“What you areis maddening.” He moved toward me, and I moved away, driven toward the hanging tapestries covering the wall.
I couldn’t stand to have him close to me. I hated that I still felt a rogue pulse of desire when he was close by, just because he was tall and muscular and commanding and far too handsome; I despised him, but the Fae were able to command mortals for a reason with their damned immense beauty. I had to get away from him.
He swept the tapestry aside, and I found myself herded into an alcove. I’d fallen into his trap as I tried to escape.
“Why are you running away from me?”
It was an intimate half-circle of a room, carved into the wall of the mess hall, perhaps for private dining.
Fieran let the heavy purple fabric fall in place behind him. I was far too keenly aware of the power and heat of his body, the need I felt when I was close to him, even though he was a rotten bastard.
I scoffed. “I’m not running.”
“If you weren’t running, you wouldn’t be afraid to sit at a table with me,” he said in a reasonable tone that he did not deserve to use one bit.
“I’m notafraid.I don’t want to sit with you. I don’t want tolookat you.”
His brows arched, but he let my rancor pass without comment. Perhaps it was beneath him.
“I want you to pretend to be my servant. That will protect you from anyone else trying to toy with you.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “You brought me all the way here to have me do your laundry?”
His mouth curved faintly, somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “No. I need you here to train until I present you in the Recruits’ Trials, but it will be safer for you if everyone sees you asmyservant they cannot touch…”
His expression, as he studied my face—and the feelings I let show there clearly—tilted heavily towardexasperation. “Are you determined to do this the difficult way?”
I smiled at him sweetly. It was unfortunate enough that everyone here saw me as a servant, but I’d be damned if they saw me as his special servant. I was sure they’d assume he was fucking me, andthatwas never going to happen.
He sighed as if that were answer enough. “When you get in trouble, call for me.”
I slid past him, carefully keeping our bodies from touching, and pushed the curtain away. “You won’t be able to hear me in this racket. But I can take care of myself.”
That was a blatant lie in this strange shifters’ world, and we both knew it. Fieran had brought me here for some reason, and I was sure he would not abandon me.
He rubbed his temple with one hand, as if I were giving him aheadache. I hadn’t abductedhimout ofhislife, though, so that seemed a little dramatic. “Try me. I’ll hear you.”
“I need some peace. Some space from you.” I let the curtain drop behind me, leaving him alone on the other side. Perhaps he would contemplate how stupid he’d been to force me into his life.
I threaded my way through the room to the food once more. I needed to get my plate and get to the unclaimed recruit’s table—or maybe justoutof this chaos—without proving him right. The chaos felt joyful; shifters called to each other exuberantly, and laughed with bantered. But it was chaos where I felt small and out of place.
As I walked through the crowd, people eyed me. Fieran’s attention had turned me from mortal servant to mortal spectacle.
But now that everyone was so keenly aware of me, no one bumped into me.
I got a fresh plate of food, then looked back at the expanse to the new recruits’ side. I didn’t really want to brave that trip again, or a table full of people already eating and conversing while I had to decide where to sit.
I slipped through the crowd—easy to do when everyone towered above me—and hid in another alcove. The curtains had been pinned back on one side, leaving me with a view of the room beyond as I shoveled food into my mouth hastily. It was really good. I paused to shove a cookie into my pocket, thinking of how often I’d woken up hungry at night.
Fieran hadn’t even made it back to his own table; he stood in the center of a crowd that seemed to orbit him like he was some celestial body. His laughter rippled through the air, melting tension.
He moved like he knew every eye was on him, but not because he craved their attention. Hecommandedit. He said something that drew another laugh from the group, and for a moment, I almost forgot what he was capable of. That same mouth that smiled so easily had just ordered a man to crawl before us.
His dark hair caught the lamplight, reflecting glints of bronze, the shadows carving sharp lines across his cheekbones. All the shifters were beautiful, but there was something uniquely magnetic about the force of his attention, his easy grace, that disarming grin.
A female shifter put her hand on his arm, smiling up at him as she made some joke, and he stilled.
The laughter around him died as if snuffed out by an unseen wind. He said something in a low, dangerous tone I couldn’t hear over the din, but the others looked chastened on her behalf, heads bowing slightly. I wasn’t sure they realized how they half-bowed to him, but they did, as if he were lord of them all.
