Mag-log inIrinaHe let go of my chin and put his hand at the side of my throat. Open palm, fingers spread, the heel of his hand at my collarbone and his thumb under my ear. He slowly ran his eyes down the length of my body under the sheet. He took his time. Now I know what a horse feels like under the eyes of a buyer.He took the sheet off me in one pull.He had it bunched in his fist at my knees and he tore it sideways off the bed and let it drop. The nightdress had ridden up to my hips leaving my thighs down bare. He looked at the bare skin from my knees to the bunched silk at my waist and his face did not move at all, and he did not have to say anything for me to know what he was looking at, and my whole body was hot at once."Spread your legs."This Idiot was in my room, and was ordering me to spread my legs. Just a simple scream from me, and every guard in the mansion would be here. Kark would be killed before he can even explain what he was doing mounting the Queen of Valdris.I did not
Irina"Luna ordered it. I did it. I'd do it again tomorrow if she said." A beat. "Doesn't mean I didn't fuck you well on that balcony. Both things are true. You're the one walking around like they cancel out."I stared at him."Sera asked you to stab me."He held the line for half a second too long."Well." He shrugged the one shoulder. "Not exactly.""What do you mean not exactly.""Yvara called me in. The order came from her.""From Yvara.""From the Alpha's beta. Yes.""And you took it.""I took it. Beta gives an order in that room, you don't ask her where she got it. She takes hers from the Alpha and his Luna. So." He tilted his head a fraction. "Yeah. Sure. Your daughter ordered it. As far as I'm concerned."I sat with that.It should not have changed anything. I had known. I had watched Sera cry in that room afterward and scold her beta in front of me, and I had known the whole performance for what it was the second she lifted her chin and started in on Yvara — a Luna does not w
IrinaHe was not in a hurry. That was the first thing I understood about him being in the room.The second was that I could see him properly now. He had come close enough to the lamp that the light caught the side of his face. He had not shaved in two days. His hair was longer than it had been in Ironmaw. There was a small healed cut over his left eyebrow that had not been there the last time I had been close enough to see his eyebrows. His shoulders were the shoulders I remembered. His mouth was the mouth I remembered.He was watching me the way he had watched me on the balcony back in Ironmaw. The same look. As though no time had moved between the two moments.The other thing my body remembered was lower than my chest.I sat with my back against the headboard and tried not to let my breathing speed up, and could feel it speeding up anyway."Why are you here."The voice came out closer to flat than I had expected. I had been expecting it to come out as a stammer. It did not. My throa
IrinaI went to him the next evening in a dress I had not worn since the early months of our marriage. I took his hand at dinner in front of three of his guests. I laughed at one of his jokes, a thing nobody had done at one of his jokes in twenty-three years. I asked him, after the wine, if he might walk me to my chamber.He walked me.He walked me without speaking, which I took for a refusal until we reached the door and he stepped in behind me and the door closed, and he took hold of me by the upper arm in a grip that was neither rough nor kind, and he asked me in a soft voice what I was doing.I told him I had missed him.I said it in a voice I had been practicing on the inside of my cheek for a day.He held me with his eyes for what could have been a long time or no time at all.Then he took me to bed.He fucked me for the second time in our marriage, and he was thorough and unhurried and effective in exactly the way he had been the first time, and he was better at it than I had r
IrinaI had told Nyx first because Nyx already knew.She had crossed the room, gone down on one knee in front of me, and waited.After a minute she said, "How long.""Eight weeks.""You're sure.""I am sure.""All right." She stood. She held her hand out. "Up."I let her pull me up.She sat me at the dressing table. She poured water from the carafe into a basin and pushed the basin across to me, and I washed my face while she stood behind me and watched my hands. She watched my hands the way she watched my hands when she was deciding whether I was steady enough to be left alone.When I was finished she took the basin away and sat across from me."How.""A man.""I know how. Where.""My father's hall. The summer.""The cloth merchant."I turned my head."You knew.""I stood outside the door for three nights, my lady."I had nothing to say to that. I waited.Nyx folded her hands in her lap. She studied them. She studied them, and then she studied me."Have you told the king.""No.""Are
IrinaHe stopped touching me the night Sera was born.I had not known, at the time, that he was stopping. I had been recovering from a hard birth. He had come into the lying-in chamber twice, taken in the child, said the child is a girl, and left both times inside the half-hour. I had assumed his distance was a temporary courtesy. The weeks had become months. The months had become a year. I had been twenty years old and the wife of the King of Valdris, and my husband had stopped turning toward me, and I had spent the second year of Sera's life telling myself it was the season, the politics, the strain of his accession — anything except what it was, which was that Aldric had decided he was done.I had thought, then, that he had taken a mistress.I had spent four years searching for her. I had checked every woman who came into the keep. I had checked the kitchen girls and the maids and the daughters of the lower lords. I had read his correspondence when his clerks were lazy. I had bribe
FenrisThe leather bag was old. It was cracked in several places, leaking thin streams of sand onto the stone floor every time I hit it. The heavy chains groaned, a high-pitched metallic scrape that echoed in the small, windowless space. This was the belly of the mountain, a place the torches barel
Sera"It’s getting pretty hot in here," Mina said.The shawl hit the floor before I could catch it. I immediately pulled my arms across my chest, hunched forward to hide the plunge of the neckline. Fenris’s eyes didn't just look at me; they felt like they were stripping away the last of the silk. I
SeraNight fell fast, and with it, the temperature plummeted. We had three fires going, but the heat didn't seem to travel more than six inches past the flames. I sat on a log by the middle fire, pulling the wagon fur around my shoulders, shivering so hard my teeth were literally clicking together.
SeraThe light coming through the ceiling vents was fading into a deep violet. Torches were being lit, their orange glow reflecting off the polished stone. I sat on the wagon, feeling the cold start to seep back in, wondering if I’d just been forgotten.The warrior returned, bringing a girl with hi







