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This did not look therapeutic. It looked like art.
Melody not only didn’t tremble, she was magnificent. Every kick, every strike, told him truths about who she was. Every easy, offhanded flip from the ground to her feet showed him that she had been hiding in plain sight from the start.
He could feel that beat in him like the drums of war.
But what he focused on most, just now, was that whatever else Melody was—chief among those things a liar—she was not fragile.
She was not breakable.
She was not any of the things she’d pretended to be. None of the indisputable things that had kept him in check.
Griffin felt the hold he’d had on himself crack into pieces, then disintegrate. There and then, like so much ash in the wind.
He didn’t think he’d moved, or made a sound, but he must have. Because one moment, the two women were engaged in the most elegant brawl he’d ever seen. Then next, they froze, both of their heads whipping in his direction.
And he knew that his bride could not see him. His head knew that. But his body reacted as if those lovely sea-colored eyes were moving all over him the way he knew his own gaze moved over her.
“Prince Griffin,” said her aide, not quite landing the appropriate bow.
But Griffin’s eyes were on Melody.
Who, for the first time since he’d met her, looked utterly out of her depth. He could see the difference now, and maybe one day it would be funny, how deeply she’d deceived him. How she’d played the blind girl he’d expected to see, and he’d seen only that.
But he rather doubted he would ever find anything funny again.
“Griffin,” Melody whispered. His name almost a question. Her voice shaky, and this time, not because she was acting.
He could see that clearly.
And despite himself, despite how little humor he found in this—or because of it—he laughed.
It was a dark thing, wild and stirring, bursting out from the deepest part of him.
“My poor, deluded wife,” he said, hardly aware of what he was doing, so focused was he on her. On how she stood in a fighting stance, not cowering or collapsing or trembling at all. The lies she’d told him battered at him, but now he knew the truth. He could feel that like her hands wrapped tight around his sex, as if the only thing he’d ever been was an animal. But this time, he did nothing to hold himself in check. “You should have known better. I might have been better than I pretended to be, but I was never all that good.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
And something in him roared in triumph that she sounded off balance. That she wasn’t quite so sure of him, after all. He wondered if she would try her act again. If she would cower or cringe, or do any of those other things he now saw, so clearly he couldn’t believe he’d ever fallen for it—had been fake.
Lies in the flesh.
He’d seen what he’d wanted to see. But now he saw her.
There was no going back from that. God help them both.
“You will,” he told her, menace and need warring inside him and turning into fire. “You’d better prepare yourself, Princess. Because I was happy to protect an innocent, but that’s not you, is it?”
“Griffin...” she began, but his name in her mouth only made it worse.
He heard it as an invitation he intended to take.
“I have no reason at all to protect a liar,” he told her, while the fire in him burned bright and tasted like victory. At last. “Least of all from myself.”
CHAPTER NINE
MELODYCOULDFEELa beating thing, a wild exultationthis closeto panic and yet not quite, and couldn’t tell if it was her heart or his.
“Leave us,” Griffin ordered Fen, his footsteps ominous against the polished floor as he moved further into the room. Melody could feel him coming like a storm. “The Princess and I need to discuss a few things. In private.”
