Page 24
His smile returns, faint and unwilling. “That sounds exhausting.”
“It is efficient.”
“Sure, let’s call it that.”
A shadow falls across us before I can answer.
One of Vaerith’s outer guards has crossed the courtyard from the registry side. I recognize him after a moment: Talen, a broad-shouldered human auxiliary who serves dark elves with the devoted cruelty of someone desperate to be mistaken for his masters. He wears the estate’s charcoal tabard, though not the proper armor of an inner guard. His eyes flick from me to Corin and then linger with unpleasant interest.
“Mistress Isolde,” he says, putting a sour twist on the title. “Didn’t expect to see you chatting in the dirt with lower-stock.”
Corin goes very still.
The change in him is immediate and violent. His aura pulls inward first, compressing so tightly that the air around him seems to sharpen. Then heat blooms beneath it, gold and ember-red rising through the hidden architecture of his altered blood. His pupils narrow. One hand curls slowly at his side.
I feel the bond react.
Not toward me as desire. Toward him as warning.
“Talen,” I say, keeping my tone mild. “You are away from post.”
He snorts. “Registry escort. Saw you over here looking cozy with gutter trash.”
Corin’s smile appears. It is not warm this time. “Gutter trash? That hurts. I’ve been promoted from alley nuisance.”
Talen’s gaze snaps to him. “Mouthy, are you?”
“Depends who’s listening.”
“Corin,” I say quietly.
He hears the warning under his name. His nostrils flare once, and I watch him force his fingers open. The effort costs him.
Talen notices enough to grow interested. “Something wrong with your eyes, boy?”
Corin dips his head, but the gesture carries no submission. “Bad sleep.”
“Maybe you should sleep somewhere you belong.”
“And where would that be?”
Talen steps closer. “Far from estate property. Far from women above your station. Far from things that get you noticed by people who can make you disappear.”
My hand tightens around the folio strap.
Corin’s hunger flares hard enough that I feel it in my teeth.
The bond turns hot and sharp, flooding my chest with an echo of his fury. It does not feel mindless. It feels aimed at the shape of insult, threat, ownership. Talen is not important enough to understand the catastrophe he is flirting with, and that is the absurd terror of the moment. A small man with a borrowed tabard is poking at something powerful enough to break him in half because cruelty has always mistaken itself for authority.
I step between them.
Corin makes a low sound, more warning than word, and I glance back at him. “No.”
His eyes lock on mine.
The command should not work. I have no right to command him. We barely know each other, and whatever bond burns between us is not obedience. Yet he stops because I am there, because my body is now the thing between his hunger and its target, and some part of him refuses to let that heat pass through me.
I feel the moment he chooses restraint.
