by Maisey Yates
But it was the lingering desire he felt for her that was what he cursed most of all.
She had been so epically responsive to his touch and he had taken things much further than he’d intended.
In his effort to exert control, he’d shown he had none.
And in the end she had looked so upset that he’d wanted to take her in his arms and hold her...
No. She was not for him. But there was something about the way she fought. Furious and feral and ferocious, and she was a worthy opponent. He did not train her to be indulgent—he never had. That could have easily spelled disaster for her. He had trained her to draw blood, and he had trained her to be lethal.
What he had not expected was for her abilities to appeal to him in this way.
She was strong. Strong enough to withstand the beast inside of him. The beast that he never let out.
He liked the soft, round women that he made bed partners of back home, but they were delicate. He treated them with softness. With deference, as one should.
But the lean muscle of Agnes’s body demanded to be tested.
Tested her he had, but he had not imagined he might find himself tested as well. That strong body begging him to give it his worst—pleasure and pain alike.
But it would not be borne, not again.
And he was impatient. The meeting between himself and Alexius was sure to be... Tense. He would have to evaluate just what Alexius was thinking, what he wanted.
He would be staying in the palace. That place that was little more than an echo in his memory. And Agnes was nowhere to be seen.
“Agnes,” he roared.
And she did not appear. He stormed across the room, as if her bad mood was her fault, and he flung open the doors to her bedroom.
She sat up, and he saw the rosy crests of her breasts. She was not wearing any clothes.
And his control suffered another mighty blow. It would not be endured.
She gasped and covered herself. “What are you doing?”
“You overslept,” he growled.
“I have not overslept,” she said. “You didn’t tell me when to wake up.”
“You never sleep past one.”
“I am never in Paris.”
Another truth sizzled between them.
“Indeed not.”
“I have no patience for you today,” she said.
Agnes did not usually snipe at him.
Nor did she usually wear his ring.
Or shatter beneath his mouth.
Or display her breasts.
“What happened to my Lord? What happened to Your Highness?”
“What happened to sanity?”
He stormed out of her room, and she appeared a moment later, looking freshly scrubbed and angry, back in the clothing that she had arrived in yesterday.
“We depart for Liri in an hour.”
“It is a private plane, so you and I both know that you just decided that right this moment, and you had no preexisting plan, and you are now making it my problem that you didn’t tell me.”
“Quiet yourself,” he said.
“I would rather contend with a toothless bulldog than you right at the moment.”
He smiled and made sure to show all of his teeth. “Not toothless. And you cannot wear that.”
“Why not?”
“We will get off the plane and have an immediate audience with my brother.”
“You have arranged this?”
“It will be so.”
“You cannot just make demands of him. He doesn’t care that you’re the King of the kingdom he does not recognize.”
“Perhaps not. But we will show that I am not to be trifled with. Eventually, that is what he will learn.”
“What do you intend to do to him?”
“All we’re doing is fact-finding at the moment. We need his trust. We need to learn everything we can about Liri. About the kingdom as it is structured. About the weaknesses in the palace. About those who may not be loyal to him.”
“I know how to run a con, Lazarus,” she said, using his first name aloud, which she never did. “I only never imagined running one with you.”
“This is not a con, Agnes. This is not about lining my pockets with money. It is not about benefiting myself. It is returning to my people what is rightfully theirs.”
“Have you forgotten that you’re Lirian. You might have grown up in the wood, but you are not one of them.”
The words were like that dagger she carried sheathed at her beautiful thigh. He had not forgotten, of course he hadn’t. That it was the blood of the disloyal—those who had sacrificed their child to a forest. The blood of the murderous traitor—the ancestor who had crushed a people beneath his fist in the name of power. That was the blood that ran through his veins.
He could never hope to have as much honor as the people he’d adopted.
“And neither are you,” he said.
A dangerous thing thrashed about in his chest.
“I’m aware. But I’m not the one who is intent on deposing their own brother.”
“Perhaps not,” he said. “But you know how it is. My life belongs to Agamemnon. My life belongs to the people. I survived that I might complete this task. Whatever else happens doesn’t matter.”
“Nothing?”
He shook his head, the blank, dark black hole in his soul feeling particularly cavernous at the moment. “No. Nothing. There is nothing else for me but this vengeance. But it is more than vengeance—it is a restoration of justice.”
“What am I to wear?”
Unbidden, his mind went back to the sight of her breasts. They were beautiful. Just as she was. All that well-honed muscle. He would’ve said that was not his particular type for a bed partner. But there was a roughness that he fantasized about...
She was suited to that. She would hold up against the pounding that he wished to unleash...
Never.
Agnes was his the way another person might own a rare artifact. It was the way of their tradition. She was to be valued, cared for and honored. He was her master, but if she fell into disrepair, he and he alone would bear the shame of it.
“Yes,” he said. “The red dress.”
As if the devil was in him, suggesting that.
“Isn’t that a bit much for meeting with your brother.”
“I should like you to wear the red dress. With red lipstick. Go. See that it is done.”
She vanished and returned very quickly, her hair down, nothing but the barest hint of mascara on her lashes, along with the bright red lipstick he had commanded. She was stunning like that. It was only truly beautiful women who could play such games with makeup and win. “Have I met with your approval, my Lord?”
“You please me,” he said.
He approached her, and he heard her breath catch in her throat, saw her pulse quicken in her neck. “Now you must only put on a convincing performance as a woman who is madly in love with me.”
“I would like to eviscerate you with my teeth presently, so it will be a challenge.”
And in spite of himself, he felt a kick of lust hit hard right in his stomach. He would like very much to have her use her teeth on him. And he would use his own on her in return.
He didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from. These aberrations. He was not a man who was controlled by his appetites. They were an appetite like any other, and when he felt the need, he indulged them. But that was it. Right now, his desire for her was intruding. In ways he did not appreciate or accept.
“Come,” he said.
“What about all of my things?”
“They will be gathered and brought. No need to fret.”
“I am not fretting.”
Almost as soon as they were down in the lobby,
a pair of men dressed all in black went back up to the penthouse.
“They will bring all of your things to the plane.”
“Well, why bother to leave without our things?”
“I thought you might like a pastry. Perhaps some coffee.”
“In a gown? At ten in the morning?”
“We are in France, and we are newly engaged. We may do whatever we like.”
And it was difficult for her to be angry once she was settled with a strong coffee and a pastry, and he could see that it enraged her on a new level. That she could not deny his hospitality.
She never could deny food.
She nibbled at the pastry in a rather delicate manner, which he found amusing, as he knew she was not delicate at all.
“Satisfied?”
“Not by half,” she said, stiffly.
“Now you’re just being spiteful.”
“Perhaps I’m enjoying being spiteful. I’ve had to be nothing but eminently grateful to you for the past eight years, and do you know, it gets very tiring.”
“Yes. I imagine it so much more tiring than the life that you led before.”
“You don’t know anything about the life I led before.”
“I certainly do. Your father was a con man.”
“Yes. Who tangled with the wrong men in France nearly a decade ago. But what else do you know? Where else that I lived? Where I’m from?”
He took a sip of his coffee and stared at her. “Clearly you’re American.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Originally. Though you do speak a great many languages.”
“With great proficiency,” she snapped. “But yes, I was born in America.”
“And where?”
“Ohio.”
He laughed. “Where is Ohio?”
“1997.” She answered it with a straight face, and he did not understand what she meant by that. “It’s in the Midwest,” she said.
“Yes. Flyover states, I hear.”
“A lot of snobbery for a man who was raised in a forest by people who are little better than wolves.”
“They are a lot better than the wolves, darling,” he said, yet again making certain to flash his teeth, hoping she took note of his scars. “The wolves would’ve simply eaten me. And were I a wolf, I would’ve simply eaten you.” But the truth that he in fact had eaten her settled between them heavily.
And desire roared in his gut.
“My mother died when I was four,” she said. “I don’t think we were normal even then. I think my mother helped my father with his scams. But I don’t know for sure. I... My first memory of my father is him telling me to pretend to be lost and crying. He taught me how to pick pockets. He taught me to take advantage of little old ladies. And they never suspected. Because I was small and cute. He taught me to use every asset that I had. To hurt other people.”
Oh, Agnes. He might have been savaged by wolves.
She had been raised by them.
And he wondered if he had not given her enough credit for that. If he had not given enough space to her wounds.
“A sad life.”
“The only life I knew. Until this one.”
It reinforced the fact that he had to send her off on her own.
“You will enjoy a life on your own terms, I think.”
“I don’t know that I will. But I suppose I have to try.”
When the car stopped, he leaned in and pressed his thumb to her lips, then rubbed her lipstick gently. Most of it coming off on his thumb.
“What are you doing?”
“I would like my brother to have to imagine where on my body that lipstick ended up.”
“What does it matter?” she said, her cheeks turning pink.
“It matters a great deal. If I’m to present myself as a man in love, it must be believable. He must believe that this is real. That I am changed. Soft.”
“He never knew you were hard to begin with.”
He had hurt Agnes last night. Not her body, her heart, and he’d seen it. She had already lived with those who had been callous with her.
And it made him want to give her this. So she was not alone in her sharing.
“Do you know what I remember of my life?”
“What?”
“Him. I remember my brother. And how I looked up to him. We played out on the palace lawn all the time. But the forest always fascinated me. I couldn’t turn away from it. Even though I knew it was supposed to be dangerous. Part of me didn’t believe it. I had to wonder why the stories were in place the way that they were. It was as if it was to... Deter people for some reason. And yes, I know. Wolves.”
“Your youngest brother...”
He shrugged. “I never knew him. I don’t mean to be cruel, but I don’t grieve him.”
“Of course not,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
“I understand now. Why they didn’t want us to go in there. They didn’t want us to know. They didn’t want anyone in Liri to know. Those people were almost snuffed out. By a power-mad King who wanted all of the land. By a man who didn’t respect the old ways. The old traditions. That man was my great-grandfather. And it is up to me to make right what was done wrong. Because no one else will. These people are owed their land. They are owed freedom.”
He waited to feel something in connection with that. But he did not.
Instead, he could simply feel the burn of her mouth against his thumb. Feel the red against his skin like a flame.
“And you wish to do that. You feel that strongly about it.”
He felt nothing. But that was a sad state of affairs for most of his life.
It was as if he had left emotion behind along with his title. As if he had left it behind along with his mother and father.
They had left him behind quickly enough. They had been quick to announce his death. He had been informed by Agamemnon when it had happened, and he’d looked it up for himself his first time in Paris. He was not necessary. He was the spare, after all, and there was a reason that those in line for leadership in land ownership were referred to in such a fashion. He had done research on his own disappearance when he had gone off into the world. They had not, it seemed, mourned for long, and why would they. One child could be replaced easily with the next. And so they had done.
It was fate. He had accepted it. He was not mortally wounded by it. In a sense, it was how it must be.
For he had a goal to accomplish, a purpose higher than himself. And it was what mattered.
Not feelings. Those unreliable, unwieldy things that could be counted on for nothing. “It is what I must do,” he repeated.
When the plane landed in Liri, he took her arm. “No sword?”
She looked down at the gown, which fitted to her form perfectly. “Where would I put one?”
“You and I both know that you are resourceful.”
They began to disembark from the plane, moving slowly down the steps. He was aware that there were photographers. He paid them no mind.
“There is one,” she said, tilting her face up toward him. And if he didn’t know any better, he would say that she was madly in love with him. For her face was radiant, her smile wide, and her lipstick smudged just so, as he had designed it. “Strapped just to my inner thigh. If you were to put your hand up my gown and feel me there, you would find it. But you might get more than you bargained for.”
He ground his teeth as her words had what he could only imagine was the desired effect on him. He studied her profile, her flat, curved nose and upturned upper lip, which gave her a regal bearing, her dark, unknowable eyes. She was a con woman, as she had reminded him only yesterday. Raised to lie, to fit in wherever she had to, to accomplish whatever she must by whatever means necessary. And what an actress. It was impossible to say what she wish
ed him to glean from her words. Perhaps it was a threat. Perhaps she intended to take control as she had tried to do last night, by ensuring that he was aroused.
Sadly for her he did not exist in shame or regret. He only lived for the next moment.
“Let us both hope you’ve no need of it.”
“But if there is need, I will use it. Remember, I am free now.” She looked at him, her eyes liquid.
“As you wish, Agnes. For if one tightens their hand with too much force around a fragile thing, it shall shatter, and then what good does it do anyone? Except ensuring that no one else can have it.”
“I’m not fragile,” she whispered.
“I think you are more fragile than you believe.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You shattered beneath my mouth easily enough.”
Heat smoldered between them, burned in his veins. The memory pulsed between them and made a liar of him. For he was not living in the present moment, but in the moment when he’d touched her not like a teacher, but like a lover.
“I cannot wait to be free of you.”
But she only smiled for all to see, and only he knew that she was venomous with him.
They got into a car, which drove them along the winding road that led to the palace. That led close to their home. The edge of the Dark Wood. They did not come and go from the country through this way. Rather they left out the other side of the forest, and used airports of the neighboring nation, typically.
A habit. For Lazarus had been in hiding from Liri for a very long time, and moreover, there was such an animosity between his people and the Lirians... An animosity the Lirians did not even know existed.
At least, as far as he could remember. He had been such a small boy when he had wandered away from home. Then he had not known that it would be the last time he would see the palace. That it would be the last time he would see his brother.
His mother and father...
The castle.
The memories that washed over him were strange and stretched. Not something that a person could make sense of. Not easily. For they were lost somewhere in the mists of childhood, twisted by that lens, and once again warped by the reality that was now before him. The way that he saw the place as a man well into his thirties.
More than thirty years he’d been away from home.