Page 63 of FoolSilver
And he kissed me.
Not the collision in the jeep—that had been me, unplanned, over before it landed. This was him. His hand moved from my hair to cup my jaw, tilting my face up an inch. His mouth was warm in a way his hands never were. The kiss started slow, then became something else the moment I stopped thinking and kissed him back. His other hand found the small of my back and pressed there, not pulling, just anchoring, and the current that always ran between us stopped being subtle.
He kissed like a man who had spent centuries learning patience and had just decided he was done with it. Every nerve in me lit. I threaded my fingers into his hair, and he made a low growl that I was going to be thinking about for a long time.
When he broke it, we were both breathing hard.
I already knew it would burn into my bloodstream. Whether I ever kissed him again, whether any future version of this existed, I’d carry this moment. If it was all I got, I’d take it. Forehead pressed to mine, security detail thirty feet away pretending not to exist, he was mine.
The lust that came up behind the kiss was its own problem. Sharp, present, and not something either of us could do a damnthing about. He had a war to run. He’d said he had minutes, and those minutes were gone.
He stepped back. Straightened his coat.
“Wait.” I caught his arm before he could turn.
I pulled one of the six armguards from my pack, sized for him, still warm from the making. “Give me your hand. I need to bleed you.”
He smiled and offered it without hesitation. “Do whatever you need to do.”
Just like that. Trusting me completely.
I pressed his palm flat, drew a small blade across my index finger, and let a drop fall onto the armguard’s surface. Then I pressed his fingertip to the metal beside mine, our blood soaking into the Coldiron together.
The metal recognized us both. I felt the exact moment it accepted the bond.
I wrapped the armguard around his forearm and fastened it. He looked at it, then at me.
“You’ll need to feed it,” I said. “Pain works best. Your pain, or the memory of it. The worse the pain, the stronger the seal.”
Something moved across his face, old and deep, the surface of a loss so vast it had become landscape. Evermere burning. His people scattered. A beloved world reduced to ash and memory. The long hunt for a prophecy that refused to arrive, year after year after year.
His pain, mine!Coldiron announced and then settled against his arm with a bright, satisfied hum.
Chapter 25
Drakken
Iwas on the first train back to the capital the moment the garrisons rolled into Greyhold.
I need to keep an eye on Max Morning,I told my dragon.I still don’t trust her bloodline.
You just can’t stay away from that female,the dragon answered lazily.Keep lying to yourself, but I’m bored.
I sneered at him. A rift had been growing between my beast and me since Max arrived, and it was widening. He’d been warming to her since the Sorting. His fire had played with her that day—flirted, even. Given the chance to brand her a liar and burn her where she stood, he’d stripped her bare instead, just to get a good long look.
I couldn’t write him off, though. The honest difference between animals and men was that animals didn’t pretend. A beast showed you exactly what it was. Men lied, worst of all to themselves, dressing every choice and every betrayal up as something noble. I’d bet my life the White Witch slept soundly, certain that dropping the bomb that gutted a continent and buried billions had been a mercy. For the greater good.
I dragged my mind off that bitch before the old rage took the wheel. She was the reason for the black thing living in my chest.It wouldn’t quiet—not ever, not until I took her head off myself and set it on a spike where the whole broken world could watch it rot.
I went straight to the war room off the train, sat through a fast war council with the other three, and was about to head for my quarters. I didn’t keep a penthouse like the rest of them. I kept a cabin at the edge of the Leo camp, close to my soldiers.
I changed direction and struck north instead.
Julie, whom I’d set to shadow Max and report her movements, came jogging up with word that the cadet was holed up in the library.
I should have gone home and changed first. I was still in travel-stained fatigues, the grime of the front on me. But I couldn’t shake the picture of one of the others reaching her ahead of me.
The image turned my stomach. Caspian swinging his cock around her like a prize, sniffing at her like a beast in heat. Nikolai watching the pulse jump in her throat like a man reading a wine list. I couldn’t hate Aelindor for his gentleness toward her, which was worse.
