Then he stopped.
Fenrik tore his mouth from my throat, dragging himself up until his arms locked, trembling as they held his weight above me. His hair was a wild, dark halo, sweat tracking through the silver markings on his face. He looked wrecked.
“If I take you,” he rasped, “I will ruin you.”
I stared up at him, my chest heaving. The prudent thing would be to scramble away. To remember the crumpled paper trapped beneath my shoulder blade.
But looking at him, seeing the agony warring with the hunger in those silver eyes, I didn’t care about sanity. I didn’t care about safety. I was tired of being safe. I was starving.
“Maybe,” I whispered, “I want you to.”
Fenrik’s pupils blew wide, swallowing the silver. For a second, I thought he would collapse back onto me, that he would accept the surrender I offered.
The magic decided otherwise. A roar tore through the room. It didn’t come from the House; it came fromhim. From the dragon that refused to be soothed, from the dragon inside that panicked.
“No!” Fenrik shouted, but the sound was swallowed by the blast.
He hit the corridor floor with a sickening thud, skidding across the polished stone.
“Lysa!”
He scrambled to gain purchase, his claws gouging the threshold, reaching for me.
The heavy oak door slammed in his face. Golden light, brighter than the sun, cascaded down the seam, sealing the wood to the stone. The wards clamped down.
I lay frozen on the flagstones, my body a map of throbbing aches. My neck felt bruised, still tingling with the memory of hismouth. My breasts ached for a touch that was gone. The space between my thighs felt empty and cold.
I pushed myself up to a sitting position. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely brush the hair from my eyes.
He rejected me.The thought was a shard of ice in my gut. He hadn’t been thrown out by accident. I saw the horror in his eyes before the magic surged. He had realized what he was doing, realized who he was doing it with.A chore.
My fingers curled into a fist, encountering crinkled parchment. I brought the letter up to my face, my vision swimming.
A chore I endure.
Of course he had almost let the beast take what it wanted, easy relief, a warm body to stabilize his curse and then he had remembered. He remembered that one does not bed the help. One does not ruin the tools one needs to survive.
“Idiot,” I said to the empty room. “You absolute, pathetic fool.”
eighteen
Lysa
Ifound him crumpled at the foot of the stairs leading away from the West Wing, he hadn’t made it far. He lay sprawled on the cold flagstones, one arm thrown over his eyes as if warding off a blow, the other hand curled into a claw against his chest. The silver veins in his neck pulsed with a rapid rhythm.
Part of me, the healer or the freakin fool, wanted to drop to my knees and check his temperature. Wanted to smooth the hair back from his damp forehead. The rest of me wanted to kick him. I settled for a sharp shake of his shoulder using my boot.
“Wake up.”
Fenrik groaned. His arm fell away from his face, revealing eyes that were blown wide, the irises swallowed by black pupils rimmed in manic silver. He looked less like a lord and more like something that had crawled out of a nightmare to die on the rug.
“Lysa?” His voice was a wreck. He tried to push himself up, his elbows trembling, and failed. “Get away. It’s not—“
“Safe?” I dropped to a crouch to force him to look at me. “We’re well intounsafe, aren’t we?”
He flinched, good. At least he had some decency for that. I thrust the crumpled parchment into his face. “Did you write this? I need to know why. Why the bloody wedding circus and everything.”
He blinked, his gaze trying to find focus on the paper. He swatted weakly at it. “What is...”
