Page 95 of Prince of Night and Storm
Twenty-Nine
WINE DARK TRUTHS
“What is this?” I ask, gripping my armrests. Idle hands and all that.
“This,” Renaud says, “is dinner.” He leans back in his chair, resting his hand next to his plate. The hand closest to me.
“I can promise you, Prince, that flippancy will get you the opposite of what you want from me. So by all means, continue as you are.”
“You don't know what I want from you.” The hand begins to curl, then relaxes. “I merely sought to ease your tension.”
This casually authoritative male smashed us into submission with a flick of power mere weeks ago.
Pulled two wyverns from the sky with the irritation of a parent chiding a reckless toddler.
Only an hour past his lust scorched me, his fight not to rut me against my will—to an audience. And he wants me to believe he cares about my nerves?
“That implies, however,” he continues in an almost idletone, “that there is something that will get me what I want from you. It’s less diverting to simply ask you your price. So I won’t.”
“You can never meet it.”
“Never, Lady, is far longer than you are currently able to conceive.” His gaze goes almost contemplative. “I’ve learned, in an Old One’s time, that there is no such thing as never.”
Those words chill me. He says the most innocent things, but they aren’t innocent at all.Iam learning that those with true power don’t have to make overt, bloody threats.
The simple ones work far better.
Who is the real Renaud? The lethal warrior, the urbane Prince, the smoldering lover, the feral male in rut, or this glacial, untouchable High Lord?
He’d also been the grave, almost gentle Old One, his quiet warning tinged with regret. . .and resigned yearning.
There are too many of him.
“Death is final,” I say.
He angles his head. “Death is not final. Or I would never have been born.”
But there is another I glimpse, the Other, the leviathan, a monster in the deep of shadowy wings and maelstrom eyes. Every instinct in me whispers to flee.
“Why sit me next to you?”
An invisible rope stretches between us, my demand for answers versus his palpable reluctance to give them to me.
“Why not simply accept your place? My desire to amuse you. Why think about it?” He smiles, brief and thin, as if to say “why start thinking now?”
“Because my place is where I decide. You haven't given methe impression that for all your plans, you're taking what I want into consideration.”
“What,” the word is chipped from a block of stone, “makes you imagine I care what you want?”
Because I would even now be sprawled on the ground, bleeding between my thighs. He pulled back earlier, I admit, and he didn’t have to. Nora said he might, that his restraint is to be feared more than passion that blazes hot, then burns out.
“Any other High Lord would have killed me by now.”
His gaze pales to a whisper of moonlight.
After tonight I will know the moon for the harbinger of monsters it is, and shy from it when full.
“Sweet halfling, I am not any other High Lord. I will not spite myself.”
