Page 90 of Golden Queen
No one around the table seemed surprised or puzzled by the interaction, so I had to assume they all knew the story of the two times I had managed to put my blade in someone lately. “Neither am I,” I told Aben, feigning innocence. “But trouble seems to find me anyway.”
I caught sight of Io’s expression. It was something close to approval, and as always, it inordinately pleased me to see that look on his face.
It sometimes felt as though his every expression bolstered me in some way, as though he was the metric by which I could grade myself. Some deeper part of me warned me that wasn’t necessarily a healthy attachment to form with him.
He was only visiting. He would go home soon—return to the doubtlessly gorgeous women of Nightfall—to the ones I was certain regularly occupied his bed in Dragon’s Reach.
The thoughts sent something very close to panic through me, and it was suddenly a struggle to concentrate on the people around me.
It didn't take long for that panic to subside, though. They were all so cheerful that I was shortly drawn into an intense conversation about pirates that had once roamed the Sorn Sea and used the clear, blue waters of Scaldwater Bay as their base.
Cairl, one of the Radune Councilors, swore she’d once seen a ghostly pirate ship when she visited the waters surrounding Elysium as a child. “They sailed right out of the mists, black sails snapping above a crew of living skeletons manning the rigging. They had a siren lashed to the bow—her mouth stuffed with rags so she couldn’t sing her deadly song. My father clapped his hands over my ears just to be sure, though. And he didn’t let go until the ship was out of sight and we were well away from the mist. That was the last time my merchant father ever put-to in the Sorn, that's for certain. He ran a route all the way around the Point of Lithaway, facing summer storms and those terrible big birds rather than chance seeing those dead men again.”
I hardly dared believe Cairl, but if it was true that her father preferred the treacherous journey around the Point of Lithaway to the calm waters of the Sorn, perhaps theyhadseen something on the waves that day.
The boisterous discussion went on from there, and I lost track of how many times the topic of conversation changed. None of them seemed even slightly aware of the class system or inclined to be careful of what they said to each other.
We laughed, ate, and drank the best wine that Windemere had to offer, and the dinner was more enjoyable than my mind had been capable of imagining one could be.
Io sat by my side, his hand by turns clasped around my thigh, or lightly stroking the outside of my shoulder with his arm draped around the back of my chair.
We were there together. That was obvious to anyone who cared to look. The way he looked at me, the way he touched me, the way he stayedattentive to my wants in the same way Juriae did for Cazmiri, made it apparent that we were embroiled in some sort of entanglement.
Yet, no one at the table seemed to give it a second thought. No one stood up and announced that we had no right to be together: he was fae, and I was the human queen of a kingdom that would never accept him. No one questioned us about the future that we both knew we didn't have.
They just let us be together, including me in their conversations as though I was an old friend who had come back after a long absence—one who had a little catching up to do, but who was accepted by rote.
And so, the evening in Juriae's manor gave me a glimpse, however heartbreaking it would end up being, of what a life at Amon Aldur's side would look like. A glimpse of what being his other half, as Cazmiri was to Juriae, would feel like.
When he took me upstairs to his rooms after dinner, that glimpse—that beautiful vignette of life—was perfected into something much more. Something that I knew would eventually be so sharp that it would cut me into ribbons, leaving my heart shredded in his wake.
Buteventuallywas later, and he was standing in front of me with that wicked smile on his gorgeous face.
As he closed the door behind us, I found it quite easy to throw out the whole concept oflaterand all the things that would come witheventuallyand leave them on the other side of the door.
He offered me first dibs on the bath, and I found a neat pile of clothing Cazmiri left for me in the bathing chamber. She hadn’t left them in the room I'd been taken to when I was injured, as though she already knew I would come to his chambers.
I expected to feel embarrassment about that, but there was only some strange feeling of satisfaction. They all knew that I meant something to him—that he was keeping me close to him because it mattered to him to have me around.
Stupid, reckless, fool, I chastised myself again, even as I knew it was insincere. I might know in my heart there was no future for us, but I would wring every drop of happiness from these moments with him while I could.
So I bathed in the huge marble tub, half expecting him to come and join me.
But he did not. So after I dried off, I walked out of the bathing chamber without bothering to dress or even wrap a towel around myself.
He was seated at a little desk across the room. At the sound of my footsteps, he looked up. His pen stopped scratching across the page as he stared, his eyes tracking me across the room.
"What were they thinking?" he asked as he set down his pen and straightened in the chair.
"Who?" I asked, coming to perch on the edge of his desk, feeling not even a sliver of shame or embarrassment.
"The gods," he said, eyes sliding up and down the length of me.
He rose, rounding the desk to stand in front of me, leaning down and running a hand down the center of my chest. "What were the gods thinking when they gave all this to one person?"
I laughed, but he frowned. "I'm deadly serious, Sera. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."
He held my face in his hand, running his thumb over my lips. And then he slid his hands lower, down my neck, across my breasts, and over my belly. "And your body is a fucking masterpiece."
