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“I need a tissue,” I say, lifting my head. “Sorry about your shirt.”
He grimaces down at it, then pulls it over his head and tosses it onto the ruined towels as he passes the pile on his way to the bathroom. When he returns with a box of tissues, I note the jagged scar across his stomach, following the line from his ribs on the left to his hip on the right.
“Does it bother you?” he asks, offering me the box. “I can put on another shirt.”
I shake my head and smile up at him. “Actually, I’m glad to see it. It reminds me that all that stuff? Didn’t happen yesterday. And that you’re still alive.”
He gives me a lop-sided smile. “Did you ever think there would be a day that you were happy to say that?”
I snatch a tissue and blow my nose loudly. “Don’t tease me. I’m in a weird place.”
“I always find the best women in weird places.” He sits beside me again.
I toss the tissue aside with a disgusted noise. “First of all, that’s a terrible line. And second, are you really hitting on me when I look like this?” I know my eyes are all puffy, my face red and splotchy, and the snot show wasn’t exactly elegant.
“You look like my mate,” he says, and puts his arm around me again, this time with decidedly different intentions. “My mate, who is carrying my child. I can’t help it if that makes me feel things.”
“That’s the binding,” I remind him, suddenly miserable again.
“Hey,” he says softly, hooking two fingers under my chin. He tips my face up and holds my gaze, those silver eyes trained on mine with an intensity that’s almost uneasy. “I’m not good at sentimental words or expressing emotion. So, you’ll have to forgive me if this doesn’t sound like the romantic declaration you’ve always dreamed of. Agreed?”
“I guess?” I narrow my eyes in playful suspicion, but my heart slams against my ribs.
“No matter what anyone says about the spell… its work is over. It has no power over me. Because what I’ve come to feel for you is far, far stronger than the binding ever was.”
An astonished, “oh,” leaves me on a breathy whimper, but it’s all I can manage to get out before he kisses me. And kisses me. And kisses me.
And he doesn’t stop until I know, for certain, that he’s meant every word.
CHAPTER 65
We summon council members to Aconitum Hall. The Council Chambers are at the ceremonial site, and the ceremonial site is where all the thralls are.
It astonishes me that for centuries, no one—except Nathan’s uncle, apparently—had cause to suspect the thralls as a source of potential treachery. It astonishes me more that now, with proof, convincing some members of the council is still nearly impossible.
“We’ve overlooked a major threat,” I try to explain to the ten men seated around the large table in the conference room. There are only ten of them because we executed the others, which makes addressing this group that much more tricky. I don’t want them to think that they have to outwardly agree with me or I’ll cut their heads off, but that’s probably what’s going to happen. “Thralls are a part of our lives every day. They’re in our homes. They’re in our school, our businesses. And they’re content to do all of that and allow us to live in luxury and ease because they can harness our magical power?”
A murmur of understanding comes from somewhere at the table, and I look to Ryan. He’s been my friend since our first days in school and he was part of the little anarchist study group he, Hannah, and I formed ahead of the change and our potentially disastrous mating pacts. He knows this isn’t the position I ever wanted to be in.
Across the table from him, a different council member objects. It’s one of the men we met with before our trip to London. “We don’t simply use the thralls for free labor. They have an important function in our lives. Before they learned to control our change, we were little more than wild beasts at the full moon.”
“The queen knows her history,” Nathan responds. Of everyone in the meeting, he seems the most relaxed. Almost unbothered entirely, considering he’d just been attacked by a werewolf, himself. He’s largely let me take control of the meeting and I can’t tell if that’s because he trusts me to do a good job or if he thinks they’re more likely to listen to someone who isn’t an outsider.
And outsider who came in and threw the entire pack into chaos in less than five years of his reign.
“I do know our history,” I agree. “I know that before the thralls perfected their spell, their job was to chain us, lock us in cells. The dungeon beneath the Council Chambers was built for that very purpose. No one wants a return to those days of secrecy and fear.”
