Dark Prince's Desire

“A pack rat,” she muttered. “But a tidy one. You’d love my sisters’ matryoshki nesting dolls.”

That was the second time she’d mentioned her relatives. “You are close to your family?”

She watched while he chose a shallow obsidian bowl and various other items from the wall. “Very. Will that make it easier for me to get home?”

He shook his head as he mixed ingredients into a thin paste. “It doesn’t matter either way.” He scraped some of the ammolite from the wall. The dust shimmered like dragon scales as it fluttered into the black glass basin.

Her jaw thrust forward so furiously he could almost see her tigress whiskers bristling. “It matters to me.”

“I meant such connections won’t save you.”

“Oh.” Her face blanked like a mask. “I know that.”

Her bleak tone—a familiar echo to the emptiness inside him—made him pause as he studied her. She might try, but she could not rival him in detachment.

After all, he intended to sever the phaedrealii from the emotional enticements of the sunlit realm forever.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

She eyed him warily. “Are you going to kiss me again?”

He wanted to object that he hadn’t truly kissed her. But the surge of interest in his groin to correct that oversight told him more clearly than the court’s growing agitation that it was past time to lock down the geasa. “I will not kiss you.” He emphasized the words with the strength of a promise.

Even as he spoke, though, he knew all phae promises were lies.

Chapter Four

Slowly, Yelena raised her hand to his outstretched palm. Her hand looked small enclosed in his calloused fingers as he rotated her arm to slide back her sleeve and expose her inner wrist. He brushed the pad of his thumb over the paler skin, making her pulse leap. The rough cloak chafed at her sensitized skin—she imagined his big hands skimming over her—making her nipples peak.

His eyes narrowed and he withdrew his knife.

She stiffened, the sensual lull severed by the glint of steel, but his grip was too strong. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to mark you with a geas. The symbol will power a spell to reveal what traps you.”

She strained away, unease ramping up her heartbeat another notch at the thought of what the spell might reveal. Phae weren’t the only ones with secrets. “Werelings don’t do magic.”

“You are magic.”

“No, we just are.” She balled her hand into a fist.

His gray gaze turned harder than the stone around them as he reeled her closer, so close the scorching heat of his body surrounded her. “If you want to flee, then change. Right here in my arms. Slash me to ribbons and go.”

She froze again, though his nearness threatened to melt her. “You know I can’t.” She couldn’t find the verita luna and couldn’t leave until she found how he had uncovered it.

“Then let me do this.”

She noted he did not say “Trust me.” Just as well. Fear made her voice prickly even if she didn’t have her claws. “Will you ruin my skin like yours?”

His thumb danced over her pulse point again. “Never. That would be a sin not even the phae would condone. The mark will fade. But—” He glanced up and she caught a glimmer in his eye, like there-and-gone-again heat lightning high in a storm cloud. “Something tells me your heart is as scarred as my flesh.”

If he’d threatened to plunge his knife through her breastbone right then, she was too shocked to have stopped him. He thought he could see inside her? In comparison, the touch of the blade parting her skin was less invasive.

He traced an X so shallow she scarcely felt the sting before he set the knife aside. The X spiraled, as if stirred by an invisible force to leave a mark hardly larger than a thumbprint and nearly as elaborate. Raze scooped a fingerful of goop from the bowl and smoothed the ointment over the small wound.

She sucked in a breath at the sudden cold, but just as quickly, it mellowed into a pleasant warmth. Too pleasant. The sensation spread until her fingertips tingled. All those whiskeys she’d been downing at Beck’s bar hadn’t had this effect.

She clenched her fist until her nails—bitten shorter than her tigress would have approved—nipped at her palms. “Did you drug me?”

“That would seem unwise. An intoxicated tigress might be too much even for me to handle.”

From the amused gleam in his gray eyes, she thought he probably thought he was lying when he said he wasn’t sure he could handle her. She also guessed he had drugged her, or whatever the fairy equivalent was. The sparkling dust he’d scraped off the rock and spread into the wound made the geas seem to shift in her skin.... No, it was shifting. Her heartbeat soared for a moment as she hoped the change was the first sign of the verita luna, and she held her breath. But nothing else happened.

Raze tugged her closer to frown at the marking. “The spell reveals hidden barriers. It should show me what is blocking...” He angled his face to scowl into hers. “You.”

Distracted as she was by the simmering power in his grip—perhaps he would indeed be able to handle her if she slipped over the il-luna edge—she was slow to react to the accusation in his tone.

“Me?” She tugged halfheartedly at his grasp, but he only tightened his hold, and the strange zinging in her blood quickened.

“You blocked the verita luna, and you are keeping me from locking that portal.”

“What?” She sputtered, frustration pushing the fizz in her blood up into her throat. “I’m not getting in the way of your gate. I didn’t even know it was there. You think I’m blocking myself?”

“You fell into the phaedrealii because you can’t bear to see yourself revealed truly in the sunlit realm.”

The ring of steely truth—spoken by a lying fairy, no less—pushed her over the edge. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You werelings might have more refined senses, but you are as willfully obtuse as the humans. If you don’t want to see what is right in front of you, then...” He flicked open his fingers in a negligently graceful gesture, setting her loose as he walked toward a curtain of flowstone.

How dare he promise an answer and then turn away, jerking the answer above her head like a teasing toy?

She’d show him what came of tempting a tigress.

Shedding the confines of his borrowed cloak, she leapt at his back.

What she lacked without her cat’s strength and speed, she more than made up for in recklessness. His eyes widened in surprise as he spun to face her attack. If he’d had his knife, he might have had a chance. But she pounced with her legs ready to tangle over his, her fingers wrapping at his throat.

He stumbled under her weight, his back crashing into the stone curtain. His hands rose to wrap around her wrists. The geas he’d carved in her skin flared with sudden light that turned his stunned gray eyes to silver.

“What I see,” she hissed, “is a phae who cannot lie, skin-to-skin.”

She only meant to challenge him with that unfortunate-for-him quirk in phae nature, but her own nature welled up as she clung to him. As long as it had been since she changed, it had been longer still since she’d found someone to ease the equally vital wereling need for touch. Werelings were creatures of sensation, of emotion, but she’d quelled such simple longings to focus on her idealistic quest.

The Amur council had ruled her half sisters unfit, their control of the verita luna shift too tenuous to risk exposure in front of oblivious humans. Their exile was final. Unless Yelena could win them clemency. If she could show the council how she and other werelings like Beck were earning a place among humans, that might open a way for her sisters to walk free in either shape.

Instead, with her own loss of the verita luna, she was only proving the council’s case. Her sudden, inexplicable shift coming to the phae court was the closest she’d come to finding an answer for her problem.