His fingers tightened around my waist, digging into the skin so hard I knew I would bruise. I bit my lip until it ached, refusing to let him hear me moan, refusing to give him the satisfaction of being the cause of my pleasure, even if it was building within me now at a blinding rate. After a while, when his thrusts became even more insistent, when he reached out and started tugging my hair while holding my back against the couch with one hand, I couldn’t contain it any longer. I cried out when starsexploded across my vision and my legs tightened so much it hurt. Harrison followed with a grunt a moment later, plunging into me so deep I nearly came undone again.
We remained fused together for a moment as we caught our breaths. Then he simply stepped back and yanked my pants back up over my ass. When I turned, I found him watching me with the same arrogant smile I’d seen on his lips the first time we met.
“Hope you got what you came for, beautiful,” he said.
Then he backed away down the hall to his room and left me in the middle of his shoddy apartment, panting.
Chapter Nineteen
Milo
Weeks after the boy’s beheading, I found Olympia at my door so early in the morning Isla was still sleeping. I listened as she told me about the rebel symbol she’d begun to see all over the city, that it was getting so bad she thought it might be time to draw my attention to it, that she was sure if she’d seen it, the other High Houses must know about it too.
My head was aching before breakfast.
My cousin left me before the acolytes arrived, slipping out of the study I’d pulled her into to allow Isla her rest, with the excuse that she was the one supposed to escort the acolyte copying Eximius’ journal to the House of Harlowe for the day. I reminded her to come straight to me with the copied pages upon her return this evening and watched her leave as another entered.
Pax looked exhausted as he delivered the message that had no doubt been waiting for me to wake this morning.
“Nascha wants to see you in her room at your earliest convenience,” he recited with the tired tone of a man who’drepeated that order so often he hardly knew what he was saying anymore.
I frowned. It wasn’t like my grandmother to call upon me so early in the morning.
“What happened?” I asked my cousin as I stood immediately and followed him out the door. When grandmother said ‘at your earliest convenience’, what she really meant was ‘get your ass here now’. Making her wait only ever made it worse.
“She found out about the diary at Harlowe and how we’ve been copying it,” Paxon replied, jaw tense as he refused to glance in my direction.
I sighed. This wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t as though it was a secret. We weren’t intentionally keeping it from Nascha for any nefarious purposes. I just didn’t want her to get her hopes up. If my assumptions were correct and my grandmother was sending me on this fishing expedition to verify her religious beliefs before her death, any false leads could have a devastating effect on the faith she loved so greatly.
Paxon split off in another direction at the end of the hall while I continued on to the matriarch’s room. I raised a brow at Cleo who stood outside, but my cousin only shook her head once and knocked on the door behind her. Nascha’s voice called out a moment later and then I was striding inside while Cleo shut the door behind me.
“You sent for me?” I asked after a moment of watching her standing by the window, eyes closed and face upturned toward the sunlight streaming in as she so often did in the mornings.
“You found a diary written by Eximius prior to the madness and didn’t tell me,” she said. It wasn’t a question which meant she’d already discovered what we’d done and verified her suspicions by someone else, likely Paxon if the way he refused to look at me just before this was any indication.
“Yes.”
Her eyes opened slowly as she turned to face me and that serene smile vanished in favor of a small frown.
“Why?” she asked carefully.
“You’re too invested,” I replied.
She scoffed and shook her head as she turned away from the window and made her way back across the room to her closet, nightgown trailing on the floor behind her.
“What have you found?” she asked, her mood far more sour than it had been when I’d entered.
“Not much of anything,” I answered honestly. “Most of Simi’s sane records are of diminishing resources due to the impending uprising and concerns regarding his family’s inability to take the rebels seriously. So far, we haven’t found any mention of anything that might have caused the man to go suddenly mad.”
Nascha nodded and, though her back was to me as she sorted through the available clothes hanging in her closet, I could sense the disappointment permeating the space between us.
“Alosia and Valin are in,” she spoke after a moment, any trace of discontent vanished from her authoritative tone. “I’m awaiting a response from Rainier and Chasina. Had I known we already had a relationship established with Harlowe, I would have sent my request to join the council through one of my own grandchildren rather than a Lynx acolyte.”
The bitterness was still there, underlying the authority. I decided to ignore it as I responded.
“That’s good,” I said.
“Have your wife request an update from her grandfather,” my grandmother ordered. “We need to have an idea of what sort of witnesses Raghnall has found and if we need to step in and source our own as well.”
