Page 140 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

He threw a heavy muscled leg over my own, completely trapping me. “You will like being held by me. Now stop squirming. If your arse touches my cock one more time, I will tie you to the post, have you ride my face and not let you come. Even if you beg.”

Sigh. This was going to be one long, tortuous night. The back of my hand brushed an indent in his arm before I decided to trace my fingers over it. As always, his skin pimpled with gooseflesh and his chest caved with uneven breaths. And it made me smile with victory—I could render the Night King breathless with one touch. “How did you get that one?”

He told me about it. He told me all about the other dozen or so I asked. Detail after detail, little important bits that I’d never think to pay attention to in my surroundings. All of his scars taught me a lot about him. How good his memory was, how many he had, how much attention he paid to everyone and everything, how he never blamed anyone else for them but himself. He told me about them till I fell asleep in his hold. Till I was sated with warmth, comfort and peace.

Chapter nineteen

Bimaris

Kilian

I stirred awake. The bed beside me was empty and a clattering noise was doing my head in.

Pen paced back and forth between the chamber rooms in a hurry. She skidded to a stop and stared wide eyed at me. “You’re awake.” Immediately, shadows of anxiousness and fear burst from her.

“Was that not your intention with that god awful noise?”

“Ah,” she said, raising a duster in the air for me to see. “Didn’t realise I was being that loud.” She bowed at the waist. “Apologies, Your Majesty.”

Pushing from the bed, I picked up my discarded shirt from the bed-end stool. “She is not here, Penelope. Your head remains safe if you keep calling me Kilian. And by the way, where is she?”

Her eyes dropped to the ground, and she made to leave the room.

I faded in front of her. “Penelope, where is my wife?”

She covered her face with her hands and muttered something unintelligible that made me grow more anxious by the second.

“Penelope,” I growled.

She lifted her stare at me and said, “Isjord. She went back to Isjord.”

I let out a little laugh. Last night must have made me extremely dizzy. “Repeat that again for me.”

She took a few small steps back. “Mal helped her too. It wasn’t just me and Visha.”

That was it, today I would kill my brother.

Four confused individuals stood before Visha, a sleepy Mal and a very guilty looking Penelope, in the meeting room of Taren.

“One of you speak,” Cai growled, hitting a fist on the table. “Now.”

Visha blinked boredly. “This morning she got Sebastian to take her back to Isjord in pretence of being your captive,” she said, pointing to me.

Tipping my head to my brother, I asked, “How are you involved in this?”

He yawned. “She wanted me to take her to our prisons on the Moor Isles and let the Isjordian soldiers pass through to her easily.”

He would be dead by the end of this meeting.

“Silas will buy none of that,” Alaric said, shaking his head as shadows of worry and anxiousness clouded him.

Visha placed a small flask containing a clear liquid on the table. “Liquid cuts. She took it. And she looked pretty believable to me.”

Liquid cuts. Liquid cuts? She was going to be the end of my patience.

“Visha,” I said calmly, taking the flask and crushing it in my fist. “Are you telling me you gave my wife a torture elixir so she could look—what did you say again—believable?”

Nia put a hand on my shoulder. “Kilian, calm down,” she said, pointing her chin around us. The place was crackling with bursts of dark, crawling and extending out of me.