My body listened to his command. He nodded as I did what I was told.
“Another.”
Again.
My cock was rock hard. My heart was about to burst.
Then the door opened.
Koryn made it two steps over the threshold. Her mouth fell open. Her eyes widened until the whites almost disappeared entirely. She reached for the nearest bedpost, knuckles whitening as she gripped it.
“You are both here,” she said. She blinked twice. She questioned whether she’d imagined the entire scene.
My instinct was to spring apart. But Syleris kept his hold on the back of my neck, though he shifted his stance so that our two bodies made an open triangle, ready to welcome Koryn in.
“Do you wish to join us, sweetling?” he invited.
She wore a thick velvet gown. But I saw the outline of her legs as she pressed her thighs together. My cock twitched. My heart reminded me that this was… I could not bring myself to call it wrong, even in my mind. But it could not happen.
I exhaled in measured increments as I reached up and disentangled his hand from my hair. “Syleris…”
Koryn’s eyes widened even more, the brown irises brightening against the black pupils. “Syleris?”
He shot me a look of pure annoyance. “That is my name,” he confirmed.
She looked between the two of us again, with renewed interest, and what I thought might be hunger. Whatever she saw, she dragged it back under control. The bedpost splintered, just a tiny bit, beneath the bite of her sharp-pointed nails.
“Syleris,” she said, trying it out. “I was getting very tired of calling you the Dark God in my mind.”
“I like being reminded that you worship me,” Syleris said. He lifted one brow in my direction as I nudged his hand away.
Koryn rolled her eyes. “If we aren’t going to…”
She was trying to kill me. I loved the woman more than I had ever realized I had the capacity to love another being, and yet she was going to reduce me to a mess of need on the floor.
“We aren’t,” I said through my teeth.
Syleris shrugged his shoulders and smirked. My smirk. A perfect imitation. Damn it all, I hated him. Except for when I didn’t. “I have other things to attend to, then?—”
“No.” Koryn’s singular word held him in place. He was as lost to her as I was. He may be better at hiding it. Or he might not have admitted it to himself yet. But Syleris, the Dark God, was in love with Koryn.
I didn’t feel any jealousy. Compassion, maybe. More than a little heat. But no jealousy. She deserved to be loved.
Koryn released the bedpost. She’d gotten herself under control, without even realizing the force she exerted on the two of us standing in front of her.
“The king is angry with Maura. While we waited outside the Peace Gate, he reprimanded her for not moving fast enough,” Koryn said.
She might as well have thrown a bucket of icy water over me. She could have shot it from her fingertips. It was well within her power. But words worked just fine, too.
“He knows about the talisman?” The possibility turned the desire in my stomach sour.
“I do not think so,” she sighed, sinking down onto the edge of the bed. “I think it has to do with Isanara.”
Who was no longer at her side. It was a reasonable conclusion. Her sister witch had told her that her familiar was the reason that we’d been taken after the Memory Gate. The king did not tell me his plans; he had no reason to and never had. ButIsanara was a creature of legend. Dragons had been rare before the curse and disappeared entirely not long after it. She was power in its purest form. Of course my father would want her for his own purposes.
Koryn sighed again, but I had no answer. She pursed her lips at our brooding and suddenly silent companion. “Anything to contribute, Sy?
“Thatis not my name.”
