We laughed and continued to press tender kisses to one another’s mouth, simply basking in the quiet peace of the moment. Just the two of us, without a care in the world for those few minutes.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt so calm.
“Does this mean your cousin won’t come after me again?” she asked after a bit, leaning back to run her fingers over her own body. “Still just feels like skin to me.”
I touched my chest and her mate marks on me. She was right. It felt no different.
“Not yet,” I rumbled, unhappy about the topic change. “Not until I claim you.”
“What’s their problem anyway?” she asked, meeting my eyes, the violet circles the same color as the lines on my chest.
I was never going to get bored of that. Ever.
“Where do I begin?” I said with a bit of frustration, turning to sit on the desk next to her.
She leaned her head on my shoulder in a casual, easy motion. The closeness made my dick jump. Again.
“The beginning?” she suggested.
“My father and my uncle were twins,” I explained. “In every way, except one.”
“What one?”
“That blackened birthmark on my uncle’scheek. He came out that way,” I explained. “My father is older, but over the years, my uncle began to believe thathecame out first. That he was born first, and is the rightful heir to the throne, but because of it, his parents lied and switched the order.”
“He thinks he should be the ice tyrant over you?”
“He thinks he should have been there over my father.” I shook my head. “It’s insane, but I get it. My father was paraded about as the heir, as the next ice tyrant, and Mirko was relegated to the shadows. Kept hidden. It’s almost inevitable he would develop a complex about it.”
“I see.”
I nodded. “Things got worse when my father died.”
The words came out as smoothly as I could manage. Thankfully, Anna didn’t seem to react to the tiny, easy to miss hesitation before I said the worddied.
“I think I’m beginning to see,” Anna said. “He chose that time to put his claim to the throne. To oust you.”
“Only verbally. I think he was going to challenge me formally, but then the battle with the Red King happened, and he didn’t.”
“He saw you were stronger, that you would beat him.”
I shrugged.
“Crap,” Anna said, deflating slowly. “And now I’m a threat to everything because, as your mate, I could provide an heir.”
“And lock him out of a claim to the throne unless he got rid of all of us.”
“And Dirk.”
“Dirk would give him the throne,” I said immediately. “He wants nothing to do with it and has made that clear. He’s said he’ll abdicate immediately if something were to happen to me.”
“Something tells me that won’t stop your uncle.”
I conceded that point with a nod.
“You’ve really dropped me into the middle of it,” she said.
The smile attached let me know she was trying to be lighthearted about assigning actual blame, but I bulldozed my way past that. She was completely and totally right.
