Page 84 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

"You don't say." Alfie sounded amused.

Sullha got up and brushed her hair with the fingers of one hand while smoothing down her dress with the other, but she still had that adorable sheepish expression of a woman being caught doing something naughty and not regretting it one bit.

"How do I look?" she whispered.

"Radiant."

"Seriously."

"Seriously. You look perfect." He rose to his feet and took her hand. "Let's go."

When they got back to the penthouse, it looked like everyone had been waiting for them to return to wrap things up. Plates sat abandoned on the tables, the buffet had been cleared, and Bianca was asleep on Rohilah's shoulder with the rabbit dangling from her fist.

The seven turned toward him as one, caught themselves, and turned back to their mothers in a staggered, deliberately casual sequence that fooled no one who was actually paying attention.

Tomek scrambled up from his pile of toys on the rug. "Mama! Yaaf! Where were you? I won four races and Lady Areana won two, but I think Esag let her win, and I ate three desserts. Nana said I could."

"Nana said one," Leehy corrected from the couch. "He sneaked the other two."

Bardov turned to look at Yaaf, his happiness washing over the collective like a wave made of warm honey.

He'd been the only one of the seven who didn't have a mother to keep him occupied while Yaaf was gone, so he'd felt the tide come roaring back more than the others, understood what it meant for all of them, and was now too full of it to hold it in.

"It's true, then," Bardov said. "What was muted didn't die. It's waking up again, and it's beautiful. I never knew it could be like this. None of us did."

Sullha went rigid beside Yaaf.

Bardov had meant it as a celebration, the hope and joy shining through the link, bright and guileless. After two years of winter, Bardov was welcoming spring, but that was not what Sullha had heard.

The languid afterglow from their kiss vanished between one heartbeat and the next. Bardov's words brought back the reality that intimate moments with Yaaf were never truly private, and that what she'd thought she was giving him in the privacy of his room in the dungeon had been felt by the other seven as well.

Worse, Bardov had just said so in front of her mother, her son, and her friends, as well as the goddess, the harem ladies, and their partners, current and former.

Yaaf doubted they had understood what Bardov had meant, but Sullha had, and that was enough.

"Tomek." She crossed to her son, gathered him up, and hugged him hard, her face in his hair.

Tomek submitted to it for a generous four seconds before squirming. "Mama, you're squishing me."

She let him go, fixed his collar, and didn't look at Yaaf.

Did I say something wrong?Bardov sent, stricken, the joy in the link dissipating.

Nothing that was untrue,Yaaf answered, and kept his face even while something in his chest shrank.

"Sullha." Zohara stood up. "Did you take pictures of the dungeon for us?"

"She probably forgot," Mirumah murmured into her coffee cup. "She was busy."

"I didn't forget." Sullha pulled out her phone. "Here. Start with the door, it's the best part. Thirty centimeters thick, and there's a slot at the bottom for meals."

The women clustered around the small screen.

"That's not a dungeon." Zohara sounded disappointed. "That's as nice as our new houses in the village. Just much smaller. Still, the lap of luxury compared to how we lived in the dormitories."

"No chains?" Mirumah asked.

"None," Sullha said.