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Dante walked into his father’s office freshly showered, shaved, and utterly presentable.
So why did he feel like he didn’t belong here? Everything about the office was perfectly normal. He knew every nook and cranny of this space. He’d spent great portions of his childhood in this office. Now it felt
foreign. Everything felt alien and odd, even the clothes on his back.
“Son, I will say, I never expected that you would find a consort so quickly,” his dad said, a smile on his face. He was a familiar figure in an expensive suit and worn boots. “You always were the smartest kid I knew.”
Dante thought about Kaja, asleep in his room. She was cuddled up in his big bed where no woman had slept before. He’d always taken them to hotels or gone to their places. His wife was asleep in his bed—their bed. And he wanted to be next to her, watching her breathe. She looked right in his bed.
He’d nearly killed her.
Damn. That was a bit overdramatic. He knew she was going to be okay, but he hadn’t really calmed until he’d made it to his cousins’ village and Flanna had pronounced Kaja perfectly fine, just tired from blood loss. She’d been sleeping for almost twenty-four hours, but she had opened her eyes and responded with the sweetest smile before sinking back into healing sleep. He’d carried her all day, placing her across his lap when he got his bike back. She’d cuddled against him.
“Dante? Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
He turned to his father. “Sorry, I was thinking about something else.”
His father grinned. “You were thinking about her, weren’t you?”
Dante nodded. It seemed foolish to try to hide it. “Yes.”
He seemed to always be thinking about her these days. Kaja was becoming an obsession.
His father came and stood beside him. They stared at the city. From Alexander Dellacourt’s office, Dallas spread out like a sea of buildings. From this far up, Dante couldn’t even see the ground. He rather thought that was the way his father liked it. His father had come from a ranch in west Texas, an impoverished royal, all the way to the heights of society. Dante hadn’t seen the ground as a small child unless he was being taken by hovercar to the door that led to the Seelie plane. That door was guarded now, and no one had been through it in years beyond the occasional political emissary.
“It’s only right, son,” his father was saying as he put an arm around Dante’s shoulder. “She’s your consort. I can’t wait to welcome her into our family. The housekeeper said something was wrong with her.”
“She lost a lot of blood.”
“She’s hurt? What happened to her?”
“I did,” Dante replied. There was on odd mixture of guilt and pride that came with the memory, as though the two pieces of Dante’s soul were at odds over the incident. “I was the one who was injured. Kaja healed me.”
His father’s arm dropped. “Why? What the hell happened? Did you get in a fight? Was it a tourney?”
Dante held his hands up. If he didn’t stop his father, there would be doctors all over the place. “I’m fine. Kaja’s fine. We got attacked in the marketplace, that’s all. Torin is finally making his move. I guess the asshole realized Beck and Ci aren’t going to conveniently die.”
His father had turned a little pale. “Torin attacked the marketplace?”
“He sent mercenaries to attack the Refugee plane, as far as I can tell. Some asshole impoverished royals have formed their own little army, and they are all about letting trade flow.”
There was a tight set to his father’s eyes that told Dante he didn’t like this subject. “They want consorts. It’s all the government can talk about these days. There are so few to be had. There’s an entire generation of royals who can’t find consorts. They’re aging, and they don’t like it. You have to understand, Dante. A royal is brought up to believe that finding a consort is his or her right. We live longer with a consort. Without a consort, we might as well be peasants.”
It was a hard truth to swallow, but Dante knew his father was only laying it on the line. “Now that Beck and Cian have come into their powers, maybe things can change.”
The look in his father’s eyes was grim. “I don’t know. I think it might be too late for that.”
Dante turned and looked his father straight in the eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that when your cousins come to visit next week, I’m going to try to convince them to leave.”
“What are you talking about? Where the hell would they go? Torin decimated their village.” Dante had wanted to cry. Beck and Cian had built the village up over the years, and it had taken a single afternoon and some well-placed sonic charges to bring it all down. He’d mourned with his cousins the loss of their home.
“I think it’s time they went to the Earth plane, son.”
The words hit Dante like a grenade threatening to explode. “Why the hell would they go to some backwater plane that isn’t connected to anywhere else?”
There were a few doors to the Earth plane scattered around, but they were very difficult to access, and few braved them. The Earth plane was almost entirely cut off. In Dante’s mind, if his cousins fled to the Earth plane, it was an admission of defeat.
