Everything. Power, admiration, lust. If it could be had, she’d covet it. It had cost him everything to learn this one simple weakness. Because it was a weakness, even if she had managed to leverage it to her advantage. So perhaps it could be his advantage too, even if the prospect made his stomach lurch like a ship in a hurricane. He welcomed that nausea; used it. Swallowed back the bile and let her read the bob of his throat however she liked.
“It helped,” he said tightly, “that you needed such distraction.”
Avette’s eyes swept up from his collarbone, a long, dramatic brush of those spider-leg lashes that had once so entranced him. Kai ground at his back teeth, forcing his jaw to tick. Conflicted; the jilted lover, the old flame in need of just the right kindling. He dropped his eyes to her lips and back. His chest heaved with the breathtaking heat of his rage, but he could see, even now, how easy it might be to confuse it for another kind of heat entirely. Could see it in the slow, smouldering flutter of Avette’s eyes, just two blazing coals in her pale face, ready to raze or consume whatever she beheld.
She tempered that fiery intrigue with a haughty tilt of her chin, but her whisper barely parted her lips.
“Needed it?”
He dropped his gaze to her mouth again, voice thick with a simmering fury that only worked in his favour.
“Begged for it.”
“A queen does not beg,” she said.
But when he forced his gaze up, hers had already lowered, lashes sloping as she watched his lips. The glow of her pendant stuttered with her caught breath, and Kai felt its light in that old, dry ache within his veins. His blood begged for connection with the mother, his fingers twitching for it.
A moment longer. Just a moment longer.
“I suppose not,” said Kai, not bothering to fight the tremor in his breath. “A queen takes what she wants.”
And with a final flash of challenge in her dark eyes, Avette did just that. She leaned in, a too-sharp tug on his shirt that dragged him closer than he’d intended to go. He could feel the radiating chill of her lips hovering over his own in the endless, frozen moment before his hand finally landed on her throat.
And squeezed.
Avette’s eyes flew wide just as the waters crashed into his veins, the force so great he very nearly buckled beneath them. More potent than the power that had reared him, more powerful by far than the magic conducted through his own pendant. Avette clawed at his hands, and he did not feel a thing, for he had the whole of the world’s oceans within him, and that was an agony beyond anything he’d ever known. If he didn’t unleash them, he would be torn apart by those unearthly currents. His pain was Avette’s too, her mouth rounded in the same silent scream that shrilled through his skull. The Mother’s roar was deafening, themagic splintering in his grasp as he gathered it frantically to himself, driving into his bones and making his soul ache.
It was maddening.
It was intolerable.
But Avette floundered in his grip, and Kai could not let this chance pass him by. He couldn’t. So he bit down hard enough to taste iron and held on tight; to Avette and the pendant and the power. Drew the waters from the frost around him, from Avette’s thundering pulse, from his own crashing blood—poured all that he could gather into her airways.
Her hands went limp, pawing uselessly around his wrists. His palms flexed around her throat, both of them, unrelenting and thrumming with the rush of the water beneath his skin.
Avette’s eyes bulged as she drowned, brow pitching with panic, her face so expressive, so raw with existential panic that she looked—Adhlas help him.
She looked human. More alive than she had since he’d first handed her that damned pendant. It was life that throbbed beneath his palm, life that faded beneath the roar of the waters. The realisation was fleeting, but it stopped Kai’s heart. And that was enough. The moment his grip faltered, the ground beneath them gave way, a sheet of ice sweeping his feet out from under him so his own weight broke his grasp on Avette’s neck and the pendant both. His veins immediately turned brittle as bone, and Avette’s scream drowned out the Mother’s call in an instant.
“GARD!”
The door burst open, and a burly mass of steel barrelled for him before he’d even managed to roll to his front. Kai was dragged upright and shoved back with such force he could hear the groanof his own vertebrae in his ears as he fell to the bed and was yanked up once more by the scruff of his shirt, a snarling face above him and a cocked back arm—
“No,” Avette said coldly, her voice thin and raw. “We have an address tomorrow.”
The snarling face drew back slightly—just enough for recognition to sweep in. The face of a particularly brutal gard Kai knew well enough; one of the first to welcome him to the Silver Palace when he had first escaped the Laune, though the welcome had been far from warm.
“So long as you are quite careful to avoid his face,” said Avette, every word a strained whisper, “you may deliver His Majesty one warning blow.”
Kai had not a moment to process the words before an almighty weight sank into his stomach and knocked the breath from him so completely that his whole body shrank around the empty space. His organs had bowed and parted within him, agony combusting outward like an exploding sun. His mind scrambled at the pain of that metal-clad fist, waiting for it to pass, waiting for his breath to return, waiting, waiting.
“Very well, Sir …?”
“Benan,” his attacker huffed.
The bed shifted as the gard stood to scrape a bow with a clink of armour. Kai rolled onto his stomach, gasping through a second bloom of breathless pain.
“Sir Benan. Thank you, you may step outside.”
