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Guess she didn’t want to be there.
Her eyes fixated on me though, and there was curiosity within them.
“The Tamed King emerges,” Calian drawled. “Suppose you couldn’t wait any longer to meet my female, could you?”
The man said nothing, only staring at us with narrowed eyes.
“I’m sure you’ve come with the desire to take Lian’s new mate,” the phoenix guy, Ervo, said calmly. “As you know, we’ll refuse. What’s the compromise you came to offer?”
My gaze skimmed all of the men on the other side of the room. There was only one I didn’t recognize, so I figured he was the one who had been with Druze and Ana, trying to deal with theirhuman problem.
One man spoke for their king. “Give us the rest of the females, and we’ll allow your connection.”
My eyebrows shot upward.
Was he serious?
There was a moment of silence.
“If your people were going to be drawn to their scents, it would’ve happened by now,” another unseelie said coolly. “We deserve the chance to see if they’re ours, same as your people.”
None of the seelies said anything, and I felt multiple sets of eyes on me.
“We have yet to prove whether or not a mate bond can occur in time,” Teris, the sabertooth guy in our group, said. “You’ve been with your human for nearly two decades, yet yours still hasn’t settled the way Lian and January’s has, so who can say that the connection doesn’t take time?”
The king’s nostrils flared, but he remained silent.
My mind was frozen on the part where the seelies weren’t sure if a mating bond could develop over time. If they could… then Mare and the other girls might want to stay in the seelie part of the kingdom.
Lian had told me to listen and go with my gut, so…
It was time to lie.
“One of the other human girls confided in me already that she’s felt drawn to one of the seelie fae for a few months now. We’re pretty sure that a bond can come on slowly.” I rattled off that bullshit like I was the best liar ever, even though I wasn’t fantastic at it. “If you take them, you might break the beginning of a bond, as well as make the women furious enough to refuse to consider the rest of you at all.”
Now, I had every eye in the room on me.
“She has a fair point,” the other human girl admitted. “And we’ve all seen the bond growing between Druze and Ana on our side of the world, even if they both refuse to admit it exists.”
My gaze jerked to the blond unseelie who had come to pick up the fireball of a woman when I first arrived in Vevol.
A tense moment of silence followed her admission.
“The balance of power is unsteady,” the unseelie king finally said, his voice low and growly. “The seelie must give us something to steady the scales.”
“Your land has far more mated couples than ours,” Priel, our hellhound guy, growled back. “As you well know. If your females don’t like you enough to fuck you, even for the security of a bond, then you don’t deserve the power anyway.”
All of the unseelies’ eyes narrowed at him.
“Your opinions mean nothing to us,” the king finally said. “The imbalance remains. Give us the rest of the women, or we go to war.”
Bastards.
The woman beside the king looked pissed. “No.” Her voice was clipped, and one look at her proved she was trying her damndest to keep from losing her temper. “We donotwant war. I’ll talk to the other mated women, and one of us will have sex with our mate so that both sides have a couple with a complete bond. No one needs to die.”
I looked at the girl with new eyes after she’d said that.
She was… sacrificing herself? Or one of the other mated human chicks?
