Page 118 of The Dark Lord's Guide to Dating

The Heirloom gleaming with hunger. My bloodline thrumming beneath my skin, finally free. The First Hero’s shadow stretching across centuries to touch me.

Kazimir’s grand design reshaping itself around me, around us.

Black roses unfurling in darkness, golden ones withering in sunlight.Blood calling to blood. Magic calling to magic. Darkness to darkness. His runes and my lineage speaking languages neither of us fully understands.

All of it spiraling together, a whirlwind of purpose and chance that I’m caught in, that I’m driving, that I’m becoming.

My father feared my power enough to cage it. Kazimir sees it and wants it unleashed.

There’s more, so muchmore, waiting in the spaces between what I’ve been taught and what I could learn. What he could teach me.

What I could demand he show me. Everything. All of it. Every dark corner, every forbidden text, every midnight ritual.

Power that’s mine by right, by blood, by choice.

Abruptly, I sat up, dislodging Kazimir’s arm and breaking our intimate connection. He stirred, mumbling something unintelligible before rolling onto his back, still asleep.

I wasn’t sure if I’d been thinking or dreaming, but now that it was in my mind, I wanted to tell him. I looked down at my fearsome villain, so at ease in slumber. More of his runes glowedfaintly, and for one reckless instant, I wanted to trace them with my fingertips until he stirred and turned that intense gaze on me again.

Instead, I settled back down beside him and smiled. I’d let the Dark Lord sleep. He’d need all his strength tomorrow.

49

MOVE THE MEETING (BECAUSE SHE ASKED NICELY)

KAZIMIR

“—and that’s when I told him, ‘It’s not necromancy if they’re still breathing when you start.’“

Griffin’s laughter ricocheted off the stone walls. I stabbed my sausage with a fork, feeling a dull throb pound behind my eyes. The last two days had left me gloriously drained and impressively short-tempered. And this weekly breakfast meeting with my advisors felt closer to torture than an actual meal.

Across the table, Sims hunched over a thin obsidian tablet. His finger traced a glowing red script while his lips curved into what passed for a smile on his perpetually pessimistic face.

“What’s that?” Griffin abandoned his breakfast, practically levitating with curiosity as he peered over Sims’s shoulder. “The text is moving!”

Sims didn’t glance up from his reading. “My new Doom Scroll,” he said. “It tracks disasters, deaths, and despair across the realm, in real time. Extremely efficient.”

“Fascinating,” I muttered, jabbing another piece of sausage as if it had personally offended me.

Griffin caught my expression and nudged Sims like they were schoolboys passing notes. “Do you have those readings from the Heirloom?”

Sims put down his Doom Scroll and shuffled the papers beside his plate. “The artifact’s energy signature kept pulsing at irregular intervals through last night. Strangely, with each fluctuation, the resonance appeared to grow a bit stronger. Encouraging news, I’d say.”

I nodded absently. I didn’t need his report, since I’d spent the pre-dawn hours alone in the eastern tower, leaning over the Heirloom while fending off a splitting headache.

To my dismay, the hairline fracture hadwidenedovernight.

My cursory search through ancient texts had provided little insight. Perhaps it was part of some metamorphosis, the artifact transforming before it reached its final form. Or maybe it was cracking because I couldn’t keep my hands off my wife long enough for the damn thing to stabilize.

I also considered the surges in magic when Arabella and I had sex. The war room incident had been wild, uncontrolled... But since then, I’d successfully channeled the more destructive bursts away from the citadel. My rune-carved bones still screamed in protest.

Worth it, though. Painfully, gloriously worth it.

Vex shot me a look over her tea that somehow managed to be both amused and judgmental. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

“I woke up exactly where I intended,” I said, heat flaring through my veins at the memory of Arabella’s warm, naked body pressed against mine. Maybe I needed to conduct a more thorough investigation—purely for research purposes—into exactly how our combined resonance affected the Heirloom during specific activities.

Or perhaps each time I buried myself inside my wife, I was destroying the very artifact I’d spent years searching for.

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