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His eyes darkened and drifted to my lips before snapping back to mine. “How about Sasha? My mother picked it.”
“Sasha.” After his middle name—Alexandre. I tasted each syllable. It suggested a softer man than the hard notes ofDimitri. Perhaps the one Mariska and Alexei had told me he once was. “I’m yours for the night.”
He tightened his arms around me with a dangerous glint in his shadowed eyes. “You make it very hard to be angry at when you say it like that, seated in my lap.”
“You pulled me up here.”
A devious smile I had not seen before but knew I would not forget, lifted his lips. “So I did. Are you still playing a part, Tempest?”
“Only if you ask me to.”
His hand drifted down to clench around my thigh, and I squirmed as my insides clenched.The other couple might be watching, I told myself as our eyes and noses met under the hat’s shadow.
Thegiggle of the courtesan broke the moment. Dimitri placed a light kiss to my cheek, whispering, “Get her name then.”
With a too-real flush, I started on the food I knew to be delicious but could no longer taste.
The other couple had ordered a bottle of expensive plum wine and when I caught the woman’s eye, I nodded to it.
“Is that good?”
“You wanna try? We can get another bottle, right, love?”
The noble man waved for the server, uncaring for the cost. The courtesan and I shared a knowing smile. Everything the woman ordered was marked up and she earned half. I might never have wanted my mother’s profession, but I knew how it worked.
“You should try the stew. It’s the best in the city,” I said in return. “Sasha, you should invite them.”
Still hidden partly in my hair, Dimitri mumbled with a dark voice I barely recognized, “Whatever you wish, Tempest.”
“Tempest?” the other man laughed. “You don’t look Sorachian.”
He narrowed his eyes. If he recognized the prince, he might well have seen me as the princess. Sorachians and other far away coastals took the names of items and professions. Where I was pale white, they were dark. Their curls tighter than my loose waves.
“I’m Talian. A mix of all.” I smiled back, able to play the role I had promised not ever to do because I knew in my heart it would never be truth. It was freeing to let go of the weight of the past. Dimitri’s very real roaming hands and distracting heat, us working together, made all the difference. If he needed the name of this woman, I trusted him.
“You remind me of someone. Who’s your mistress? Maybe we could meet another time?” Perhaps he desired a taste of a princess he could not have.
I shivered under his leering gaze, the woman—Vsadnik-looking like the prince, with straight black hair, sun-kissed skin, and dark eyes—frowned.
“She’s taken,” Dimitri snapped, before I was forced to answer. “Look at her like that again and you won’t ever need a woman again.”
A different kind of heat warmed me. His arms were like Morovara’s blanket, cozy, safe, and, in this stolen moment, mine.
Only Lumi had stood up for me before, and this felt nothing alike. He might want the woman’s name, but despite how I had lied to him, he risked revealing himself as if he could not stop the words.
“No offense meant,” the other man said as the drinks came and even filled our ceramic cups himself. “If she’s private, you just needed to say so. Some prefer variety.”
We lifted the cups in unison with a mumbled “For Tal” and drank the sweet plum wine. For it to be this cold, they must have kept the bottles on the bottom of the Taliell.
As Dimitri slid me to the side so he could eat, I caught the eyes of the other woman.
“We good?” I lowered my voice so that she had to bend closer. “Tempest isn’t even my real name. I’m V.”
She nodded. “Not your fault. I’m Esfir, work for Madam Jian.”
To whom Lumi and I had almost been sold. The chained-heart tattoo with a debt sigil in the center on Esfir’s wrist brought back everything that happened, from breaking in to Mekeln’s mansion to stealing the crown and acting the princess. It had led to betrayalsand death, but meeting this woman’s tired eyes and seeing the man who had bought her for the night fondle her as he ate, I could not regret it.
The prince’s long fingers squeezed my thigh, not an inch below the bag with the stolen letter, and I remembered there were more truths I owed him. But those thoughts were easy to push aside when he whispered in my ear again.
