Page 89 of FoolSilver
There she was. Max Fucking Morning, in a gown.
My gaze locked onto her and refused every other thing in the room, which was a problem, because I was running security. My detail—Spartans, most of them—had already melted into the shadows and the crowd, walking the perimeter. I should have been watching the doors and the dignitaries. I watched her instead.
It was all staged: the timing, the entrance, the gown. We needed Xander to see her, and see her first—a striking woman gracing a ball on no one’s arm—so the last thought in his ancient, evil skull tonight would be any suspicion that this same woman meant to walk into the heart of his kingdom before dawn and rob him of his prize. He knew her face. His spies would have handed him a current profile. She looked nothing like the half-dead boy from the mines now, but he’d know her. That was the whole point.
I’d caught myself wondering what she’d wear.
At the brief, she’d looked nearly cornered by the question. “I don’t own anything like a ball gown,” she’d said. “Could I just wear my uniform? You’ve already picked six cadets to serve. Make me the seventh. I’ll carry trays. I’m good at not being seen.”
“The entire point is for you to be seen, Max,” Nikolai had said. “To stand out. You will not be carrying trays. We’ll find you a gown.”
She’d bitten her lip. “That’s the trouble, though.” She’d gestured down the long lines of herself, her height, the breadth a decade of swinging a pick had built into her. “I’m not exactly standard issue. You could buy out every shop in the compound tonight and still not turn up one gown that’d fit me right. And then I’m the giant in a dress that pinches, and everyone’s looking, which—that’s the opposite of what you want, isn’t it?”
When she got nervous, she babbled, words tumbling out, hands moving. It was?—
Cute?
Shit. Did I think cute? That was the dragon. That had to be the fucking dragon. He was a fool when it came to her.
She’d badly underestimated what three besotted immortal princes could arrange when given a week to do it. Three gowns reached her at once, carried by the same messenger, and not one of them came with a card. The heirs were a great many things; subtle was not always among them.
Nikolai’s was a deep blood red, cut bold and low and built to be remembered, the silk falling in one long clean line broken by a slit to the thigh. The bloodsucker had never met a room he didn’t mean to own the instant he entered it, and he’d dressed Max to do the same.
Caspian’s had been built for one purpose: to put every curve she owned on open display. Deep storm-blue, his house color, fitted like it had been poured over her, every long, muscled line of her on show. Tasteful, just barely.
Aelindor’s was the clever one. At a glance it read as simple—an elegant fall of fabric, nothing shouting. But woven through it, swirling and folding over each other like currents in dark water, ran five colors: the silver of Virgo, the oxblood of Sagittarius, the storm-blue of Aries, the charcoal-and-gold of Leo—the four houses—and threaded in among them, a fifth that belonged to no house at all. Midnight blue, shot through with a single streak of white. Her color. The exact color of her hair. Subtle and deafening at once, and only someone who knew the houses would ever hear it.
And then there was the gown I’d had made for her—my best tailor, weeks of work, a thing that shifted and rippled like blue dragon fire when it moved. I’d had it finished, and I’d kept it. Never sent it. My dragon had raged at me over the missing messenger.
And here she stood. I wasn’t remotely surprised she’d chosen Aelindor’s, as though some instinct in her had read every thread of it, the four Zodiac Houses and hers stitched in beside them, like she’d always belonged in the weave.
She was stunning. Harshly beautiful.
The gown flowed like moonlight when she moved, the hidden colors catching and turning under the Stormglass light, and the whole room had simply stopped breathing just to look. Her midnight hair, the white streak in it bright as struck silver, fell loose to her shoulders. She held her chin level and her spine straight and dared the room to find her wanting. Not one of them could. And on a pair of high heels, she stood taller than any other soul on the continent.
I took a slow pull of my martini and set my face to warn the whole room off disturbing me while I drank her in.
Caspian appeared at my shoulder anyway.
“Gorgeous, isn’t she. My girl.” Pure satisfaction rippled off him. “And she wore the boots I sent. I’m calling that a clean win. Look—I’m no dress man, nobody beats Aelindor there, fine, I’ll say it once and never again. But shoes? Shoes I know. A tall, regal, one-of-a-kind woman like Max needs something she can stand in all night that still looks like a weapon and goes with anything. And I’ll tell you what warms my heart, Drakken—tonight my girl gets to look down her nose at the whole room, not just at me, for a change.” He grinned. “It sucks to be Nikolai. Scored a flat zero. She didn’t even wear the belt he sent with his gown. Oh, and the sapphire’s Aelindor’s too.”
That big midnight stone at her throat, ringed in diamonds. Of course it was.
“She isn’t your girl,” I half-snarled. I only wanted him to stop talking; he’d already wrecked what little peace I’d carved out. There was no angle in the room from which I could watch Max without some fool wandering into my line of sight.
“Jealous?” The shifter’s smirk widened. “Careful, Drakken. You’re drooling.”
If he weren’t the finest fighting partner my dragon had ever carried, I’d have put his teeth on the floor.
“Grow the fuck up and shut your mouth, Caspian.”
He shut it. Not because I’d told him to; because we’d both caught the way Xander was looking at her.
He’d been holding the center of the floor, wine in hand, charming Aelindor and President Whitmore with some story, laughing in the right places like a man who’d had a thousand years to practice laughing. Now he was staring at Max, who stood at the entrance like a star torn from the sky and dropped into our ballroom, singular and impossible to look away from.
He looked at her possessively, as if she were simply a rare thing he hadn’t finished acquiring yet.
White-hot rage tore through my veins.
