Vale just smiles into his drink.
Dinner continues, but the mood’s different now. There’s an ease to it, a grim steadiness. Not joy — none of us are stupid enough for joy — but alignment. They argue about loadouts, approach angles and lines of fire the way other people argue about football or the weather.
I listen. I watch. I commit every detail to memory.
Saint slips me a piece of bread like I forgot how to feed myself. I glare at him on principle, then eat it anyway. Wraith keeps refilling my glass with water without asking. Vale keeps smirking at me like he’s picturing me draped over something and has the nerve to wink when I catch him. Ash just watches and memorizes, gaze flicking to me between sentences, cataloguing each micro-move like data he’ll protect with his life.
Rook just… exists at my side. Solid. Heat radiating. Control sitting on him like a perfectly fitted suit.
When dinner’s done, plates pushed back and plans set, chairs scrape and they start to break. Ash rises first, already turning toward the hall that leads down to his den of screens and steel.
“Come on,” he says to me. “We’re starting with draws from concealment. Then wrist breaks. Then—”
“She’s with me first,” a voice purrs at my shoulder.
Mateo. Of fucking course.
He’s already moved by the time I register it — up from his chair, circling behind me, too close. His palm ghosts over the back of my neck in a touch that isn’t quite a touch. My whole body tightens in response, heat flashing low.
Ash stops, annoyance flickering over his face. “We’re on a clock.”
“We are,” Vale agrees lightly. “Which is why you can spare me five minutes. Unless you’d like to watch?”
Ash’s jaw works. “No.”
“Then off you go,ghost boy.”
Ash mutters something under his breath and disappears down the hall.
Saint’s already standing, pushing his chair in with that lazy, practiced grace that hides how fast he can move when he needs to. “Play nice,” he tells Vale. “Both of you.”
Wraith lingers a beat longer. He leans in, presses his mouth to the crown of my head in an absent, possessive kiss like it’s nothing, like it’s routine now, then turns and leaves without a word. The enormous, lethal bastard is soft with me in ways that short-circuit my brain.
Rook doesn’t move. He just watches. Always watching to see how I react. Though now, it feels more like possessiveness than anything else.
Vale waits until the others are gone before he hooks a finger under my chin and tilts my face up to his.
“Walk with me, little queen.”
I should say no. I don’t.
He leads me out of the dining room and down a side corridor lit with low sconces, past old portraits and tall mirrors that catch brief flashes of us — his ink, my bare legs under Rook’s shirt he gave me, the faint red mark at my throat that wasn’t there yesterday. That one makes his eyes flare when he notices it in passing. Good. Let him notice.
He doesn’t take me far.
Just around the corner, half-hidden in a niche in the hall, pressed between a tall window and a bookcase older than this country.
He cages me in without touching me. One palm flat on the wall beside my head. The other settles low at my waist, not quite on my hip, not quite on my stomach. The heat of it bleeds through the thin cotton. His pitch-dark eyes rake over me, hungry and amused and something else under it — something that doesn’t joke.
“I’m tired of waiting,” he says softly.
My pulse jumps.
“Waiting for what?” I ask, even though we both know?
He huffs a quiet laugh. “For you to stop pretending you don’t want to taste me again.” He leans in, mouth brushing my jaw but not landing. “For you to stop giving everyone else their bite and leaving mestarving.”
“You’re not starving,” I whisper.
