Lara smoothed his hair off his face, wishing there was a solution she could offer him but knowing that platitudes and false hopes would only make them both feel worse.
The voice of a man she hadn’t thought of in a very long time rose in her thoughts.Ice and fire might ravage the world, but still the cockroach survives,Erik said, her old weapons master visible in her mind’s eye.Just like you.
And just like Ithicana.
“We will win this,” Lara said, a sudden rush of determination filling her, fueling her. “I swear it.”
“When you say it, I believe it.” Aren tangled his fingers in her sodden hair with one hand, then traced a finger down the line of her cleavage tothe plunging neckline of her gown. “This is what you were wearing when I first saw you. What you were wearing when I married you.”
Her breath quickened beneath his touch, and Lara rocked against him, feeling his cock hardening where it pressed against her. “I didn’t think you remembered. I’ve worn it many times before, and you’ve never said anything.”
“It might be because you’re as wet as you were that day.” His finger moved from the tiny blue beads embroidered on the neckline, tracing over the wet silk to circle her nipple, and a soft whimper pulled from her lips, an ache forming between her thighs. “Wetter, I think,” Lara murmured.
Aren made a noise low in his throat, and then bent his head to kiss her. “If I live to be an old man, I’ll still be able to close my eyes and see you walking toward me, this goddamned dress clinging to every curve like a second skin. The most beautiful woman alive, and I wanted you like I wanted breath.”
“Whereas all I got to see was that awful helmet. Where did that thing go? Perhaps you can wear it for me later.”
Aren laughed into her throat, then bit at her collarbone. “Dissolving into rust somewhere, so you’ll have to let that fantasy go.”
She smirked. “Find another way to satisfy me, and I’ll banish it from my thoughts.”
“Gladly,” he murmured, pulling the narrow straps of her dress over her shoulders to reveal her breasts. Rain pelted against them but all she felt was the heat of his mouth as he closed his lips over her nipple, a fierce need to be filled by him consuming her soul.
Rocking against him, she unfastened his belt, weapons clattering to the stone beneath them as she caught hold of his soaked tunic and pulled it over his head. Beneath was all hard muscle and suntanned skin, and Lara traced her fingers over his shoulders and back, every inch of him familiar and yet as thrilling as the first time.
Dragging Aren’s face up from her breasts, she kissed him, his tongue delving into her mouth and claiming her. “I want you in me,”she growled, dragging her lacquered nails down his back, then reached between them, sliding her hand into his trousers. She closed it around his thick cock, stroking him hard, the feel of him against her palm almost pushing her over the edge. “I want to fuck you now.”
He groaned her name and pushed her onto her back, but Lara caught hold of his leg with her ankle and flipped him onto his. Straddling her husband, she let the tempest tear her hair this way and that as she looked down at him, then slowly drew his trousers over his hips. She took hold of her ruined dress and lifted it over her own head, so that all that she wore were two thigh sheaths and a long knife strapped to the small of her back.
“You are the storm,” he breathed, his fingers tracing up her thighs, his thumb finding her clit and circling it until she moaned. “Beautiful and terrifying and mine.”
“Yours.” She tilted her face back, rain sluicing down her cheeks and her breasts as she mounted him, her body taking in the hard length of his cock. “Till my last breath.”
Lightning cracked overhead and thunder boomed as she rode her husband, the wind lashing them with violent ferocity that Lara barely felt, because all that mattered was the taste of him. The feel of him. The hold he had on her heart and her soul.
As Lara crested, she pulled him over with her, screaming Aren’s name at the sky, every part of her raging in defiance at those who sought to take from them.
She’d fought for Ithicana before and won, and little cockroach that she was, she’d do it again.
37
James
James’s head bumped against theside of the wagon. Every inhalation smelled of dust, and his ears rang with the teeming noise of a city. Merchants shouted their wares, aggressive and loud as they bargained with patrons. Animals bleated and brayed, some pulling carts while others were intended for slaughter. Bells rang out from the fourteen cathedrals, tolling the hour, tolling various ceremonies, tolling as one of the largest cities on the continent toiled.
Riomar.
It was the capital of Amarid, and while James had never stepped foot in Riomar, he knew its reputation well. It epitomized the extremes of human existence. Wealth built on wineries that shipped their bottles throughout the known world, the families who owned them equal parts nobles and criminals, each of them running an extended network of deeply illegal activities that earned them as much as or more than the wine. They lived like kings in their walled palatial estates as they conducted what amounted to warfare against one another. Battles fought by street thugs and urchins in the dark of night. By poisons slipped into cups and or dusted across pillows. By riots and marches, the middle class pitted against one another to achieve their master’s ends.
Yet there was also poverty and misery of an unrivaled magnitude.Tens of thousands who lived on the streets, great slums that multiplied only blocks away from white stone buildings capped with enamel-tiled roofs. Children starved on the streets while carriages passed them by carrying children playing with golden rattles. Every morning, hundreds of city workers swept through the slums with wagons to retrieve the dead, and James had heard that great pits outside the city limits never stopped burning the corpses spat out by Riomar.
Above it all, in her palace of gold, ruled Queen Katarina.
Ahnna shifted where she lay tied on the other side of the wagon, both of them trussed like hogs and gagged so they could not speak. As they’d been since they were dragged out of the river, both of them half drowned. Carlo had shrieked above the cacophony that he hadn’t realized fishing was so enjoyable. He cast handfuls of coins into the air so that they showered down around the civilians who had aided his hunt. As the civilians had fought over the gold, Carlo’s soldiers had fallen upon them. Killed them with sword and knife and arrow, merciless in their need to keep his and Ahnna’s fate a secret.
The wagon rocked and bounced over ruts, the man driving shouting oaths at anyone who got in his way. Which meant the soldiers were not making a fuss. Katarina did not want anyone to know who her new prisoners were, most especially not Alexandra.
A bead of sweat rolled into James’s eye and he blinked at the sting, desperately thirsty. It was hot and dry, made worse by the canvas over the wagon, and it felt like he’d sweated out every drop of moisture. Though he anticipated that it would get much worse once they were delivered to Amarid’s infamous prison.
