I watched the fortress burn at its edges. These walls, the camp, the academy, and the forest the heirs and I had raised out of the ash of a broken world. White-hot emotion sat in my chest like a burning coal.
Then the scope found Max, high on the dragon’s back, and I saw the dark bloom spreading down her shoulder. Her blood spilled where I could not reach it. Something in me that had lain still for centuries came awake and bared its teeth. And beneaththe rage, pride rose in me. Max did not flinch. Did not hesitate. She fought like a Spartan despite only a single month’s training to her name, as though war were a tongue she’d been born already speaking. My fierce, impossible girl, cutting herself a place in the sky.
We had let her fight. The dragon had carried her into the worst of it, and I had not been at her side, but Caspian had, at her back where I could not be. When she chose to be a warrior and asked for her place in the academy, the four of us made one another a quiet vow: we would honor it. We would never clip her wings.
But what if, in refusing to cage her, we lost her?
The fear closed on my throat so fast I couldn’t breathe around it. If I lost her, I was finished. I couldn’t say as much to my brothers; I knew them too well, and the same terror would close over each of them the moment I gave it words. I shook my head hard. I would not walk that road tonight. If she fell, I would follow her into the dark.
And then—she was there.
I felt her first, a warmth blooming at the edge of my senses where there should have been only night.
My head snapped toward the window.
Max stood in the moonlit forecourt, looking up at my window. Her beautiful face held that contradiction only she ever wore, like a wild bird that has decided to come close and will bolt at the first wrong breath.
My night guards had melted back into the trees. They’d served me for centuries; they knew what she was to me. Not the whole of it, for I kept that close, but enough. Enough to vanish into the dark and let her come.
Our eyes met across the silvered stone, and I gave her a single nod. She started for the house. I was already moving, so that bythe time her foot touched the first stair she found me waiting in the open door.
She’d come the whole way on her skates. I could see it in the slight flush of her cheeks. She had not let herself think too long about coming, but she’d dressed to disappear: a dark blue silk shirt beneath a jacket, black trousers, everything cut to drink the shadows. Nikolai’s training settling into her like second nature.
The moon laid its silver along the hard, clean lines of her face: the stubborn jaw, the wide midnight eyes turned up to me, dark enough to drown a man. There was want in them, and beneath the want, a trace of unguarded fear. Her lips were parted on a breath she hadn’t finished taking. She looked at me as though I were both the man she’d come for and the man that might break her.
And she had come anyway.
I held out my hand. She laid hers in it without missing a beat, and whatever was in my chest surrendered. I drew her inside.
We didn’t speak. At the foot of the stairs, I gathered her up into my arms, and she locked her hands behind my neck and let me.
My steps made no sound, my feet bare on the cold stone. She had weight—good, solid weight, muscle and bone and life—and my mouth curved at the memory it stirred. Caspian had complained the whole way across the Scorched Wastes about that weight, certain he’d been saddled with some half-dead boy from the mines. Then he’d gotten one good look, and after that he flatly refused to let Nikolai take a turn. Funny, how fast a man’s complaints died once he liked what he was carrying.
I carried her to my suite and kicked the door shut behind us. My elite did not come running. They knew I would not be disturbed, and they would see to it.
I carried her the length of the room toward my bed—and did not lay her in it. Though I wanted that more than breath.
Instead, I set her down, slowly, by the window. I wanted to look at her first. To learn her by inches, before ever I brought her to my bed.
The moon poured its silver over her. She held my gaze, and hers was full of desire and longing and a rawness she’d never have let another soul see. She had come to give herself to me, freely choosing it, and that more than anything undid me.
I didn’t kiss her. Not yet. If I kissed her now, we’d be tangled between the sheets in two heartbeats.
“This…this will be my first time, Aelindor,” she said. Her hands rested on my shoulders, and they trembled a little. She stood nearly at my height—a rare and lovely thing, a woman who could meet my eyes without lifting her chin. Max met them squarely, even now.
“Then it will be my honor to have you,” I said, and began to undress her.
I took my time with it, the way a man handles something he has waited a very long while to hold. I eased the jacket from her shoulders and let it fall. I freed the buttons of the silk shirt one by one, my knuckles grazing the warm skin beneath, and felt her breath catch and stutter under my hands. The shirt parted. I drew it down her arms and away.
Where my gaze went my fingertips followed—the line of her collarbone, the scarred shoulder still raw from the mutant vampire’s claws, the flat plane of her belly. She shivered, yet she didn’t pull away. I wanted to see all of her, and she let me.
“You might not be my first, love,” I told her, low, “but you will be my last.”
Her face was nothing soft—it was stunning, arresting, carved—but her body held every curve, laid over hard muscle through her belly and her arms and those long, long legs. Her breasts were full and soft and warm in the moonlight, the dark-redpeaks of them already drawn tight and aching under the weight of my worshipping gaze.
One of a kind, and somehow, impossibly, here.
My gaze dipped lower, to the flesh between her thighs—lovely, laid bare just for me—and the breath hissed out of me. I was already straining at the front of my trousers, the fabric gone tight, and the crown of me throbbed with increased pain. I had never been this hard for any woman in all my years, not even the first time I took a lover, a green Fae boy in a realm that no longer existed. A very long time ago. None of it had readied me for her.