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“Or you’ll wake up with a bouquet of roses made of his flesh and a footstool of his head.” He growled before slamming the door to the storeroom behind him.

The small room felt smaller without him in it. It was tiny and cold and empty without him filling up the shadows and without him filling me up with his soft smiles.

“Do it, then! Bring me my flowers, Raven! And don’t forget the chocolates!” I screamed at the closed door.

Why did I feel like I had been in a lovers’ quarrel? Why did it feel like he had just walked out on me, and I’d never see him again?

I lowered myself down onto the icy stone bed and stared at the corner he had been sitting in. The lonely chair whispered recriminations at me for the outburst. He drove me crazy, though. There was something about the way his lips always seemed to be laughing at me and the sparkle in his gorgeous eyes that made me want to punch him.

I had to remember that I had nearly died because of him. I just had to remember that, every time we are in the same room for longer than a few breaths, I can’t help but stab at him. I just have to remember that, no matter what, he was the reason I was lying in this dirty little room, in a place I hadn’t even seen the outside of, where I was worth nothing to no one but the rest of us worthless.

I couldn’t remember the way he had given me choices. I couldn’t remember the way he held me. I couldn’t remember the way his voice softened into a gentle rain when he spoke to me. I couldn’t remember the way those leather gloves felt against my skin. I couldn’t remember the way he hadn’t leered or ogled me even though I was more naked than he’d ever seen me before. His eyes had never left mine a single time. And I couldn’t let the fact that it felt a little sweet infiltrate my heart.

“Fuck you, Raven,” I whispered to the bundled-up roll that had acted as my pillow for who knows how long.

Chapter 15

Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn

“Again,” I barked, spitting blood from a tooth knocked loose by the new guard’s pommel strike.

My pride said it was a lucky strike, while my ego said I had let him have it. I knew, deep down, under my unwillingness to present anything less than what was expected of me, that both were wrong. It had been carelessness. My mind was smothered by wafting grey tendrils of incense smoke, my heart wrapped beaten and bloody in a cheap wool blanket beneath stones. It should be laying languidly naked but for the caressing rays of a breaking dawn.

The punishment of training was not enough. The bands of my shield were biting into weeks of layered bruises. The vicious quake of the blunted practice swords ran up an arm, savaged by tightened muscles and a shoulder that had seen far too many lances. Every strike was agony, but it was nothing compared to what I wanted to be feeling.

I wanted to throw myself from the tower and fall into the brutal arms of the wild magic storm that was shredding three acres of the bastard’s favorite hunting grounds. I wanted to switch out the soldiers practice swords with real blades, rip off my gambeson, and let them come for me.

It was what I deserved.

“Snap the fuck out of it, Raven,” the guard hissed as he threw his sword and shield back into the pile.

He was tired of beating my ass.

Unfortunately, for him, I wasn’t tired of the punishment. I had watched her take strike after strike for three whole minutes before I could stop him. A single human man can do enough damage in three minutes but an Ard Rí of the Fae? When he is drunk on the power of his god? That she even survived it long enough for me to get her to the temple was shocking.

She was a primordial contradiction in my arms as I bolted through the palace. She felt like a home I had lost over two hundred years ago, like a knife to my throat. She had felt like the accumulation of my misdeeds yet lighter than a feather, too light. She had felt like all the best decisions I had or would ever make.

I had longed to touch her. Oh gods, had I longed to feel her skin on mine again. I ached for it like I had never for anything before. When I felt the pooling of my magic on my skin begin to drip into her at the Market, I had panicked. I hadn’t savored it. I hadn’t even thought about what it could mean or would mean until I had seated myself next to Ever Bright. It was only when she and her little crony had been so vocal about what they would do to her when they got her back to Deep Fire that I had determined to ensure that would not happen.

Watching her up on that block had been agony twisted into a corrupted braid with pleasure. The world had narrowed as the wisps danced around her, lighting her curvy figure from every angle. I imagined she was on stage to dance for me, that this was a private moment shared between lovers. Imagining it as a game between us, rolling in the others that were insistent upon including themselves, made it survivable. It made the possessive beast within me stop shifting and eased the urge to rip out everyone who dared to look at her throat. Even the silent war I had waged over her with Ever Bright had been rolled into my fantasy.

Anything to prevent me from remembering that the first creature in my entire life that had made my magic stir was, in fact, a human daoire.

It’s not that it was not done. In the old days, when the Fae were more present in Human, it was almost commonplace to take a human lover. There were whole coteries of Fae who found their human pets fashionable. In the end, though, they were never accepted as mates, as spouses.

The few times, a Fae had dared to try to elevate their status to be equal enough to mate with one, let alone marry one. Both the Fae and the human had been cut down by magic itself. The imbalance between a human spirit, inherently banal and incapable of harboring even a spark of magic and the spirit of a Fae, by its very nature, inherently a manifestation of magic itself made flesh, was too much. If magic itself didn’t dispose of them and their offspring, then Mabh would have been oath-bound to do so. Or her House of Magic.

Cricket might have been safe from the slaughtered House of Magic and their dead god, but that had only unshackled magic from its moors, and it ran rampant, unchecked and uncontrolled, across the land now. If it would have cut such a pairing down when it was bridled and tamed, what would it do when its primordial wild spirit had been left unattended to do as it pleased? Magic was mercurial on the best days, and it had become a savage tempest.

Sceach Gheal an Bith, the Sacred Hawthorn of the World, this very palace, had been built to withstand the direst of magical barrages, and its placidity was a boon most of us didn’t deserve. But even this sacred place turned den of debauchery under the rule of that bastard had its cracks. Magic within the palace walls was more stable than out in the countryside, but it was harder to touch, more distant in our veins than it was anywhere else.

If I were bold enough to give into my urges to lie with her, to feel the length of her body pressed naked against my own, would that distance from magic be enough to keep her safe from its ire?

The idea of it ravaging her because I allowed myself to give into the temptation of her flesh and break my oath to magic kept me dancing on the razor’s edge between madness and determination. I wanted her beneath me, whispering my true name with the passion of an anam cara more than I wanted air most days, but she was as far outside of my reach now as she had been when the concept of her existing was all I could cling to in the cold night.

“Sir.” The Grey Hound of Summer said with a stiff sniff and a tilt of his head toward something over my shoulder.

I spit the last of the pooling blood in my mouth into the dust of the bailey and turned my attention to the tiny animated doll that stood, dwarfed among the pikes that rested in their stands. She cut an out-of-place figure, dressed in a pale purple dress adorned in ruffles. Delicate icy blue lace and silver snowflake buttons lined the front of her crisp white pinafore, her dainty unnaturally white pointed ears capped in silver filagree. Among the dun, black and grassy livery of the guards gathered in exercise around her. She was a rose among weeds.