Something was using the thinning. Or something was causing it. Or, and this was the thought I didn’t want to have, standing barefoot on cold stone in the dark, but I was going to have it anyway because I hadn’t survived this long by refusing uncomfortable thoughts,something was the thinning.Something with enough presence and intention to move inside a warded dreamspace, push back against a trained walker, and leave no signature behind.
I thought about the moths I’d spotted in the dungeon when I’d taken on my feline form. The skull-patterned ones. Skull moths didn’t come from anywhere natural. They came from the border between. And now something was inside the dreamspace that had no business being there.
I went back to the bed and sat on its edge. I didn’t lie down. Lying down would mean trying to sleep, and I wasn’t going to sleep. Not tonight. Not until I’d worked through what I knew, what I suspected, and what I was going to do about both.
The wind moved through the pines again, making the needles bristle against one another. It sounded like the world was crying.
Vaelen needed to know. Not because I trusted him or anything silly like that. No, he needed to know because he was a dreamwalker, and he maintained routes through the dreamspace I didn’t have access to. What was more, he’d probably felt the same thing I had: that something was strange, something was off. If he’d felt this same presence and hadn’t mentioned it, that was one kind of problem. If he hadn’t felt it at all, that was another kind.
Either way, I needed to know which one I was up against.
I pressed the thumb of my left hand into the silvery scar running down my right collarbone. Doing so was now just habit; the mark held no power, having been used up long ago. And yet the action brought back a memory, of a certain night, of a certain price I’d paid, of something I’d done that hadn’t killed me. But that was a story for another day.
For now, the veil was thinning through the bedrock of Camelot, and something without a signature was walking inside its dreams. Merlin’s daughter was locked in the middle of all ofit, with her power bound, and no idea what was coming through the floor.
I sat in the dark and let the full weight of that land.
Then I got up and started getting dressed.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then, with a weary nod, he followed.
-MORGAN-
The time had come to do something about Carlisle.
But he didn’t know that. He was too busy being useful with his cock buried deep inside me.
I rode him slowly, one hand braced against his scarred chest, watching his jaw go tight with the effort of holding still. His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise, and I let him. There was something about a battle-hardened man that I’d always found difficult to dismiss. The way the body became a record of every war it had survived. Carlisle’s body was practically a manuscript: scars mapped his shoulders, his ribs, the thick column of his throat. He’d earned all of them, which was more than could be said for most of the men I’d met in comfortable rooms making comfortable decisions.
This wasn’t about pleasure. I mean, it was, incidentally. But that wasn’t the point. The point was the fine silver thread I was spinning between us, breath by breath, subtle as perfume. Not a compulsion, nothing so crude as that. Just a softening. A loosening of the particular knot of pride and stubbornness that made Carlisle difficult to manage in a room full of people with competing agendas.
I felt the magic leave my fingers when I pressed my palm flat to his sternum. He didn’t notice. Men rarely do when they think they’re winning something.
I rolled my hips against his engorged cock and found the angle I wanted. Carlisle’s cock wasn’t long, but it was thick, and that’s how I preferred the cocks I fucked. Wide so it would spread my walls, so I’d feel every inch of it. I took what I needed from him before he had the chance to catch up. The orgasm moved through me clean and quiet, and I kept my face composed throughout. Then I lifted off him.
The problem with Carlisle wasn’t his appetites or his temper or even his particular brand of blunt-instrument loyalty to the rebellion. The problem was that a day or so ago he’d decided, without consulting Vaelen or myself, to strike the garrison at Ember Ford. It had been a small operation by his reckoning: four men, a supply cache, and a route he wanted cleared. By any reasonable reckoning, though, it had been a catastrophe.
We’d lost one of our best-placed operatives in the fallout, a man who had taken two years to position inside Camelot’s supply chain and who was now dead in a ditch outside Ember Ford because Carlisle had grown impatient and decided that waiting for authorization was for men with less experience than he. Vaelen had spent the time since then calling in obligations to contain the damage and reroute our people away from the compromised passage. Neither of us had said anything to Carlisle that would make him understand the true cost of what he’d done, because a man like Carlisle responded to blame by doubling down. But I’d been thinking about it since. A man who acted unilaterally once would do so again. The only question was whether the next time would be something we could survive.
He was watching me from the bed with the satisfied expression men wore when they believed they’d been the primary event. I reached for my robe.
“Now,” I said. “Let’s discuss the problem at hand.”
Carlisle made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. He was still breathing hard, his large hands fisted in the sheets.
“Morgan,” he grunted. “I haven’t—”
He hadn’t spent himself. I didn’t care.
“—I know.”
He stared at me, those hawk-sharp eyes going very dark. Clearly, he wasn’t a man who was used to being denied. “That’s not—”
“—if we solve the problem,” I said with a little purr, “I might allow you to fuck me again.”
There was a beat of silence. Then the corner of his mouth pulled into a smile. He loved this. That was the thing about Carlisle: he understood games because he’d been playing them his entire life, just never with a board this interesting.
“I thought you only warmed Vaelen’s bed,” he said.
