by Cege Smith
She cleared her throat, refusing to show him her embarrassment. “I think I can control myself.”
Staring deep into the fire, Angeline tried to forget what the rustling movements behind her meant. She had an entire world to worry about, and suddenly all she could think about was the half-naked man behind her. Her father wouldn’t approve. She was betrothed to another. And yet Connor filled her thoughts.
Everything about them was wrong. Perhaps that’s why it was so difficult to fight the fact that every minute with him made her feel like she was complete for the first time in her life. It was wholly unfair. Once she thought that she felt this way toward Malin, but that immature crush paled in comparison to what she felt for Connor. She had seen both sides of life and death since she met him, and yet he was her constant companion. He followed through with his promise of fealty and loyalty. He professed his love for her, but he was too much of a gentleman still to act on it.
It was that thought that pushed Angeline to her feet. Dawn was only a few hours away. She still needed a plan for manipulating Theodora into a meeting with Alron. She also felt the pull of her responsibilities back in Brebackerin. Her wedding ceremony was just a day away now, and she knew that if she did marry Malin, Connor would be forever out of her reach.
Her chin moved slowly to gaze over her shoulder as her eyes swept to the scene behind her. Her breath caught in her throat. Connor stood undressed from the waist up in front of the water basin. She had never seen a man with his shirt off before.
He wiped the water from his face with a towel. She could see the droplets hanging from the ends of his hair as they dripped almost casually to the floor. The muscles of his back flexed and rippled with his movements, and her mouth went dry watching the interplay with the rest of his shoulders and arms. His physique was entrancing.
Then she saw a small black mark on one of his shoulders and she frowned. She had seen that symbol somewhere before, but she couldn’t remember where. Without even thinking, she crossed the room and reached her fingers out to touch it. Her fingertips barely grazed his cool skin when Connor whirled around. She found herself looking up into his piercing green eyes. There were questions there. She wasn’t sure that she knew the right answers, but she did know the right answer for now.
She let her hand descend again, but more slowly this time until it rested on his chest. The muscle felt like stone beneath the palm of her hand. She couldn’t stop the gasp from escaping her lips.
Connor caught her hand and began to push it away. “You should go back to the fire.” His tone was twisted thick with emotion.
He was right. She should go back to the fire. But she didn’t want to. In a few hours, she would once again belong to her people. In the blink of an eye, she would be married. But none of those things were important enough to stop her right then. None of that mattered.
“I don’t want to,” she said with a faint scowl. He didn’t tell her what to do. She was his queen. She pushed against his hand, and was rewarded when he didn’t resist the return of her hand to his chest. Her other hand joined it, and she allowed her fingertips to skim his skin.
Connor’s eyes closed, and he uttered a moan, which thrilled Angeline to her core. She was completely inexperienced in the ways of passion, but there was something about Connor that broke through any shyness or uncertainty. Maybe it was because every time he looked at her, it was as if he thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Connor’s hands came up and gripped her shoulders. “Are you cold?”
Angeline shook her head. “Anything but,” she whispered. She met his eyes again. “Are you going to make your queen beg?”
His head lowered, and his lips sought hers. She returned his kiss eagerly. No longer caring about her wantonness, she pressed her body against his delighting in the places where his hard edges met her softness. She wrapped her arms around his waist. His hands moved to her face, and she thought that he might try to devour her then. There was nothing gentle about his lips. He wanted something far more powerful than blood it seemed, and she understood because she felt the same hunger.
He pulled away only once, but she didn’t let go. “If you say anything about what we shouldn’t be doing, I’ll break you in half,” she teasingly threatened. “Don’t forget, I’m stronger than you are.”
He hesitated only a moment before leading her to the edge of the bed. She found out then that she didn’t need to be the stronger one. Connor showed her that the ultimate pleasure existed in complete surrender.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Malin walked as quickly as he could without running. He was the Chief Advisor, a position second only to the Queen herself, and it wouldn’t do if anyone saw him running through the palace. That would cause a panic. The last thing he needed was more panic.
But even as he approached the courtyard directly below the turret in the west wing, he heard the shrill voices. He felt the tension filled air before he saw the actual gathering of nobles. They all stared upwards. The women were wringing their hands even as they dabbed hand linens at the corner of their eyes. The men appeared to be in shock, trying to comfort the women around them while never taking their eyes off the spectacle above them.
Malin wasn’t sure what to expect, but as he stepped into the courtyard and finally had a clear view of the top of the turret, he found that he wanted to rip his hair out. Sophia stood with her back to the courtyard, and as far as he could tell, her feet were on the very edge of the stone wall of the small balcony. Her arms splayed wide to either side of her body. She didn’t move, but appeared to be almost a statue.
He could see the guards gathered on the walkway a distance on either side of the turret room. If he had to guess, he figured Sophia had barricaded the door. Then a nobleman from one of the minor houses happened to glance around and caught sight of Malin.
“Chief Advisor!” the man strode toward him. “What is happening with the Queen? Why would she do this?”
Moments later he was surrounded by the nobles. All of them talked over each other to the point where he could hear nothing but an incoherent babble of voices.
“Enough!” Malin’s voice rose slightly above normal. He wondered what motivation Sophia had for causing the uproar. She was a vampire, and he knew that the fall from the turret wouldn’t kill her. If she jumped and crashed into the hard stone pavement of the courtyard, yet survived, everyone would know that something was horribly wrong. He couldn’t let her ruin everything. Angeline trusted him to keep Brebackerin in order during her absence. He couldn’t let her down.
He went with the first semi-plausible explanation that came to mind. “The Queen was a sleepwalker in her youth. Please, keep your voices down. I will go up and get her down. You must keep quiet so we don’t wake her. That could have disastrous consequences.”
In any other situation, he would have been more than amused by the fact that he had finally found a way to quiet a pack of nobles in less than a minute. But in this situation, he needed to keep them quiet so that he could think. Malin shushed the crowd again, even though he thought he could hear a pin drop. He made his way to the doorway that opened to the stairway that would deposit him at the top directly outside of the door that led to the inner turret chamber.
As he climbed, his fingers skimmed inside his jacket to the key resting in a hidden inner pocket. His duties as the Chief Advisor took him all over the palace at all hours of the day and night. There was no place that was off-limits to him. As such, he was the only person outside of the reigning sovereign that had a master key to every room of the palace. He guessed that Sophia knew that fact.
Reaching the last few stairs, he paused to gather his thoughts for a moment. He needed to find out what Sophia’s angle was, and the only way to do that was to get her to trust him. This was a girl who had been traded like a piece of livestock. She endured two hundred years as the bride of her father’s worst enemy. She had been turned into a creature she was raised to fear and loathe, and as a f
inal insult, she birthed one of them from her own womb. It was a miracle she retained any sanity at all.
If Malin was to guess, he thought that channeling all of her energy into seeking a way to gain revenge on her former family was what kept her mind together and kept her alive. His life’s work depended on his ability to absorb everything he knew about someone so that he could manipulate them quickly and easily to his will without them have any idea of what he was doing. He could quickly switch between charming to commanding and back again, and he knew exactly how far to push to get someone to crumble. It was a game he had been born to play, and he played it exceedingly well. Or at least, he had until Angeline Robart walked back into his life inside the deserted palace in Craven after her kidnapping.
Pale, yet stunning, she looked every inch the queen that she had been raised to be. It didn’t matter that she had come face first with an enemy that was supposed to be dead. It didn’t matter that she had been turned into a creature that hadn’t walked the face of Altera in three hundred years. She listened to her options, considered them, and chose the one that would put her back on the throne. He had to admire her tenacity and strength of will. Just like that, Malin’s heart was lost.
That was why he had to control the rage he felt at the imposter who threatened to damage Angeline’s image. She deserved the chance to rule, and he was the one who had been naïve to think that he could ever do the job better. He was cunning, ruthless, and manipulative, but she was a Queen. To lead was in her blood. Anyone could see it.
He had to find a way to deal with Sophia. He emerged into the moonlight on the stone walkway that crisscrossed the top of the palace walls. Relief crossed the faces of the guards when they recognized him.
“Chief Advisor. The Queen has locked herself inside. She yelled that she would throw herself off the wall if we came any closer,” the man closest said to him. “What’s happening?”
“I think the Queen is having a waking nightmare,” Malin said, continuing the story that he had devised in the courtyard. “She’s sleepwalking. It is important that you don’t do anything else to startle her.”
The guards nodded with wide eyes.
Malin pulled the master key from his pocket. He gently tried the knob and found that, as the guard said, it was indeed locked. Then he slipped the key into the lock and turned it softly. He winced at the clicking noise, which seemed to reverberate against the walls. Then he realized that it was silly to try to sneak up on Sophia. She would be expecting him. Yet to keep up appearances with the guards, he raised a finger to his lips before pushing the door open a crack and slipping inside.
He closed the door behind him and relocked the door. Then he faced the woman standing on the edge of the balcony wall across the room. In the moonlight, with her gown seeming to float around her in the gentle breeze, she looked like some kind of exotic bird who would fly away at any moment. But her violet eyes were open and locked on Malin.
Malin hated seeing her wearing Angeline’s face, but he understood it was necessary. If she revealed her true self, there would be an even worse turn of events to have to deal with.
“It’s about time,” Sophia said. Her toneless voice told him nothing of her mood. “It feels like I’ve been waiting here for hours.”
Malin took only one step forward. He wanted to be away from the door in case one of the guards decided to be brave enough to eavesdrop. “Well, here I am. What is it you require?”
“How is your hand?” The corner of Sophia’s mouth curled even as she asked the question.
It was a subtle reminder that she could physically hurt him again if she wanted to. Malin unwound the length of fabric covering his hand and dropped it onto the floor. Then he held it up as if inspecting it himself. He flexed his fingers out and then clamped them together in a tight fist before letting it go again. Then he looked back at her. “Never better. It is kind of you to ask.”
It was the first time that he could recall seeing Sophia surprised. That pleased him because it told him that she had underestimated him. That was a very stupid thing to do.
“Someday soon you will have to tell me the source of your miraculous healing abilities,” she said.
“If you come down from that wall, I will tell you now,” Malin said. “Come, come now. Surely you’ve gotten your thrill of the melodramatic out of your system. You are the center of the court’s attention.”
“All’s everyone was talking about was Lord Redley’s murder. That was yesterday. Today is today. They should be talking about me, but instead we’re canceling the Ascension Tournament, and there’s even talk that people think we should cancel the wedding! Elvry didn’t used to be so sloppy in her dealings. That Connor Radwin must have distracted her.”
Malin filed away in his memory everything that Sophia was saying. There were so many questions he had, not the least of which was how Sophia faked her death, and where she had been for the last hundred years. But he couldn’t rush the conversation. He had to let Sophia think that she was in control. So he waited. He was a patient man.
“We can’t cancel the royal wedding. Everybody needs to think that you and I are perfectly in love,” Sophia said with a slightly mocking tone.
Malin began to wonder if Sophia’s hold on reality was blurring with the illusion of the role that she had been inadvertently asked to play.
“There are no plans to cancel the wedding,” Malin said. The wedding was scheduled for noon the following day, and his true bride was out of reach indefinitely.
Marrying Angeline would make him the happiest man in Altera. He couldn’t risk letting the idea of having Angeline on his arm as his wife forever distract him. He would use the rest of their lives together proving to her that she could trust him.
The containment of Sophia’s madness was the first step. “The people need the distraction of a positive and joyful event,” he said.
That was true. Although they had so far managed to hide the fact that four vampires had been killed inside the city walls, it was only a matter of time before the truth came out. A royal wedding and Angeline’s leadership would be a beacon of light and hope that the threat had no teeth.
Sophia dropped her arms to her sides and stepped gingerly down onto the balcony floor. Malin could practically hear the collective sigh of relief from the crowd gathered in the courtyard below.
“I will not put up with my court being distracted,” Sophia said. “They should be fawning all over me, falling over themselves in simpering piles of flattery to gain my favor. The guards should look on me with adoration and love whenever I pass by. I am their Queen.”
“You threatened to swan dive off of the highest wall in the castle because you felt…ignored?” Malin was incredulous.
“I wasn’t going to jump,” Sophia said, rolling her eyes. “I never said anything about jumping. I was enjoying the breeze. It was so stuffy in here.”
It seemed too simplistic to be true, but then Malin remembered that he was dealing with a woman whose mind had been splintered apart. “Then there was clearly a misunderstanding,” he replied smoothly. “I hope you understand that your actions have caused some confusion. I told them that you were having a waking nightmare.”
“Sleepwalking?” Sophia threw back her head and laughed. Then her expression grew serious. “I feel like I’ve been in a living nightmare for three hundred years.”
“Sophia, I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Malin said. “The news of my sister’s death was startling, and it was a great shock to hear that you were alive.” He had to choose his words carefully. It appeared to be working as Sophia scooted closer to him. “My ancestor recorded your death during one of his annual pilgrimages to the coven.”
Sophia’s eyes narrowed. “What fun it was to let Alron believe that death could still visit someone of his kind. But as soon as I was free I ran. I ran like the wind.”
Sophia spun around in a circle as Malin watched frantically trying to assess what to do next. He had planned fo
r cunning. He had thought through the manipulation required for engaging with a devious mind. But madness was a different matter altogether.
Inside madness, there was no linear logic at all. That meant that Sophia was wildly unpredictable and would require constant monitoring. It also meant that in order to show her that he understood her, he would have to step into the madness himself.
He bowed stiffly at his waist and then held out his hand. “A dance to your freedom, m’lady?”
Sophia paused, and he wondered for a moment if he had miscalculated. Then she giggled and dropped a slight curtsey. “Wonderful idea, dear sir.” She slipped her hand into his, and then Malin pulled her into his arms and began to dance to music that only Sophia could hear.
CHAPTER NINE
Angeline didn’t want to return to the real world. If given her way, she would stay in Connor’s embrace and forget that there was any reason at all that they could not be together forever. For those stolen moments, everything was simple. Everything was right. No one else existed.
All too soon though, she felt the pressure of the forward march of time. It wouldn’t be long now until she was called to meet with the Clan council again, and this time, she had a feeling that she would be the one to walk away in chains if she didn’t play her cards right. Theodora would be looking for any opportunity to discredit her. She couldn’t lose focus for a moment.
As she watched Connor pulling on his shirt, her eyes found the strange marking on his shoulder again.
“What is that on your shoulder blade?” she asked. “It looks familiar.”
Connor finished buttoning the front of his shirt before leaning down to kiss her forehead softly. “It is something that I’d like to forget. It doesn’t matter.”