Page 91 of The Robin on the Oak Throne

Graves pursed his lips. “What else did he say?”

“He thinks Cillian Ryan is dead. Sometime in the Monster War.”

“Hmm,” he responded skeptically.

“I guess he drained a sacred tree and that’s how he eluded Lorcan all this time. Sansa-something.”

“Sansara?” Graves asked with wide eyes. “Fucking hell.”

“That’s the one.”

“I knew he was pathological, but not that bad. No wonder the spell lasted so long on you, if it was fueled by Sansara.”

“Lorcan said that, too.”

Graves’s face turned dark. He clearly disapproved of the comparison. “Is that all he knew?”

She told him the rest. About his wife and her parents and the triskel. Graves looked unsurprised. He’d known, then, that Lorcan had been part of a triskel. For some reason, that didn’t seem to be what he wanted to discuss.

“Did he ask for anything else?” His voice was pitched low, his body leaning toward her like she was the earth and he her moon.

“Well, he asked me to stay. To move me and Gen onto the property.”

“Of course he did.”

“Which is why you kissed me,” she breathed as he loomed over her. She tipped her chin up to meet him.

“Is that so?”

“You knew he’d ask.”

“I know what he wants,” Graves said with finality. His hands moved to her hips, finding the hem of her black shirt and running it through his fingers.

“He offered me the world,” she teased. “Training and magic and a family and a throne.”

“How could you deny him?” He toed her feet farther apart, spreading her legs wide and settling between them.

“Who says I denied him?” she breathed. She put her hands on his chest. The heat of him rippled through her. Just a breath away from tipping over the edge.

“Well, if I knew all I had to do was offer you the entire world to get you to accept,” he began, his hands slipping to her ass and lifting her effortlessly onto the table, “maybe I would have done so earlier.”

“Are you offering me the world?”

“And the stars.”

“All of the ones in the night sky?”

“We’ll see if I can get you to see them all,” he said before pushing her flat on her back.

Her heart thudded noisily in her chest as he loomed over her exposed body, ripe for the taking. His eyes crawled over her chest to the sliver of pale skin exposed at her navel. Down her toned legs in fitted leggings to the black boots. Her wren necklace beat its wings against her breastbone. A thrum calling like to like.

She was the wren to the Holly King. In so many ways—magical and metaphysical and spiritual—wrens belonged to the winter god. A physical manifestation of his power. A hope for spring in a long winter. The source of his own destruction. Because after the winter solstice, their connection ebbed and he lost his power to make way for spring. The changing of the seasons, born in this pair of men and monsters.

Which meant at the summer solstice, their connection would grow once more. A little bird power-booster, destined to destroy him.

Even if they were currently out of season, she could feel the power blossom between them. The temperature in the room dipped, the balmy summer weather responding to the anthropomorphic winter at its heart.

Her breath frosted. Graves smiled. “Hello, my wren.”

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