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“Are you sure this is okay?”
Rune smiled down at her and pressed a kiss to her hair. “You crave control, and if this is what you need, I give it freely.”
Chapter fifty-seven
Thetimewornpagescrinkled as Rune carefully opened the ancient tome. Soft light from Hell’s ever-twilight sky streamed in from the floor to ceiling window behind him. He rubbed his fingers over the center of his forehead. He’d combed through every book and scrap of parchment that predated Saith and found nothing to bring him closer to Faye’s race or altar.
We should seek our queen, the Ra’Voshnik said, impatiently prowling the edges of his mind.
Rune’s thoughts wandered to his night breeze. How she bound his wrists and climbed onto his lap. The memory of her soft lips lingered with him. She focused his attention to a razor’s edge and in those moments all he could see was her. Rune smiled, recalling the feel of her nails scoring his chest. He would lean into her proclivities, explore her desires. A pleasant experience she would associate him with.
The creature purred its agreement.Bring her into your mind, we could both tend to our queen.
Do not frighten her.
She won’t be screaming with fright.
Do not press the issue, we see to her desire. Not yours.
Sadi appeared beside his desk, wearing typical Familiar fashion. A tight corset over a shirt with billowing sleeves, paired with a skirt with slits that ran the length of her legs. Her thigh-high, belted boots completed her outfit. She took a seat on his desk and rested her feet on the arm of his chair. The panel of her skirt falling between her thighs.
Get herlegs away from us, or I will present her head to our queen as a gift.
She leaned forward to rest her forearms against her knees and said, “You’re courting her.”
“I am,” Rune answered, getting to his feet to shelf books he had yet to read.
“Have you forgotten your blood debt? Alister will come for her.” Sadi said, pivoting on his desk to watch him at his bookshelf.
He never imagined the cost of his arrogance would extract so deep a price.
The frail-blood will die before we surrender our queen,the Ra’Voshnik growled.
Be silent,Rune grated as he slid a book into place.
The unofficial title he bestowed upon his day-blood brother ushered in a tide of pained memories. The wounds he hid didn’t scar with the passage of time. They festered, guilt feeding off his every misdeed.
“Should I collect his head?” Sadi dragged the metal tipped claw of her ring over her bottom lip, excitement lighting her eyes.
“No.” Alister’s path hadn’t crossed Rune’s in eight centuries. Alister was no threat, his older brother didn’t have the strength to challenge him. Faye would remain safely at his side, under his protection.
The light faded from Sadi’s eyes as she let out a long breath. “I looked into her line. She’s ancient, her line is tetheredinthe Darkness.”
Faye’s winged double told him as much. “Will she be immortal when she invokes her blood?”
“You need to tread lightly with her. She’s death. I can’t see it, but I canfeelit.”
His night breeze was on her ninth life, her previous deaths didn’t drag him to the Darkness. Rune suspected the eternal part of her safeguarded his life. “I am quite difficult to kill. Did you find anything useful in her line?”
“Her line is strange. It took me days to walk it. During the past eight centuries her lives have been constant. When she dies, she’s immediately reborn, the magic takes root in an Anarian woman near birth. It seats in the child and kills the mother.”
“That cannot be shared with her.” Knowing she caused her mother’s death would cripple Faye.
“She looks like me during her repeating lives. Then her line goes dormant. It’s quiet during Saith’s life and the Great War. Then her lives are peppered along her line again. There’s no pattern to it. She’s always a woman but her appearance varies in her older lives.” Sadi’s throat worked. “She dies young Rune. In every life.”
Rune turned toward Sadi as worry and protectiveness clawed through him. “How does she die?”
Sadi shook her head. “I can’t witness it. A blinding light and pain are all I see.”
