Page 159 of The Mercy of Dawn
“Please don’t say anything to Dion.”
Cyril looked at Tyr first. The rich hazel of his eyes softened, and he held up his hands in a show of submission she wholly appreciated.
“Not my place, don’t worry.”
Next, she looked at Bron. He still looked far too fucking amused with all of this.
“Not my business, either. But…” Bron gave her a wry smile, and Cyril clenched her teeth. He needed to stop there. “I take it this means you don’t want me to break his hands?”
“No! Gods, do not,” she hissed and flashed a forced smile at the pair of maids that stepped around them on the pathway, unease flickering on their faces.
“Well, the offer always stands.” Bron pinched her cheek before she had a chance to swat at him, and he turned to start back down the path. “Oh, and make sure you take a tonic, yeah? Be smart about it?”
“Bron!” she whined.
Not this conversation, no no no.
“He’s right, dove.”
Cyril stared at Tyr, but he only shrugged.
“Not you too! Mikael and I…we aren’t…we haven’t…!” Cyril groaned and stalked away from her uncles and the rumble of laughter that broke out between the two of them. She’d take the damn long way back inside if it meant getting the fuck away from them and this topic.
“Cyr, I’m just teasing you!” Bron called out, but she flipped him off and kept walking.
Mikael would be lying if he said the day’s turn of events hadn’t left him disappointed.
A trip to the barracks with Cyril wasn’t going to happen, and that meant that after the barracks wasn’t happening either. Likely for days now too. A cruel thing to accept, with little glimmers of the afternoon still drifting around in his head. Namely, those gods damned little noises she made, and how fucking good she felt—
“Distracted, boss?” Ari muttered from his right, all thinly-veiled amusement.
Mikael blew out a slow breath and knocked back the rest of his wine.
He knew he wasn’t observing Cyril as discretely as he should as she talked and drank on the other side of the lounge, flanked by her three more personable uncles.
The damn woman was just, well…distracting.
Her budding, drink-laden laugh tore through the white-noise chatter and thin haze of smoke that filled the room—entirely his father and Dion’s doing—and her lips kept peeling back into a wide, eye-lifting grin. She was having a far better night than he was.
Mikael sighed. “Long day.”
Ari made a non-committal noise and turned his attention back to whatever bullshit General Ezra was rambling on about. Eleven years now of listening to his lifeless, grating voice and it never got easier.
Mikael supposed he only had himself to blame for making such an impulsive choice when his blood ran a little too fucking hot. Not the first time, and probably not the last, truthfully, not with how thoroughly fed up he was with his self-imposed test of patience. He wanted to bed her so fucking badly, but things were getting…complicated, and in a way that he wasn’t sure how to navigate.
Mikael may have had plenty of experience with women in the physical sense, but courting? He was fucking lost. The feelings, and romance, and sweeping someone off their feet were not things he ever had to worry about. Nevermind with a woman who had a family brimming with men that frankly horrified him.
The men she sat with right now, joking and laughing without a care in the world, were the same men who tortured and killed mercilessly, just in the name of contracts. He didn’t want to imagine what they would each be willing to do for Cyril.
Mikael needed another damn drink, and a stronger one at that.
He slipped away from the group of captains and commanders still feigning their interest in Ezra’s droning lesson about fucking whatever piece of irrelevant history.
The moonstone-topped sideboard tucked along the far wall had a bottle of something dark and pungent on it that seemed like it would do the trick. He poured himself a few fingers worth and the half he shot back burned the entire way down.
“You’re brooding more than usual.”
Mikael stiffened and glared down at his mother.
