Page 69 of Beds and Blades

Her eyes slid back to Skip.

“What we would give you in return is beyond anything your little claiming bond can offer. The dark bond is not cold. It is immersive. Every thought, every desire, every sensation shared across all of us simultaneously. What you call the claiming bond is a candle. What we have is…”

“Blasphemy,” Skip said.

“Desire is sacred, is it not?” she asked lightly. “We honor it more than your theology permits.”

She looked at me again.

“Morvanna herself. Her beauty. Her power. The full depth of the bond.”

Her voice dropped, intimate now.

“Every sensation felt by every member simultaneously. Every desire known before it is spoken. Every want met the moment it surfaces.”

Her eyes returned to Skip, and the quality of her attention became obscene.

“And I…”

Her gaze moved down his armored body with the unhurried recognition of someone identifying territory she had once known well.

“I have not forgotten what it felt like when you were inside me. The way you looked at me in those moments. As if I were the only thing in the world worth seeing.”

She let that hang in the corridor.

The audacity was, objectively, extraordinary.

I looked at Skip. His jaw was set. His hand was on the hook. His eyes told the truth.

He had loved her. Claimed her. Removed the ring. Grieved her. Went back to work.

And now she stood in this corridor using the most sacred thing they had ever shared as a weapon.

The tear on his face was the most honest thing in the room.

“Do not speak of our claiming, you blasphemous beast,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I think about our claiming often,” Mira said. “The dark bond amplifies everything. I have shared the memory with Morvanna personally.”

Skip’s face went white with rage.

Mira smiled.

“She is very interested in meeting you.”

The garrison below roared suddenly. A shout. A crash. A cry cut short. Closer now.

Mira’s head turned slightly, listening.

Then her eyes came back to me.

“All of us,” she said. “Together. Through the bond, you would feel everything we feel, and we would feel everything you feel. Every sensation. Every want. Every response. No end. No night spent alone with your own imagination.”

She looked between us slowly.

“We do not do anything by half measures.”

“Stay back,” Skip said.