Page 50 of FoolSilver
I didn’t need to be told twice. Coffee first—the good kind, rich and dark. Two cucumber sandwiches. I carried them to the table and sat.
“Sorry you got stuck with me, Major. I know this isn’t how you wanted to spend your morning.”
“Just try not to make my life more difficult than it already is,” he joked and settled into the other chair with a mug of tea. “I won’t always escort you. You’ll know your way around soon enough.”
“Of course, Major.”
I ate. The sandwich was good.
I thought about the Fae woman’s voice in the old tongue. The way she’d gazed up at Aelindor. The way his face had changed at her whisper. The shape and weight of a secret carried by someone who didn’t know they were carrying it.
But I wasn’t built for spiraling. The mine had trained that out of me—process what you can, file the rest, move on. Something had shifted and I didn’t know what. I’d find out, or I wouldn’t. Either way, there was nothing to be done about it now.
The walls I’d let come down over the past weeks—the ones the heirs had been quietly dismantling, meal by meal, every hand offered, every time one of them had looked at me like I was worth the cost—I felt them going back up. Not all the way. But enough.
I wasn’t here for romance. I was here because I needed a safe home for my little sister, and now she was somewhere inside the Haven, and I was the only person who was going to get her out.
Everything else came second.
Chapter 20
Max
Late morning light fell through a row of clerestory windows. Four mats covered the center of the room in a wide rectangle. Along the walls, weapons hung in careful arrangement: daggers, swords, staves, chains, and sharp things I had no names for.
Frost told me this was the heirs’ private training space, then left me to wait for Caspian.
I walked the length of the wall. With Coldiron pulsing against my wrist, eager to do my bidding, I had no need of any other weapon.
Exclusive,Coldiron chirped happily.
Drakken was supposed to take up my training, as he’d promised, but he was still at Greyhold, holding the eastern border while the garrisons made their way in. There was no estimated return. His absence had taken up residence in my chest, a dull, inconvenient ache that I didn’t want and couldn’t evict.
For the life of me, I didn’t understand the pull. He’d called me a warlock and designed a Sorting specifically to weed me out. And here I was, craving his presence. I must be wired wrong.
And it wasn’t only Drakken. I wanted all four of them, as if they had imprinted on me. A fish with four hooks set in its mouth, being hauled in four directions at once.
That’s a disturbing image,the demon said.
I felt Caspian before I heard him, a warm sweep of kinetic energy down the corridor, and then he came through the door on roller blades that rumbled like low thunder. Wine-red hair. Bright green eyes.
The heaviness in my chest lifted. The shifter prince always had that effect. The easy smile said everything would be all right, that the sun would be brighter tomorrow, and you believed it, right up until you saw him fight. Brutal, efficient, a torpedo with a heartbeat. The carefree warmth and the apex violence lived in the same body. Wolf and man sharing the same skin.
He grinned. “Max.”
“Your Highness.”
“Caspian,” he insisted.
“Nice skate shoes, Caspian.”
He glanced down at himself, the broad shoulders, the T-shirt stretched across his chest, the whole presentation of a man who knew exactly how good he looked, then back at me. “Seriously, the skates? Not the face? Not the body?”
“You’ve got enough women drooling over those already.”
“True.” He grinned, wearing his own effect a little too well. But I wasn’t about to swoon over him like everyone else. I might be insanely attracted to him, but I was no one’s conquest.
“I only want one woman to appreciate me,” he purred, and my stupid heart skipped a beat.
