Page 156 of The Dark Lord's Guide to Dating

With a dry laugh, he scooped me off my feet and threw me over his shoulder in one fluid motion. “Smartass.”

“Put me down!” I yelled, half-laughing and half-annoyed. I swatted at his back with my good arm, feeling infinitely scandalized at being hauled around like a sack of grain.

He strode out into the corridor, ignoring my protests. A startled servant pressed herself against the wall, eyes wide at the sight of her Dark Lord carting his wife around at dawn. Heat flared in my cheeks. Kazimir gripped my thighs firmly, and dammit, my body reacted with a traitorous surge of desire.

“Are you taking me upstairs to ravish me?” I tried for indignant but sounded more enthralled.

He chuckled, shifting me higher. “Tempting.” The quiet rumble in his voice promised that it was definitely on his mind.

At last, we reached our chambers, the sky outside just turning pale. He paused, clearly debating between continuing his barbarian act or showing mercy. With a theatrical sigh, he set me down on the edge of our bed with surprising gentleness.

He fetched a fresh glass of water and a small vial, placing them on the bedside table. “Drink that if you have lingering pain. We’ll try this again tomorrow night—with fewer constructs and no magic.”

“Lucky me,” I said wryly. Then my gaze flicked up to his. “Kazimir?”

“Yes?”

“When you said you didn’t regret taking me... did you mean it?”

He paused in the middle of pulling on a fresh shirt, something unguarded flickering across his face. “I did.”

“Even... with war looming and no Heirloom to use?”

He met my eyes. “Even then.”

After he left, exhaustion tugged at me, but so did a quiet sense of affirmation. I lay back on the bed, smiling faintly in the dim light.

62

AVOID DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS (WHILE SHARKS CIRCLE)

KAZIMIR

The war room settled into near-silence after midnight, save for the whisper of candle flames and Griffin’s tired muttering. We’d retreated there as soon as the workers left, craving the dead-of-night quiet for unholy paperwork and half-finished enchantment diagrams. I hovered over the table, scanning Griffin’s meticulously sketched runes—complex bindings and arcs that hurt my eyes if I stared too long.

“This stabilization matrix should work,” Griffin said, tapping the parchment with an ink-stained finger. “In theory.”

My eyebrow twitched. “I loathe that phrase.”

One of his lenses had cracked earlier in the week, giving him a permanently disgruntled look. “You’re asking me to fix an artifact that’s never been broken, using an untested method to ensure it doesn’t explode and annihilate half the Western Realms. So yes, ‘in theory’ is the best I can promise.”

I bit down the urge to snap and examined the schematic again. It appeared elegant—spells layered in interlocking patterns, designed to feed the Heirloom’s unstable magic back into itself.

“How long until you can test it?”

“Two or three days,” he replied.

I ran a finger over the drawn runes, half convinced we were all courting catastrophe. “And it won’t interfere with the Heirloom’s function?”

He gave a beleaguered sigh. “I can’t know until the enchantment is finished and tested properly… which I can’t do if you keep hounding me. My lord.”

I opened my mouth for a suitably domineering retort, but the door swung open before I could deliver it. Arabella stepped inside, wearing my robe over a thin nightgown. Her hair spilled down her shoulders, and that single sight twisted something possessive deep in my gut.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, voice soft.

My chest tightened. Over the last week, I’d buried myself in war plans and enchantment details, hoping to keep my mind off her and her effect on me. We still trained and ate together, but outside that, our interactions were tempered by the presence of others. It seemed wise, considering the circumstances.

Griffin cleared his throat. “Perhapsss?—”

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