Hope sat on the bed closest to them, and when she laid down, the mattress barely held her back within the edges, which meant Ciaran’s body would most definitely not fit on it. He didn’t seem to care, as he put his knees around hers on the bed, his metallic and biological arms on each side of her head, his hands holding the edges of the mattress in a plank while he stared deeply at her from above. And damn all Cardinals if that view didn’t do many sudden, potent things to very specific parts of her body.
He held his breath, taking her in, and then his powerful arms started bending as he slowly pushed his lips closer to hers, his firm chest leaning atop her breasts—until an invisible force threw him at least twenty-five feet away. Hope gasped, flinching as she expected a loud noise when his body hit the floor, but there wasn’t any noise other than a very poetic array of curses, because the House had made him land on—
“A mattress?” Ciaran let out a loud, desperate growl. For a moment, Hope wondered if he was going to show the House exactly who and what he was, and that with so much of a whisper of shadows, he could bring the whole thing down. Instead, he said, “Llunal give me patience and bloody shade me now.” The moment he stood up, the mattress vanished.
Hope tried to contain her laughter out of pure compassion for Ciaran’s increasing desperation and annoyance at the House, but she couldn’t resist a smile tensing against her cheeks.
“Not one bit funny,” he said, pushing himself up.
“But it is,” Hope said with a grin. “And I must say, a part of me admires how insistent and persevering this House is. It knows what we want, and it wants us to ask Gabrielle to provide it for us. It also knows we don’t want to tell her we’re together, yet it wants to force us to confide and trust the House’s Ruler.”
“Not happening,” he reiterated. “Why a room so big though?”
“Because I better figure out how to wield the Fifth Power, and I honestly don’t know exactly what to expect, but what I feelpressing against the core of my panom mark, this new magic pulsing in my veins… “big” doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Ciaran narrowed his blue eyes. “Don’t get yourself killed using it, will you do me that favor?”
Hope shook her head with a defiant smile. “I’m hoping to kill a lot with it, but not myself. Which reminds me…” She opened her hand to Give theOf Southern Petals and Wicked Greedinesshandwritten copy to him. “Would you mind making a start on this? The sooner we find the Queen’s heart piece in the South Petal, the sooner—”
“The sooner we can share a fucking bed again,” he finished, his nostrils flaring as he clenched his jaw.
Hope pursed her lips, her core tightening at his desperate need. “Also that, even though I meant the sooner we can go to the West Petal and you can introduce me to…” She cleared her throat before continuing, “Your father.”
Ciaran lifted his eyebrows and swallowed. “After centuries of thinking I was a lonely wolf, meeting you might be the biggest shock of his life.” He approached Hope and caressed her cheek, the metal cool and smooth against her skin. “But you were the most magnificent, most beautiful shock of my life, too, so I completely understand.”
Extreme blushes right before experimenting with a deadly sacred power that hadn’t been used in centuries was most surely not the best recommendation. Not that Hope could do anything but precisely that.
After sound-proofing and destruction-proofing it, the gigantic room proved useful for Hope’s exact purpose: figuring out what to do with the Fifth Power, how to use it, and the consequences of its powerful reach. She only allowed herself to try playing with an ounce of it, because the risk of destroying the room, the House, and the Cardinals-damned Petal was not out of the question. It was deadlier than she could have imagined, andit was terrifying yet exciting to imagine such force against any being—against aQueen.
When the sun abandoned its position and the red moon and Llunal’s stars painted the sky, Ciaran and Hope ventured to the gardens of the South House. The small, white petals continued floating in the air, as if they were another particle of nature, bringing some brightness to the night and the shadows that covered this part of the world. The light blue waters of the different pools were magically illuminated, too, inviting any guests to dive in. Perhaps they would have dived in, if they weren’t too busy whispering their discoveries and theories, planning their next steps, and deciding the next risks they were willing to take.
There was a lot to talk about, and their discussions carried them until morning light, but when Hope finally laid on her very small bed, Ciaran refused to sleep on his own on the other side of the room. He didn’t attempt to lay on hers either. She couldn’t blame him for not fancying the House throwing him across the room again. Instead, he laid down on the floor next to her, and her hand hung from the mattress to hold his.
It took less than fifty seconds for her to join him on the hard ground. They fell asleep immediately after, in each other’s arms, his lips on her forehead, her slow breaths on the skin of his neck, on the floor of the Taking-the-piss South House.
19
Ayla
The last time Ayla stepped on the North Petal, she was the second daughter of its Ruler, twin sister of the heir of the House.
She was a different woman now. From the rocky shores where the Radel Sea clashed, to the unwelcoming mountains delimiting where the North Petal finished and the West and East Petals began, to the Jofryo River separating the North from the Core, including the busy city of Borealia and the North House… As the current heir, every inch of this land would one day belong to her. It would be hers to rule and command.
But that wasn’t what made her truly different from her past self. Her new role had been imposed, a mere punishment from the previous Organ Mandor to Lenna for her defiance and lack of obedience. Even if Ayla had dreamed every day and every night of being the heir, had envied her sister and occasionally even wished for fatal accidents to occur to her. For a quarter of a century, her life had been full of jealousy, desires for things that weren’t within her reach, and pretense. So much fucking pretense it was embarrassing even to think about it.
She had pretended to fit in a world that didn’t accept her sister and her fierce personality, so Ayla had molded her own personality to meet the expectations of her mother and father, of her House, of the Northern Elite, and of the wider panom society. For over two decades, Ayla had pretended to be everything a dutiful daughter was meant to be—submissive, respectful, compliant. She had repeated what she was told to the point of satiety, until she thought those words were her beliefs and her own ideas. She had nullified her true persona to be pleasant, to satisfy, with the stupid hope that she would be noticed, that she would be told she was good enough, that she was not the second plate.
It didn’t work. It never worked.
And then, one day, she wished to be the heir and pretended to be the perfectly correct panom her persona had become. The next, her twin sister was being tortured to unconsciousness for speaking up and begging for compassion for an innocent soul, and none of the panoms Ayla had always admired moved a finger. Not even Mother and Father.
Until then, Ayla had accomplished the masterful task of being a twenty-five-year-old who didn’t know herself because she had pretended her life away. She had become a brainless reflection of those she admired, but that day, something changed. Even from her numbed-to-reality, privileged seat in this society, she sawsome wrongs, and more importantly, her blood boiled for the first time in her life when Lenna’s pooled, red and thick, in front of her eyes.
Ayla swallowed the tight knot in her chest she had learned to live with. A knot full of regrets and many useless and nonsensical years. Her life had been a waste of energy, feelings and time—time she would never recover. But that was the past, and this was the present.
The past few months had changed her irreversibly. She had stopped pretending the dead didn’t speak to her. She had a woman she had sworn herself she would protect, a Petal to Rule in the future, and a mission to help make Thyria a safer place. She had sacrificed her sight for a power she had never yet used, but every cell of her being knew the Fifth Power would be necessary when they needed it most. She had a goal: finding and destroying a piece of the heart of the Cardinal Queen. For the first time in her life, Ayla had greater goals than her own selfish dreams.
“How do you feel being here again?” Nina’s voice was quiet, despite Ayla not detecting anyone surrounding them.
