Adrift. Honestly, he just wanted to feel welcomed somewhere. By someone.
As if she knew his thoughts, she gave him a hot, hungry kiss that left him hard and aching with longing. She ran her tongue across the cut on his bottom lip. “Just put a drop of your blood on the amulet and call my name. I’ll hear you and come instantly.”
With a wistful sigh, she stepped back and inclined her head to his father. “Take care, Strykerius. May we meet again one night.”
“Indeed.” His father opened the portal for them so that they could take their leave.
Urian didn’t move or speak until after they were gone.
Not until his father approached him and took the deerskin cloth from his hand. “You’re a royal fucking idiot. I can’t believe you came from my loins.”
“I know.”
With a disgusted sigh, his father shook his head. “How long have you been sleeping at Tannis’s home?”
Urian let out a ragged sigh before he confessed the truth. “Three days.”
“Have you fed?”
“Not really. Tanny’s tried to feed me some of her blood in a cup, but I haven’t felt like taking any of it.”
His father grabbed his arm where he had fresh bite marks. “Yet you’ve been feeding your children.” There was no missing the angry condemnation in that tone. “You know you can’t keep feeding them if you’re not taking anything for yourself.”
Urian knew. It was the quickest way to make an Apollite sick. And it could give them a rare disease that would kill them.
“I’m only feeding Geras. He won’t go to sleep unless I rock him. He only takes a little right before he drifts off.”
A tic started in his father’s jaw. “You coddle that boy. He’s getting too old for that kind of foolishness.”
“Just looking out for my son, as my solren taught me to do.”
Disgusted, his father flung his arm away. “The difference being thatI amyour solren.”
Urian gave him a chiding frown. “In my heart, Geras is as much mine as if he’d come from my seed.”
His father grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked him closer. “Nay, Urian, there’s a difference. I was there when you slid into this world, still covered in your mata’s blood. My hands were the first that held you. My face, the first you saw. Even before your mata’s. I held you every day of your childhood. I promise you that whatever love you have for that boy pales in comparison to what I feel whenever I look at you and your brothers and sister, knowing it is my blood you carry. Knowing my hands delivered you into this world, and that your welfare falls unto me all the days of my life. That it was my blood that caused you all to be cursed by the gods. You’ve no idea how much I hate myself for that. How much I hate my father. Not because he cursed me. But for what he did to my children, and theirs. And if your wife does not do right by you, I will see her throat ripped out. For her life is nothing to me, but your happiness is all.”
“I will make sure to convey your insanity to her, Solren, forthwith.”
His father winced before he kissed Urian’s forehead and playfully shoved him away. “You try my patience,pido.”
“Someone has to, Solren. Otherwise your head will grow too swollen to fit inside your helm. And you need that for battle.”
Growling, his father headed off toward the theocropolis. “I blame your mata!”
“She always blamed you.”
“And we both overcoddled you when we should have taken a heavy strap to your ass.”
“Nowhe figures that out?”
Urian arched a brow at Archie’s low tone as his brother stepped out of the shadows behind him. “Dare you to say that louder. And to your solren’s face.”
“I’m not you, Uri. Me, he’d put through a wall.”
Yeah, right. “He’s never struck you any harder than he’s struck me.”
“I would beg to differ. He was a much harsher parent prior to the curse. Ask Theo. There’s a reason why we curb our tongues and actions more than you younger assholes. Guilt rides him harder than you know.”
