Malice begins doing something he does well: locking things behind doors of his mind. The sound of Aerin moaning: locked away. The sight of her naked ass in her kitchen: locked away. The wicked smile she flashes him as she sets down the food: locked away.
Like a whip, irritation strikes across Aerin’s features. She looks again like the Fae from last night, the one who held a blade to his throat.
“I’m not your sitter,” she snarls, canines flashing, “do whatever it is you’re supposed to do and then leave me the hell alone.”
Malice opens his mouth, a nasty response on his tongue. Something about how he doesn’t want this either, or perhaps if she was more responsible then he wouldn’t have to be here at all. Instead, he snaps his mouth shut, mashing his teeth together as if he can grind out the frustration between his molars.
Not bothering to tell Aerin of his plans, Malice heads down the hallway. He finds each large bedroom to have a set of bedroom furniture, a seating area, and desk with individual ensuite bathrooms that contain massive showers and tubs,large enough to accommodate even his oversized wings. All the fixtures gleam, not a speck of dust to be found. None of the rooms aside from the first on the left, Aerin’s room, seem to be inhabited. Malice checks each window and door. The windows are made of thick glass that doesn’t open while the doors are thin wood with measly flip locks and sound proofing magic.
This shows Malice exactly who Aerin’s father is. Controlling. Possessive. The apartment is designed so that no outsider can break in. But it’s also carefully constructed to ensure that Aerin can’t keep the King out. And that’s without assessing the magical wards he has in place. Malice was keyed into the wards three days ago but told that only blood relatives can cross otherwise.
When Malice reaches the end of the hall, he faces a single door: the emergency exit leading to a stairwell, down twenty-two flights, before it lets out into the alleyway. The door only opens from the inside. After the front door, it’s the only other way out.
Malice isn’t sure exactlywhythe King wants additional security on Aerin. Valtara is the safest of the City-States. This apartment alone is a locked vault. Aerin Tolvare is getting herself into trouble, sure, but not the kind of trouble Malice can protect her from.
Though they did pick her new personal guard well. Malice owed the crown a favor, and they played to instincts that were instilled in him since birth. Malice was born to protect. Protect his secrets. Protect his family from his curse. Protect the world from the monster inside of him.
Maybe that’s why he said yes so quickly, without really considering all that this assignment would mean. Without considering the ways he’s putting himself and everyone else at risk by being here.
He can’t think about it now. As soon as the wordyesfell from his mouth two weeks ago, he’d been bound by it. He will simplyhave to get through this, as quickly as possible preferably. He’d been assured it isn’t a long-term post. A year or less.
And because Malice was born to protect, he won’t be doing it half-assed either. Fishing a small camera from his bag, Malice reaches towards the center of the doorframe. It's the best vantage point for the comings and goings of the hall. His finger knocks into something small perched in his perfect surveillance spot.
“I wouldn’t move that if I were you.” Aerin’s voice comes from behind, making him freeze. Slowly pulling his hand down and pocketing his camera, he turns to face her. Aerin stands at the end of the hallway, eyes narrowed, arms folded, hip popped.
It only takes Malice a second to connect the dots. The King is already watching her. Closer still. Once again Malice finds himself wondering: Why?
“You know you’re being watched?” he asks, surprised. Aerin seems like the kind to smash the cameras to bits under her shoe before letting her father’s men have eyes and ears inside her apartment.
Giving him a resigned smile she gestures with her arms as if she’s showing him something grand. “Welcome to my life of freedom.”
6
AERIN
Eight years ago, only days after coming into her adulthood as a Fae, Aerin sat across from her father, Oberyn Tolvare, and signed her name in blood. On the heels of a night so traumatic she’d have nightmares about it for years to come, Aerin found herself stuck in a trap, lured by the honey that was Father’s reassurance, and then caught with no means of escape. Though no one physically laid their hand over hers and forged a signature, the effect was the same. Aerin had no choice, and in her naivety, she believed she could find a way around the stipulations.
There is no ‘around’ a blood contract: only through.
Blood contracts are fickle, finicky, things. Old, dark Witch magic that requires a sacrifice made in blood to bind the signatories to its stipulations. Aerin’s contract controls her entire life: where she goes, how much magic she uses, who she talks to. Outlined in explicit detail, it’s iron clad, never bending to Aerin’s will despite many attempts to make it so.
But every blood contract has a loophole, and once breeched, the contract dissolves. Every stipulation Aerin has been bound to like iron chains over her soul could dissolve away intonothing, granting her freedom once again, if only she could find that loophole.
Aerin has clung to this small shred of hope for eight years: that in the end, it will be the frivolity of such old, tenuous magic that will set her free.
Aerin thinks, just maybe, that loophole could be standing before her.
Despite the hope he may represent, Aerin still finds anger pulsing through her hot and bright like a weapons forge. He represents everything she detests: her father, the Valtara crown, someone else’s control over her. He walked straight through wards that gave Quinn a bloody nose the first time she tried to enter Aerin’s apartment. Straight into her life as a living and breathing reminder of everything Father has stolen from her.
Aerin wants to scream. Wants to explode.
Once upon a time, she would. Could. Her magic would burst out of her in a violent wave, shattering any windows and glass in her proximity. Somehow, Aerin always felt better after, like pressure being released. Now the violence is omnipresent under her skin. Her magic is a frozen lake under the will of the blood contract. Aerin can only access a small, melted puddle on its surface, everything else trapped below no matter how she tries to break through.
The Dragon-Fae at the end of the hall speaks, his tone a mix of disgust and anger as he says: “You know you’re being watched?”
His dark eyebrows stitch together before he forces his body back to neutral. Wings close to his body, fists hanging loosely by his side, he’s the picture of indifference, and yet Aerin can sense otherwise. The way his forearms ripple, dying to clench those same fists shut, the way he stitches his teeth together to keep from saying more.
“Of course I am,” Aerin snipes back, arms folded over her chest defensively. “I’m not stupid.” Aerin isn’t sure which makes him more naive, thinking she wouldn’t be under surveillance in her own apartment, or thinking that she wouldn’t know about it.
