“Because they’re wrong.”
“Stop thinking about them. Follow my hand.”
I try. The music helps. It moves through the stone floor and up through my bones, and after a full turn around the floor, I stop counting steps and start moving with him. Not correctly. Not the way the Fae are dancing. But with him, which turns out to be enough.
He pulls me closer on a turn. My back against his chest. His mouth near my ear.
“Every Fae in this room is watching you,” he says.
“Let them.”
He turns me out. Turns me back. I’m laughing.
The Fae drink wine and dance, and the cavern pulses. The music shifts. Slower. Deeper. The harmonics change, and the sound becomes something more rhythmic, more percussive.
The Fae blood is fully in my system now, and my body is moving before my mind makes decisions. The formal patterns feel like a costume that doesn’t fit. My hips know a different language. My spine learned rhythm in East Atlanta with a speaker system that rattled the windows and girls who could make their bodies do things that defied the laws of physics.
I stop following Maximus’s lead.
I start moving the way I know.
His hand falls from my waist. He steps back.
Rolling my hips to a rhythm the Fae strings didn’t intend but absolutely support. Dropping low and coming back up with the kind of isolation that requires core strength most people don’t have. The crimson dress moves with me because the Lithenmere made it to move with me, and it handles this just fine.
Maeven stops mid-conversation.
Veyran looks confused.
A cluster of Stone Court Fae tilt their heads in unison like birds encountering a new species.
I don’t care. I’m having the best night of my life, and this music works, and my body works, and I have spent months at war, and a year as a vampire, and tonight I am going to dance like a woman who doesn’t have a single enemy on any plane of existence.
Mira appears beside me. “Are you actually twerking in a Fae ballroom?” She arches a brow.
I giggle again.
She shrugs a shoulder and begins to move. She grew up in the mortal world, she knows what to do. Her green dress handles the motion differently than mine, tighter through the hips, and she compensates with footwork that tells me she’s been to clubs I’d have liked.
We’re closing down a Fae rite with moves that I’m sure have never been seen in Thessivane, and I am having the time of my life.
Seraphina has her hand over her mouth.
Across the cavern, Syrenne raises one perfect eyebrow and drinks her wine.
And Maximus. My Maximus. The lord who commands armies and carries six centuries of composure like a second skeleton.
He’s leaning against a stone column with his arms crossed, and he’s watching me with an expression that has nothing to do with protection or strategy or control. His eyes track my hips. My spine. The line of my back where the dress opens.
He’s smiling. The full one. The one nobody else gets.
I move toward him without stopping what I’m doing. His smile widens.
Then the floor shifts under my right foot.
A spike of heat in the stone. Targeted. Precise. The kind of change that makes your balance fail before your brain registers why.
My body registers it first. Forty-three fights. My weight transfers before I think. My right foot finds solid stone, my left pivots, and my hand catches the source of the heat signature passing behind me.
