Shit. She didn’t realize his dagger was poisoned, and her jump had freed one of his arms. I watched the shining blade rise toward the child, annoyance written on the assassin’s face. Ratter was holding on for all she was worth, and her body was an easy target. The blade would hit her in the side at this angle, pierce her thin frame, and probably kill her.
There was no help for it. I let go of the arm I was holding, and wrenched the man around, pulling his strike off course. Ratter tumbled free as I did so, jerking his cloak loose and racing for the door of the pub with it in her grip.
But in saving her, I had opened my own guard, so the blade found its original victim. It burned going in, the poison already working. I roared, and the man flinched, loosening his grip on my wrist. I took the moment to plunge my own poisoned dagger into his side, the blade glancing off a rib. Not deep enough to kill him instantly, but he stumbled back, cursing in Starlakian.
Starlak was sending assassins into my kingdom? Their Warlord was the most feared leader on the continent, ruthless in battle and renowned for his military strategy. I had thought the Warlord was an ally, but if he had sent this man… Heart racing, I answered the man in the same language, “Who sent you?”
The corners of his mouth turned up. “Why does it matter? You’ll be dead from the veninspire within minutes.”
The name of the poison on his blade took my breath away. He had inadvertently answered my question. This was a worse enemy than Starlak.
He had been sent by the Assassin’s Guild.
Veninspire was one of the Guild’s more effective poisons, reserved for use by only a few, and for this man to wield it meant he was one of their chief assassins. There wasn’t time for me to get to an antidote, but I pulled out the metal ampoule that I always wore on a chain at Vali’s insistence and waved it in front of my chest. “True, but this is the antidote for the adderbane you have coursing through your veins.”
His fingers moved toward the pockets on his cloak that probably held his own antidotes, but Ratter was most likely ten blocks away with it by now. Before I passed out, I would have to tell someone in the bar to chase her down and confiscate that cloak. The Assassin’s Guild supplied their killers with a slew of poisons, and they carried them secreted away in those cloaks. Ratter’s curiosity would probably get her killed.
I tucked the ampoule back inside my shirtfront as my veins turned to fire, then stumbled back into the stool behind me, catching myself on the lip of the bar. “The Guild will need to send more than you to lay hands on my queen.”
“But they did,” he hissed, turning to flee. I couldn’t see what happened, but he stopped, stock still, and made an odd, guttural growling noise.
And then he fell to one side, revealing what had happened to him. Or who.
The assassin had a gut wound, but also a slit throat, the blood still pumping out of the neat wound as I blinked, trying to understand. My eyes skated upward… but not that far. His attacker was short, dirty, and smiling like she had just gotten every Solstice present she’d ever dreamed of all at once. Ratter had returned.
The assassin’s cloak was nowhere in sight, but the dagger I had given her was clutched tightly in a hand covered in blood. An overturned stool—her perch for delivering the killing blow, I assumed—lay at her feet. Her eyes were golden and fiery, like Vali’s had been four months before, when she was saving the kingdom. “Child?”
She glanced up at me, as ragged and filthy as ever, but her voice was strangely beautiful when she spoke, all trace of her low-class accent erased. This was no guttersnipe. “Your Omega needs you, Rigol. Run to save her and your brothers.”
“Goddess,” I breathed, and glanced down as the wound I had taken began to burn with golden fire. As I stared, the wound vanished, the veins under my skin lighting up. My strength returned, and more. The child had somehow channeled the Goddess’s power, and now I felt Her magic filling me.
The others in the bar gasped, cursed, and a few dropped to their knees to pray. When I looked up, Ratter was gone, but I shouted to the others, “The queen is in peril. To the castle!”
The pub emptied out into the night, all of us united in our goal to save the young woman who had saved us. Our queen, our miracle.
My love.
Tarn
Before this night, if anyone had claimed I would rather be anywhere but here, knotting my sweet Omega in her nest, filling her, and listening to her moan with need and satisfaction, they would have heard me laughing in Mirren, two hundred miles away.
But at this moment, with my knot still pulsing inside my love, her golden eyes fixed on me, my need to fuck her warred with a deeper Alpha need to protect her against a threat I couldn’t see or hear.
Then I did hear something.
Footsteps, running up the hallway outside. “Axe,” I whispered, trying to get his attention. His eyes were focused on the shadowed entrance to the secret tunnel that lay within the walls of the castle. “I told you not to worry about the spy tunnels. Vil took care of them.”
Vilkurn had re-routed so many tunnels, not even I had figured out where they all led. I’d gotten myself locked in one of them, and if I hadn’t been the best lockpick in the kingdom, I might have spent the rest of my life regretting that detour. Vilkurn had finally relented and shown me how to find the secret ways in and out of those nefarious trapped rooms.
Axe’s eyes snapped to mine, his grip on his axe tightening as he moved carefully to shield Vali and me from view if the door opened. “Listen,” he signed with his free hand. “Something’s coming. Someone.” As he spoke, the stillness in the room was broken by a knock.
The knock was quiet and coded: three short, a pause, one, then four, another pause, and one. The castle was under attack. Axe gently removed a shirt from the edge of the nest and slipped it over his head, nodding to me. I called out, “Who is it?”
“King’s Guard, sir. Permission to enter?”
Axe swelled up even larger when I replied, “Quickly, and keep your eyes down.”
Vali growled under me, not liking this disturbance. I let my hands move to her clit again and circled it, purring to relax her.
