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I hummed. “No, I believe I’ll hang on to them. Just in case your stubbornness gets in the way of my will again.”
“Either you destroy those petals, or you’ll wake up one night roped to the bed.”
“Oooh.” I winked. “I might like that.”
Alisdair snorted. One look at each other, and we burst out laughing—a loud, cleansing, raucous laugh that let me know... I wouldn’t need those petals again.
“I’M PARTIAL TO TOFFEE.”
I bit my lip hard, holding back a grin by the actual skin of my teeth.
“I’ve read all the early works of Garban Wordweaver.”
Picking up my rune instruction book, I crossed the length of the library, returning it to its proper place.
I didn’t spend much time in the library, and whenever I crossed its threshold, I regretted that. It was such a calm, quiet place. Cold, yes, but filled with warm, squashy armchairs andsweeping ceiling-high stacks that encouraged me to stay. Simply shut myself inside and keep out the world.
Alisdair followed, trailing me across the shining, marble floors. “I was born with a full set of teeth.”
I broke, a giggle bursting free. “I’m almost certain you’re making all of these up.”
He shrugged, leaning against the stacks. “You’d have to prove that, my queen, but in the meantime, I expect you to keep with the terms of our deal.”
“A deal you’ve taken to with vigor,” I replied, brow high.
“Is that a complaint? I could always be less... vigorous.”
I shivered.Mother Meya strike you down if you dare.
Aeris was right. There was no moving forward with Alisdair while he treated me like a toy, a duty, or a bunch of fuckable holes. He had to be vulnerable, and she was correct to put that obvious notion in my head.
But I was right too.
If he was going to fall in love with me, then I had to be me. I didn’t dance, or flirt, or hand out clumsy compliments. I gave one warning, then I acted.
Like the single warning I gave to recruiters, telling them to keep their notices off our door or receive a face full of soiled cloths. Like the single warning I gave to the bullies chasing Riordan, telling them to back off, or I’d do to them everything they did to him. They walked off laughing, but then came and beat him the next day—breaking his nose, wrist, giving him a concussion, and bruising him all over.
Kahir I kicked down the stairs. For Brenden I lay in wait outside his favorite war wife’s house, hit him with a brick when he rounded the corner, then stomped him until he cried and wailed for me to stop. Conri got his hands on a coudarian crystal and taunted me with all the ways he’d tear me inside out if I tried attacking him. I took the crystal off him while he was passed outdrunk at his usual table at his usual pub, then broke the whole arm and smashed his face on the bar table for my trouble. I broke his nose and three teeth.
I may not have been so brutal if not for the reason they chased and beat up Riordan. It was because my friend intervened and chased them off when the three filthy kakkas cornered Meliora in an alley and tried to rape her.
And then there was Kirwan, and the second and last time he struck my mother. The second because I warned him after the first that if he ever hit her again, I’d kill him.
He laughed at me, naturally. A thin waif of a thirteen-year-old girl against the king’s advisor, the hero of the battlefield, and the heir to House Dawnbreaker? I wasn’t a threat.
And then, months later, he hit her again. That evening, I walked into the deepest part of the woods where the plants not meant for the sun and light grew. I picked something my mama warned me never to eat, snuck into his grand manor through an open servant’s window, and slipped it in his midnight cordial while he slept next to his unsuspecting wife.
He was on death’s door for weeks. It wasn’t thought he would make it. After he recovered, he returned to my mother’s house with a look in his eyes like he knew what I’d done. But he never accused me, and he never hit her again.
The truth of me was very simple. I never let anything—size, power, position, magic, or threat—get in the way of protecting the people I loved. Alisdair and his stubbornness was in the way, so I felled him like an oak tree—
—and what an amazing decision that was.
Alisdair took to blowjobs with the expected gusto, and he wanted more. All the more.
As good as the sex was before when he catered to my pleasure, it somehow became three times more incredible. I ranout of my secondhand sexual knowledge pretty quickly, but that didn’t stop us from getting creative.
There was no other word for it but that we were havingfunnow. Our bedchamber was filled with teasing, laughter, fevered moans, and conversation. Alisdair told me of his favorite books and music. We talked of the beautiful, kind woman who raised him and took in his brother, Bradach.
