When I jam the knife into the cake, sweet-smelling liquid spurts out of it and the guests at my party react with surprise and laughter. It’s a morbid dessert that has me grinning up at Baelfire, who looks smug as fuck.
You made me a bleeding cake,I tell only him through the bond.
I knew you’d like it.
I love it. My mate is the best fucking mate in the world,I add, knowing the praise will go straight to his cock.
His gaze grows molten.Watch your pretty mouth, hellion. I’m not above snatching you away and fucking you on the beach, but we have gifts for you, first.
The cakes are dished and served up to everyone. We dig in, but it doesn’t take long for my quintet to get their gifts for me from the big table full of gifts, leaving me alone for a second. Taking another bite of cake, I study the gathering with a sense of contentment unlike anything I’ve experienced until the last six months.
Thanks to the legacy and human governments merging and reforming, many positive changes are being made. All Four Houses have representation now, as do atypical casters and Nether humans who are still getting settled in this colorful plane of existence. Humans and legacies are no longer in constant danger of fiends slipping into this world, and the temples of the gods are being cleaned up and rebuilt.
Lillian would be happy about that.
I’m sure she’s happy, anyway, enjoying her afterlife with her daughter. That thought makes me smile as I watch another raven perch nearby, tipping its head at me.
“Ready for your gifts,ima sangfluir?”Silas asks, smiling at me as he reapproaches with the rest of my quintet to pull me out of my thoughts.
He sits beside me at the table and sets down a carefully-wrapped gift before kissing my cheek. With the rest of my matches watching, I quickly unwrap Silas’s gifts.
The first one is a knife with a clear handle, and swirled around in the handle are four flowers—an orchid, a dead snapdragon, a snowdrop, and a rose.
It’s obviously supposed to represent each member of my quintet.
I examine the blade. “I fuckinglovethis. Thank you.”
“My turn,” Baelfire insists, sliding an envelope toward me.
When I open it, I’m not sure what I’m looking at. It’s a photograph of…something. I squint.
“Is it a…saddle?”
He nods, beaming at me.
“Thanks for the picture of a saddle.”
My other quintet members laugh, but Baelfire hurries to explain. “No—it’s not just a picture, it’s just that the actual thing is kinda big and still being built by Declan. But it’s a dragon saddle. For you,” he adds. “That way, you can finally ride on me and I won’t be scared out of my mind of you just falling off.”
Oh.
I grin at him. “I do like riding you. I can’t wait to ride you as a dragon, too.”
“There’s more,” he says, motioning at the envelope.
Moving aside more pictures of the saddle, I realizing there’s also several pages of some kind of list in here. It takes reading the first few lines and feeling my face warm before I realize what this is.
“Is this…your list of ways to fuck me?” I gawk.
“The one I wrote right after I met you at Everbound, and you were still pretending to hate my guts,” he confirms, preening. “I’m glad to say we’ve already checked off some of the things I wrote down, but we’re still a long way from done with it, Cutie Pie.”
Oh, my gods. I can’t believe he hung on to this.
I’m going to fuck the hell out of him later for this, right along with the rest of my quintet.
I’m still smiling like an idiot when Everett clears his throat and scoots another envelope toward me on the table, along with a small box. He’s surprisingly nervous, adjusting one of his sleeves and straightening the gifts in front of me several times before he mutters, “Okay, I can’t take it anymore. Just open the damn things.”
In the envelope are a bunch of legal documents. I browse through them, again not sure what I’m looking at—until my gaze snags on a name at the top.
