But I could not stop. My flesh was raw. So was I. But I drove my fingers into myself, harder, deeper, until I came again. I didn’t care what sounds I made. Maybe my growl matched Arran’s beast, primal and harsh.
I had no idea how much time passed as my body stilled, the last tremors of my climax finally settling around me. There were no more sounds of blades and weapons. Only ragged breaths. Mine—and Arran’s.
I should open my eyes.
“Veyka,” Arran growled, his voice raw with need. Nearly shaking. “Veyka,” he said again. Insistent. A demand.
Knock. Knock.
I thought he might ignore it. Damn strategy and duty and everything exceptus.
But I was disappointed.
He threw open the door so hard the hinges cracked.
“Good morning!” Lyrena said brightly. “I found some…
My cheeks were burning again.
“I can come back later,” Lyrena said firmly.
But the scent hit me before Arran could slam the door in her face. I scrambled out of the bed, nakedness entirely forgotten. “Are those—”
“Veyka!”
“—chocolate croissants?!”
“You need something other than pastries if you want to keep your energy up,” Lyrena admonished as I polished off my third chocolate croissant.
“Yes, yes,” I said, waving my hand toward the cured meats. “I will get there eventually.”
“You do not find it suspiciously coincidental that Palomides happened to prepare your favorite breakfast?” Arran scowled from the window.
The sun had disappeared, eclipsed by thick gray clouds. Arran had been scowling at their progress for an hour.
“My favoritefood. Period,” I corrected, licking a stray bit of chocolate off my fingertip. Arran tried and failed to cover his groan as he turned back to the window.
Lyrena swiped the plate of chocolate croissants away, replacing it with one bearing thick slices of bacon. “Arran has a point. It could be poisoned.”
“I do not care,” I said. I took a bite of bacon for my own sake, not to appease my hovering skoupuma mothers. Besides, it did not play into the game that Palomides was playing. He was assembling an army of succubus, challenging me to a duel so hecould take over my kingdom. If I died quietly from poisoning, he would not get to take credit for the kill. “Death by chocolate croissant would be the best way to go.”
Arran covered the ground between us in a blink. His hands pinned mine to the chair, pressing me down into the wooden arms to the point of pain.
“Don’t do that,” he snarled, an inch from my face. “Do not ever joke about your death.”
The stubborn, rebellious core of me wanted to push back, to shove him away and insist he had no right.
But that was wrong.
He was my mate. He hadeveryright. The thread within me, the manifestation of our mating bond, which had frayed and stretched, began to glow. Bright, golden, solid.
“I am yours,” I said, quiet by strong. Unflinching before the most powerful fae to ever walk this continent.
Arran’s black eyes blazed with ebony fire as he took my words inside of him. As he gave them back to me, his voice gravelly and not wholly his own— “And I will never let you go.”
62
ARRAN
