Dark Prince's Desire

Yelena knew scars. These must have hurt like hell. For a heartbeat, the detachment she’d cultivated since coming home wavered, her careful facade splitting as intricately as his skin. If he looked, he’d be able to see the ugly truths that had brought her to this place.... Well, not to this place in particular—where the hallway had widened into an intimidating expanse of soaring columns and flying buttresses, like the hallucinations of a first-year architecture student with a better understanding of grandiosity than gravity—but to this place in her life

Then she remembered where they were—the phaedrealii—where nothing was real, where every shifting surface was an illusion.

“Dreams,” she said suddenly.

Raze glanced back then shortened his stride to fall into step beside her. Despite his size, he moved with an almost animal elegance that reminded her of her own people as well as the more instinctual human warriors she had worked alongside. “What about them?”

“When I walked down to the lake, I said, ‘Perchance to dream.’”

His look sharpened. “You sought to drown yourself, to die?”

She scowled at him. “You know Shakespeare.”

“Along with the drunken wanderers, some poets have found their way to phaedrealii.” His hand dropped to the long knife tucked against his side. “Dreams and death are common paths to the court. Although only one leads out again.”

They had come to an arched doorway where a stairwell spiraled down. The mellow glow of the corridor did not reach past the first curve of the stair. Tiny will-o’-the-wisps drifted in the darkness, their firefly lights twinkling.

Yelena balked. “I’m not going any farther.”

The phae tilted his head. His dark hair was too short to fall into his eyes, but it had just enough length to start to curl, a quirky contrast to the unyielding slash of his high cheekbones and tight jaw. “Into death? Or dreams?”

“Neither.” She glowered; she wasn’t going to forgive him for that “drunken wanderer” crack. “Not until you tell me how you inspired the verita luna.”

When he crossed his arms, the open neck of his tunic gaped, revealing more scars descending over his collarbones to what she could see of his broad, smooth chest.

She swallowed, suddenly certain the scars were no glamour. How far down did the wounds go? The phae were known for their perilous beauty, but she sensed these marks were not meant to be alluring; quite the opposite, they were the sign of something very, very dangerous.

Still, against her better judgment, her fingers twitched to confirm the marks were real. That he was real.

He stared at her, his gray eyes hooded. “What did you dream?”

She snapped her gaze up from the taut line of his chest. “Excuse me?”

“At the portal, which should have been locked, you spoke of dreams. Dreams of what?”

She shifted, her bare feet making no sound, but uncomfortably aware of the rest of her bareness under his borrowed cloak. “What does it matter? Dreams don’t come true.”

“Here they may.” He paused, then his gaze sharpened. “The verita luna. You’ve lost the way. That’s why you wanted to know how I triggered it.”

“No, I—” The lie was bitter in her mouth, and she choked on it. Of all the places where a lie should have been easy. “It’s none of your business.”

“It is now.” He took a step toward her. “That is what brought you here. You are trapped, unable to change, just as we—” He cut himself off as he prowled behind her.

She whirled to face him again. The threatening heat of his big body made her already sensitized skin tingle. As a cat, she would have rubbed against him to release the static charge. A longing for her tigress arrowed through her, as piercing as the knife at his side. She could not admit he was right; to say it made it too true. She hedged, saying, “You think my answer is here.”

“The phaedrealii is rarely a place of answers.” When she opened her mouth to press him, he set one fingertip to her lips, silencing her. “Not that the sunlit realm is any better. But if ever you might find what you seek, it will be with me. Now come.”

His touch burned on her lower lip, and she found herself tilting toward him as if gravity had shifted. His scent—like a storm brewing in the boreal forests she called home, mist and mountain struck by lightning, wild and evergreen—lingered in her flared nostrils. The unintentional change she’d just gone through must have unsettled her more than she’d thought.

But when he turned, she followed. What other choice did she have?

* * *

Which was more dangerous: a tigress by the tail, or a tigress on his tail?

Raze’s spine tingled with awareness of the force of nature prowling behind him as they descended to his lair. She might be smaller than him at the moment, but the wild heat of her was the same in either of her forms. He didn’t doubt holding her would be risky whether her claws were feline or verbal.

But she’d tacitly confessed she’d lost the verita luna. Curiosity prickled more than the sense of danger, both sensations an irresistible lure. Just as well he was no cat or this curiosity might get him into trouble.

He glanced back, and the prickle in his spine shot out along every nerve as he found her golden-green gaze fixed on his backside. She instantly glanced away, but her pupils were blown wide and dark, not just from the low lighting in the stairwell but from something else, something more edgy.

The steep pitch of the stairs left his head level with her belly, and though his gray robe covered her now, his mind’s eye had no trouble seeing right through the rough weave to the memory of her bare curves. His previously loose trousers suddenly felt very constricting.

The werelings had wanted no part of the Iron Wars, and he’d had few dealings with them back when the phae walked the sunlit realm. He knew they were sensual creatures, prone to grand passions of the sort that had been the Undoing of the phaedrealii. Phae magic was destabilized by unruly emotion, and that unpredictable animal fever couldn’t be allowed to wreak havoc on his painfully wrought geasa. Not now, not when he was so close.

She was too close, which was why his pulse was racing as if the fever had already infected him.

“I suspect...” His voice sounded harsh, even to himself, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I suspect the depth of your longing for the verita luna brought you through the lake gate, even though it is locked.” The Queen had crafted the portal with a volatile new compound, which had no doubt exacerbated the already erratic qualities of a doorway woven from algae spores.

Yelena pursed her lips—her wide mouth was the same dusky-rose-red as the tips of her breasts had been; would her tender, inner flesh be as lush?—and he almost fumbled on the last stair.

“You started to say the phaedrealii couldn’t change either,” she mused. “Why not?”

Unbalanced by his misstep—and by his distraction at a simple pout—he spoke without thinking. “Because it would mean the end of us.”

To his relief, she was sidetracked when, triggered by his presence, light bloomed in his lair. Swirls of ammolite phosphorescence spiraled up the fluted columns of flowstone that supported the rough cavern rock far overhead. The glowing traceries branched out across the ceiling like spreading limbs and leaves, a tree of light.

Yelena’s dark pupils constricted in the sudden shine, revealing the wide pools of tigress-gold that shimmered with the iridescence around her. She turned in a slow circle, and in her wondering gaze, he saw anew the beauty of the quartz-studded walls only barely softened by the long falls of silky curtains. The lacy edges drifted on an imperceptible breeze that carried the faint mineral scent of wet stone.

A sudden wish to show her more—to point out the tiny spiderling phae constantly spinning the silk or to guide her deeper into the caverns to reveal the hot springs where he soaked away the agony of his scars—welled in him, a desire even more corrosive to his discipline than the blatant delights of her naked body.

He slammed a halt to the thought, as hard and jagged as the quartz. What in the deepest hells was he thinking? Sharing their magic had almost destroyed the phae. He couldn’t forget that, not even for one, impossible moment with a woman who reminded him of the world he’d lost.

He would have pulled his cloak more tightly around himself, but she was wearing it. He’d coax the spiderlings into weaving him another. Otherwise the tigress’s earthy perfume would haunt him forever.

“Come,” he said again. And this time he did not try to keep the harshness from his voice.

Her upper lip—ah, those lips would not be so easily purged from his memory either—curled at his brusque tone, but she followed him toward a small alcove carved with many sills and ledges holding boxes, bowls, bottles and bric-a-brac.

“A pack rat,” she muttered. “But a tidy one. You’d love my sisters’ matryoshki nesting dolls.”

That was the second time she’d mentioned her relatives. “You are close to your family?”

She watched while he chose a shallow obsidian bowl and various other items from the wall. “Very. Will that make it easier for me to get home?”

He shook his head as he mixed ingredients into a thin paste. “It doesn’t matter either way.” He scraped some of the ammolite from the wall. The dust shimmered like dragon scales as it fluttered into the black glass basin.

Her jaw thrust forward so furiously he could almost see her tigress whiskers bristling. “It matters to me.”

“I meant such connections won’t save you.”

“Oh.” Her face blanked like a mask. “I know that.”

Her bleak tone—a familiar echo to the emptiness inside him—made him pause as he studied her. She might try, but she could not rival him in detachment.

After all, he intended to sever the phaedrealii from the emotional enticements of the sunlit realm forever.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

She eyed him warily. “Are you going to kiss me again?”

He wanted to object that he hadn’t truly kissed her. But the surge of interest in his groin to correct that oversight told him more clearly than the court’s growing agitation that it was past time to lock down the geasa. “I will not kiss you.” He emphasized the words with the strength of a promise.

Even as he spoke, though, he knew all phae promises were lies.

Chapter Four

Slowly, Yelena raised her hand to his outstretched palm. Her hand looked small enclosed in his calloused fingers as he rotated her arm to slide back her sleeve and expose her inner wrist. He brushed the pad of his thumb over the paler skin, making her pulse leap. The rough cloak chafed at her sensitized skin—she imagined his big hands skimming over her—making her nipples peak.

His eyes narrowed and he withdrew his knife.

She stiffened, the sensual lull severed by the glint of steel, but his grip was too strong. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to mark you with a geas. The symbol will power a spell to reveal what traps you.”

She strained away, unease ramping up her heartbeat another notch at the thought of what the spell might reveal. Phae weren’t the only ones with secrets. “Werelings don’t do magic.”

“You are magic.”

“No, we just are.” She balled her hand into a fist.

His gray gaze turned harder than the stone around them as he reeled her closer, so close the scorching heat of his body surrounded her. “If you want to flee, then change. Right here in my arms. Slash me to ribbons and go.”

She froze again, though his nearness threatened to melt her. “You know I can’t.” She couldn’t find the verita luna and couldn’t leave until she found how he had uncovered it.

“Then let me do this.”

She noted he did not say “Trust me.” Just as well. Fear made her voice prickly even if she didn’t have her claws. “Will you ruin my skin like yours?”

His thumb danced over her pulse point again. “Never. That would be a sin not even the phae would condone. The mark will fade. But—” He glanced up and she caught a glimmer in his eye, like there-and-gone-again heat lightning high in a storm cloud. “Something tells me your heart is as scarred as my flesh.”

If he’d threatened to plunge his knife through her breastbone right then, she was too shocked to have stopped him. He thought he could see inside her? In comparison, the touch of the blade parting her skin was less invasive.

He traced an X so shallow she scarcely felt the sting before he set the knife aside. The X spiraled, as if stirred by an invisible force to leave a mark hardly larger than a thumbprint and nearly as elaborate. Raze scooped a fingerful of goop from the bowl and smoothed the ointment over the small wound.

She sucked in a breath at the sudden cold, but just as quickly, it mellowed into a pleasant warmth. Too pleasant. The sensation spread until her fingertips tingled. All those whiskeys she’d been downing at Beck’s bar hadn’t had this effect.

She clenched her fist until her nails—bitten shorter than her tigress would have approved—nipped at her palms. “Did you drug me?”

“That would seem unwise. An intoxicated tigress might be too much even for me to handle.”

From the amused gleam in his gray eyes, she thought he probably thought he was lying when he said he wasn’t sure he could handle her. She also guessed he had drugged her, or whatever the fairy equivalent was. The sparkling dust he’d scraped off the rock and spread into the wound made the geas seem to shift in her skin.... No, it was shifting. Her heartbeat soared for a moment as she hoped the change was the first sign of the verita luna, and she held her breath. But nothing else happened.

Raze tugged her closer to frown at the marking. “The spell reveals hidden barriers. It should show me what is blocking...” He angled his face to scowl into hers. “You.”

Distracted as she was by the simmering power in his grip—perhaps he would indeed be able to handle her if she slipped over the il-luna edge—she was slow to react to the accusation in his tone.

“Me?” She tugged halfheartedly at his grasp, but he only tightened his hold, and the strange zinging in her blood quickened.

“You blocked the verita luna, and you are keeping me from locking that portal.”

“What?” She sputtered, frustration pushing the fizz in her blood up into her throat. “I’m not getting in the way of your gate. I didn’t even know it was there. You think I’m blocking myself?”

“You fell into the phaedrealii because you can’t bear to see yourself revealed truly in the sunlit realm.”

The ring of steely truth—spoken by a lying fairy, no less—pushed her over the edge. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You werelings might have more refined senses, but you are as willfully obtuse as the humans. If you don’t want to see what is right in front of you, then...” He flicked open his fingers in a negligently graceful gesture, setting her loose as he walked toward a curtain of flowstone.

How dare he promise an answer and then turn away, jerking the answer above her head like a teasing toy?

She’d show him what came of tempting a tigress.

Shedding the confines of his borrowed cloak, she leapt at his back.

What she lacked without her cat’s strength and speed, she more than made up for in recklessness. His eyes widened in surprise as he spun to face her attack. If he’d had his knife, he might have had a chance. But she pounced with her legs ready to tangle over his, her fingers wrapping at his throat.

He stumbled under her weight, his back crashing into the stone curtain. His hands rose to wrap around her wrists. The geas he’d carved in her skin flared with sudden light that turned his stunned gray eyes to silver.

“What I see,” she hissed, “is a phae who cannot lie, skin-to-skin.”

She only meant to challenge him with that unfortunate-for-him quirk in phae nature, but her own nature welled up as she clung to him. As long as it had been since she changed, it had been longer still since she’d found someone to ease the equally vital wereling need for touch. Werelings were creatures of sensation, of emotion, but she’d quelled such simple longings to focus on her idealistic quest.

The Amur council had ruled her half sisters unfit, their control of the verita luna shift too tenuous to risk exposure in front of oblivious humans. Their exile was final. Unless Yelena could win them clemency. If she could show the council how she and other werelings like Beck were earning a place among humans, that might open a way for her sisters to walk free in either shape.

Instead, with her own loss of the verita luna, she was only proving the council’s case. Her sudden, inexplicable shift coming to the phae court was the closest she’d come to finding an answer for her problem.

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