Before she could overthink it and ruin everything, she leaned in and pressed her mouth to his. Random stiffened and drew back, and heat flushed her cheeks.
“Shit. I’m sorry, I should have asked first.” Just because she found kissing him relaxing didn’t mean he felt the same way.
“I’m not complaining, love,” he said slowly. “I’m just confused.”
“You said a well-placed parking lot kiss could sell a fake date.” Hadn’t that been the entire point of “practicing” earlier? Or, as she remembered it, him torturing her. “We’re in a parking lot.”
“I don’t think—” He cut off, shook his head. “Never mind. You’re absolutely right. But there’s a proper way to do this.”
His hands settled on her waist and he pushed her gently back against the car, his body covering hers as he leaned in and claimed her mouth. She yielded to him, closed her eyes and slid her arms around him as their tongues brushed.
He might not be any more experienced at the official dating part than she was, but he had plenty of experience in other areas, and goddess, he could kiss. His hands traveled up her back, raising gooseflesh in their wake. As thin as the fabric of the dress was, he might as well have been touching her bare skin. She melted against him, all of her tension releasing as she lost herself in the taste of him.
To her left, a woman coughed disapprovingly. Valkyrie broke the kiss to glare at the woman—she’d just been starting to feel mellow—who turned out to be Jenna DuPont. Jenna made a startled noise, her eyes going wide in astonished recognition. Her husband, who hadn’t bothered looking in Valkyrie’s direction until his wife reacted, did so now. If his wife’s eyes were large, Martin DuPont’s practically took over his face.
“Evening, Mr. And Mrs. DuPont,” Random said with casual politeness. He was still pressed against her, trapping her neatly between him and the car.
Jenna DuPont managed a brittle, “Evening, Mr. Tremayne,” and rushed her husband toward the restaurant.
“Well,” Random said once they were gone, “I’d say we sold the fake date to precisely the right people.” He pulled her away from the car. His hands idly stroked up and down her spine, and she didn’t think he realized he was doing it. Then again, that sort of casual touching was probably second nature to him.
“I guess we should go in, then.” She didn’t want to. She wanted to stand in the circle of his arms forever, to hold on to this one moment in time, where she wasn’t afraid or angry or haunted.
He nodded and stepped away from her, but when his hands left her back, his right trailed down to clasp her left.
“For appearances,” he said, when she looked at their joined hands.
What other reason would there be?
Random wasn’t sure what impulse had stopped him from telling Valkyrie that the parking lot kiss that could sell a fake date usually came at the end of the evening, not the beginning. Maybe it was because it had seemed, for once, like she actually wanted to kiss him, needed to kiss him. Masochist that he was, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from taking what she offered.
He also couldn’t stop his thumb from tracing circles on the back of her hand as they walked into the restaurant. If she decided to point it out, somehow he didn’t think she’d buy that that was for appearance’s sake too. But she didn’t comment on it, and as the hostess led them to their table, she kept his hand. Even when the paths between tables narrowed, not quite wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, and she had to trail her arm behind her to keep hold of him, she didn’t let go.
He knew precisely when people noticed them because Valkyrie stiffened, her already perfect posture going just a little bit straighter, fingers clenching around his. Especially when they passed a table that contained none other than Lauren Hale. Given how the previous night had gone, he decided it was absolutely fine to enjoy the look of shocked outrage on Lauren’s face.
Once they passed her, he didn’t give her another thought. When they reached their own table—a small round affair designed specifically for two—he slid Valkyrie’s chair out for her. As she sat, he leaned over her shoulder and whispered, “It will be fine.”
She gave a small, sharp nod, and he took his seat across from her. He’d barely settled into it when the server appeared.
“Can I get you started with something to drink?”
“Wine?” Random asked Valkyrie. He had a suspicion they were both going to need it.
“Goddess yes,” she answered, enthusiastically enough that the server’s eyebrows shot up. He handed them each a long, slender wine menu.
Random could tell, by the growing combination of panic and irritation in Valkyrie’s eyes, that she had no idea what to make of it. As long as he could remember, she’d never drank. Not until her father disappeared.
He could have cheerfully murdered Elijah Winters had the man been around. Not because he thought everyone should be drinking alcohol left and right, but because the more he thought about it, the more certain he was there wasn’t a facet of Valkyrie’s life the man hadn’t kept iron control over.
For goddess sake, Random was a domestic abuse lawyer. He should have fucking seen it before now. He reminded himself he hadn’t been a domestic abuse lawyer in his teenage years, which was the last time he’d spent any real time around her before her father disappeared. After the man was gone...well, Kyrie hadn’t really been talkative enough for him to put it together until now.
“Should I choose?” he asked. At her nod, he picked a merlot. “It’s basically dessert,” he told her once the waiter left.
“Great.” She sounded hollow. She kept bumping the table and he suspected that beneath it she was twisting the cloth napkin on her lap into knots. The table was intimate enough he could reach beneath it and take her hand. He did, and she stilled. Then she squeezed his hand back tight enough to cut off his circulation.
“Everyone is staring,” she whispered.
“Yes, but it’s surreptitious staring.”
“How does that make it better?”
“It’s supposed to make it easier to ignore.”
“It doesn’t. I can’t do this.”
“You can. You gave a speech to the most stuck-up members of Aspect Society at the Gathering Ball. There were a lot more people staring at you then.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“It was a role. One I was taught how to play. I know what Aspect Society expects of me. I don’t know what role I’m playing here. I don’t know who I am.”
He lifted their joined hands around the side of the table, brought hers to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles.
“You’re a beautiful woman, having dinner with a man who’s absolutely wild about you.” He swallowed, wishing he could leave it there, at the truth, but knowing he couldn’t. “And you’re wild about him. That’s the role you’re playing tonight.”
The server chose that moment to return with the wine.
Valkyrie slipped her hand from Random’s, grabbed the wine glass and took a large swallow, one that made the server’s eyebrows raise almost to his hairline. She didn’t care. Before Random had added that last, That’s the role you’re playing, she could have believed he’d meant the words he’d spoken.
Get your head on straight. He’d given her the role, and if she thought about it like that, it helped. Playing that role wouldn’t be hard, either. Because she was wild about him, and she had complete permission to let it show, this one time. After...after, he’d never need to know it had been real.
She realized the server had been saying something and tuned back in.
“—need more time with the menu?”
Valkyrie scanned the menu—it was select, what she supposed was probably referred to as curated in these types of establishments—so she made quick enough work of it.
“I don’t think that will be necessary.” Goddess, it felt good to have some confidence in her voice again. “He’ll have the vegan mushroom W
ellington, I’ll have the lemon garlic scallops, and we’ll start with the artichoke dip.”
The shock on Random’s face was priceless. The server shot him a questioning glance and Random nodded his confirmation of the order.
“How did you do that?” Random asked.
“What? You think I didn’t know you’re a vegetarian? Except for bacon.” She frowned. “I never could figure that out.”
“I’m a hypocrite,” he said sheepishly. “Bacon is bacon. I shouldn’t, but sometimes I have it. You know, Jace is my best friend and he never figured it out. I had to tell him.”
“Jace’s head is so perpetually stuck in the land of theoretical Aspect equations, fictional characters, and now Siren, that he wouldn’t notice a bulldozer if it was about to flatten him.”
“There were three other vegetarian options on the menu,” he pointed out.
“One had eggplant and one had rosemary, neither of which you like. It was a toss-up between the Wellington and the butternut squash linguine. But you seemed more in a Wellington mood.”
The look he gave her was...she had no idea what it was.
“I, too, find it useful to know things about people,” she said. It sounded better than, I’ve noticed everything you do for a long time. Much better. Much less creepy. She should change the subject.
“You’ve never really explained how your Aspect works.” She’d picked up on the obvious—that it tended to do what he wanted or needed—but often it appeared both more and less specific than that. More specific, more controlled, when he wanted to do something like get through a property ward. Less specific when unintentional things happened, like her horses wandering onto his property. Goddess only knew what had made that happen.
“Are you asking me to explain it now?”
“No.” He had a right to his privacy, and if he’d wanted to explain it, he would have by now. “But sitting here while my mark is fifteen feet away and waiting for things to just work out is not in my nature.”
The DuPonts were seated two tables over. Jenna radiated a stiff disapproval in their general direction—apparently she vehemently disapproved of people making out in parking lots—and Martin kept sneaking glances at Valkyrie like she’d sprouted dragon fangs and was merely waiting for the chance to sink them into his neck. Which, truthfully, wasn’t far off the mark. If nothing else, Valkyrie was pleased she’d clearly ruined their evening.
Random smiled. “You’re getting antsy, is what you’re saying?”
“I’d like to know the plan. Is he going to magically develop a nosebleed or something?”
“Truthfully? I have no idea. But probably not a nosebleed. I can do a lot of things but I can’t bridge over into Life or Death Aspect.”
“Then how am I—”
He reached across the table and took her hand again. She was already entirely too accustomed to him doing so, and her fingers reflexively twined with his.
“What do you want to happen, love?”
“I thought your Aspect was all about what you wanted.”
“Humor me.”
“I just want this to be over. I want to be free.”
His fingers tensed briefly. “Free from what?”
She really had to stop opening her big mouth. “Nothing.” She was grateful, this time, when the server reappeared. He handed Random a card and then retreated.
“Looks like I have to go pay the piper for this reservation,” Random said, waving the card. “Mia wants a word. May I suggest you look longingly in the direction of my disappearance while I’m gone?”
“Don’t push it.”
“Perhaps you could rest your chin in your hand and sigh dreamily?”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
He grinned at her. “I thought you knew. Ridiculous is exactly what I am.” He stood, stopping on his way past to lean down and whisper in her ear, “Try not to look too happy that I’m gone.”
She watched him walk away, because he was a pleasantry to the eyes at all angles, and because it allowed her to observe the DuPonts without giving the appearance of doing so.
When she was nineteen, two years into her work contracting for the Council, she’d come to the conclusion that Martin DuPont was the single most boring man she’d ever encountered. A decade had done nothing to improve him, and it appeared even his wife had given up pretending to be interested in him. The couple didn’t look at each other and they weren’t talking. DuPont’s entire focus was on the steak in front of him, and his wife’s was on noting who else was in the restaurant.
Valkyrie tracked the servers’ paths through the dining area and calculated her odds of tripping one at the right trajectory to send them sprawling into DuPont. It was doable, and she could make it look like an accident on her part, but the odds of the server falling into DuPont with a sharp object were slim.
She took another sip of the wine—it really did taste like dessert—and the velvet smooth liquid was halfway down her throat when Danvers walked in. He wore yet another new face—a younger, more handsome face—but it didn’t matter, now. She’d cataloged the way he carried himself, the mark of his stride, the things an illusion couldn’t quite hide, if one knew where to look.
Her power was a deep rumble in her chest, both a comfort and a warning, as Danvers walked to her table. He took care to make the walk look like the lazy amble of a powerful man taking his time, but Valkyrie saw the stiffness beneath it that hinted at pain. She felt a bone-deep satisfaction to know she had cost him something in their encounter the previous evening.
He sat in the chair across from her. Random’s chair. She wanted to growl at him to get out of it, but she wouldn’t let him goad her into speaking first. She held his gaze, ignored the badly-disguised curiosity of those seated nearby, and took a small sip of wine to steady her nerves.
Danvers tsked in disapproval. “Alcohol muddles the senses.”
Valkyrie swirled the burgundy liquid and took another deliberate sip before she set the glass back down. She chose her reply with care. “Disapproval is hardly your place. After all, you’re not my father.”
The seconds ticked by, one then two, then five, then ten, and she thought either that she’d been wrong, or that he wouldn’t take the bait. Then the corners of his lips curled and he said, “Oh, come now. We both know that isn’t true.”
Fury shot a jolt of adrenaline into her. Its harsh tendrils shuddered through her chest, down her arms to twitch and dance in her fingertips. Her Aspect hummed, begged and demanded to be unleashed.
“You knew,” she gritted out. “You knew Evelyn was pregnant.”
He looked mildly surprised. “Of course I knew. That was the entire point.”
Valkyrie jerked back.
“You never put it together? I thought you would, after Siren brought so much of my work into the light. Evelyn was never special. But she wasn’t a failure, either. She was simply a vessel. Everything I changed in her, I changed to create you.”
Horror churned through her. “No.”
“Oh, yes. The earliest manifestation of Aspect on record? Obliterating all the records for Battle Aspect in your Academy trials? How swiftly your Aspect regenerates? That’s not coincidence, daughter mine.”
“I am not your daughter.”
“But you are. Blood speaks, Valkyrie. It is a shame. You could have been so much more. Given Elijah’s interference, you didn’t have quite the upbringing I’d intended. Still, he did push you, once he saw your potential. A little. Not enough.”
Not enough? The sadistic son of a bitch had broken a quarter of the bones in her body. And that had only been the beginning.
“What is your connection to Elijah? Did you know him? Before Evelyn?” She had been on the verge of putting it together at Savado’s, but the pieces hadn’t quite clicked together for her until just now—the way Danvers talked about Elijah, as if they were familiar, as if they were close. Closer even than a year of holding the man prisoner could make them.
“You might say we were contemporaries, of a sort.” His words held just a trace of amusement. “Before the idiot went and fell in love with Evelyn. Our paths diverged after that.”
Contemporaries. Valkyrie swallowed against the bile that rose in her throat. She clasped opposite hands to opposite wrists, over the internal scars where her chains had been.
“Yes,” he said, noting where her hands had gone, “those were my design, originally. Such beautiful work and that anomaly had to go and destroy it all in a temper tantrum.” He reached for her right wrist.
She snapped her hands back, out of his reach. Her Aspect uncoiled, shadowed the air behind her like the wings of the battlefield Valkyries for which was she was named, power poised to strike.
“Touch me, and you will regret it.” Her voice was loud and clear. Too loud, in the quiet, elegant restaurant, the classical music piped through the room too soft to mask either her words or her fury. Even as well-bred as the establishment’s patrons were, some were no longer bothering to disguise their interest in the goings-on.
“Why are you here?” she asked, softly this time, so it wouldn’t carry to nearby ears.
“To make sure you understand something. Random Tremayne is nothing more than a spoiled playboy who thinks a defect in his Aspect makes him invulnerable. He isn’t. He can’t save you.”
Anger rode her, demanded she explain to Danvers just what would happen to him if he touched a single hair on Random’s head. But if Danvers and Elijah were working together, she couldn’t risk that information getting back to Elijah. Couldn’t risk showing that she cared.
She leaned back against her seat and affected boredom. “Random is a means to an end. Getting what I need” —her gaze flicked pointedly to DuPont before returning to Danvers— “isn’t easy. And with the timeline you’ve put me under, I decided to take advantage of his apparent interest in me.
“All you are doing here is interfering. So get out. Before I decide I’d rather put you on your ass here and now and get Elijah back from you that way.”
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