Something In Her Blood

Soren

I had not had a woman in years.

That was the first stupid thought, and it nearly cost me the file.

Lyria stood in the aisle with Kael’s coat open over her stomach, the mark darkening before my eyes, and every instinct I had wanted the same thing. Pin her to the cabin wall. Shove the coat off her shoulders. Take her until the rings on my fingers left prints on her hips. I was so affected that the wool of my trousers hurt. Ruthless men do not get to be this hungry in a room full of rivals. Yet here I fucking was.

“What?” she whispered.

I closed the file. “Give me your hand.”

“No.”

“Give it,” I ordered.

She did not move, so I took it. Her palm was hot, soft where mine was not. The contact sent one vicious jolt through my entire body, and my control slipped its leash for one filthy second. I saw her with her back against the bulkhead, my thigh between hers, her curses dying in her throat while I took everything she was willing to give. It had been too long. A Witch King does not beg. He takes. And I wanted her until she could not say any name but mine.

My thumb dragged across her palm, lingering longer than it needed to. I felt the lines there. Life. Lie. And something beneath both that should not have been awake.

She sucked in a breath. “Soren.”

My name in her mouth made it worse. My body reacted further, blatantly, and I did not step back. Let them see. Kael’s jaw locked. Lucien’s heat climbed. Cassian went still in that dead way of his. Malakai laughed once, the sound strained.

“Careful, Witch,” Malakai said. “You keep stroking her hand like that, and I will think you mean to take her standing up.”

“I do,” I said.

The cabin went quiet. I did not take it back. I pressed the pad of my thumb to the center of her palm until a bead of blood welled, dark and strangely bright. “Hold still.”

I took the drop.

All five of us reacted. Kael snarled, a low animal sound he did not let become a word. Lucien swore and gripped the seat as though the metal had offended him. Cassian’s fangs slid fully down. Malakai’s head tipped back, his throat working, his body tensing hard enough to pull at the seam of his trousers. And I felt it in my own blood, a hot snap behind my ribs, my entire body tightening until I had to lock my knees to remain standing. Her blood did not taste human. It tasted like a door opening to something I could not yet see.

My rings chimed. All of them. A sound I had not heard since the last true circle, and never for a woman who was supposed to be human.

Lyria doubled over. The coat fell open.

Five marks branched across her stomach, one after another, spreading as quickly as ink through water. Not one heat print. Five. A wolf’s claw. A dragon’s scale. A night-bite, two points. A demon’s hook. And mine. A black thorned ring sitting lowest, right where a womb answers a claim.

I knew them instantly. None of us had claimed her. Yet all five marks were already there.

Mine terrified me most.

A claim mark does not appear simply because a man wants a woman. It appears because blood has already chosen, or because someone forced the choosing before the woman ever saw a cage. My mark on her skin meant my blood had somehow been involved in this long before my thumb touched her. But I had not put it there. I would have remembered being with her. I would have remembered the sound she made. I had not had a woman in years, and yet my sign sat on her skin as though I had already claimed her.

Kael stepped closer. “What did you do?”

“Nothing you get to know.”

“She is on her knees.”

“She is breathing,” I said.

Lyria clutched the coat shut with one hand and stared at me as though she wanted to bite me. Good. Fear without teeth is useless. “What the fuck was that?”

“A test,” I said.

A lie. If I told them the truth, Kael would try to tear the marks off her with his teeth. Lucien would call it a dragon right and mean claiming. Cassian would want her vein. Malakai would laugh and offer to complete the bond in front of us. We were rival kings. Not allies. Not a circle. I would burn the file before I gave them that information.

Lucien crowded the aisle, his body still visibly tense beneath his trousers, his eyes on the coat instead of the truth. “You bled her.”

“A drop.”

“And you enjoyed it,” Cassian said. His fangs had not gone back. “We can smell what it did to you. To her. Do it again, and I will take the next drop with my mouth.”

“Try.”

I wanted her against the wall so badly my hands shook. Pin her there. Keep her between me and the bulkhead until the mark answered me properly, until she stopped fighting the pull because a Witch King does not ask. It had been years. Years of councils, blood rites, and empty beds, and now the only woman who could survive us was bare beneath another king’s coat, smelling like want and wearing my sign.

The need I felt was not tender. It was ownership. I hid it. I closed the file over the page that would have shown them the branch if they knew how to read it. They were not my allies. They were rival kings who had bought the same woman and called it a treaty. I was not handing them a map to her womb.

“Sit,” I told her.

“Don’t touch me again.”

“Then don’t bleed on my floor,” I said.

She sat. The coat gaped open at her thigh. I looked because I am not a priest, and desire twisted through me like a punishment. Malakai saw me looking and grinned. I did not grin back.

The plane lurched.

The lights died.

Darkness swallowed the cabin, but the engines kept running. Someone moved. A curse came from Lucien, bitten off halfway. A growl followed, unmistakably Kael’s but sounding nothing like a man. Then Lyria gasped, but not a scream. A shocked sound punched out of her, the kind a body makes when a hand finds skin it was never invited to touch.

“Don’t,” she said. “Get off me.”

A second sound left her, lower this time. Hers. A reaction torn from her before she could stop it.

I did not move toward her. I listened. One set of footsteps. One breath that was not mine. My rings were dead on my fingers, which meant the magic in the cabin had been cut, not merely the lights.

Someone on this plane knew how to blind a witch.

The lights returned. Everyone had moved.

Kael was closer to the door than he had been. Lucien was on one knee beside her seat, one hand braced against the leather near her hip, no longer touching her. Cassian stood behind her chair. Malakai was in the aisle, his smile gone, his clothes still strained. Lyria had the coat clutched tightly to her chest. Her mouth was open, her pupils blown wide. The scent surrounding her hit harder than before, fresh, panicked, and unmistakable.

“Who touched her?” Lucien demanded.

He was asking the wrong man, and he was asking the wrong question.

I was not watching Lucien. I was watching the marks. The coat had slipped again. Four of the signs remained as they had been, quiet and waiting. But one had gone darker. Not a newly formed mark; it was activated.

The scale along her ribs, Lucien’s, was blacker than the rest, its edges slightly raised as though it had been fed. Or was it the claw? I looked again. No. The scale.

Lucien was the one on his knee. Lucien was the one whose voice I had heard cursing in the dark. Lucien was the one demanding to know who had touched her, as though asking the question would stop anyone from looking at his hand.

I looked at all four of them anyway. Any one of them could have touched her. Kael had already proved his hands did not obey him around her. Cassian’s mouth was wet. Malakai’s body had not settled.

But contact had done something to Lucien’s mark. It had not created it. It had awakened what was already there. And that was worse. One of them had touched her while the lights were out.

Yet she had carried all five marks before the cabin ever went dark.

Lucien kept talking. Who touched her? Who put a hand beneath the coat?

I shut the file.

Lucien was asking the wrong question. It was not who touched her. It was why she already carried all five.