Page 85 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

Snow put a hand on her chest. “I am a pacifist at heart, truly.”

“Must be a small heart.”

“It is,” Snow said with a polite smile, and I feared for Moriko. “But I compensate with cleavage.”

Moriko blinked slow for a moment and then breathed out a long sigh. “Safe journey back. When you are ready to see the Ryuu, let me know.”

“Thank you for letting me stay,” Nia said, clutching Moriko’s arm.

Snow kissed her cheek and threw Moriko a glare before retreating to me.

I extended a hand to her which she took reluctantly. “Don’t fade us between a brick wall.”

“Love, I've never been that injured.”

Chapter thirteen

Invidia

Kilian

Mal stood on a corner of my room as the Medi healer ran a glowing palm over my injuries that hurt and bled like they were fresh. The pain was not as dire as the fact that I was struggling to fade from one place to the other.

“Don’t look so grave, brother. One would think I am weak enough to die from this,” I said.

He didn’t make a sound or blink at all for that matter besides stare at me, but the Medi healer tending me shook her head. “Wouldn’t be so sure, my king. This isn’t like any injury you have sustained before. In my eighty years as a healer, it is the first time I’ve seen something like that. I will send a Magi healer up after I am finished.”

“No need.”

“Send them,” Mal said, all grave and quiet. And oddly sober and clear minded, too.

Someone knocked on my door and I straightened. It was almost night time, but Snow never knocked. And it had not been Snow.

“I heard you were injured,” Nesrin said carefully, glancing around the room before stepping forward.

“Council does not need to bring him fruit baskets and good salutes every time he gets hurt, Nes,” Mal said, annoyed, sprawling on my sofa. “Who even allowed you to enter this side of the castle?” He chuckled in realisation when her shadows blushed from embarrassment. “Don’t tell me you waved some ‘I am a councillor’ bullshit to the guards.”

The councillor’s facade twitched a little and shadows she carefully had forced to hide broke to the surface. Disdain and something else—green almost as vivid as envy. “We have grown up together,” she said to Mal. “Does it matter what position I hold in court to come see my friend?”

“Yes,” Snow’s melodic voice filled the room before I could answer. She leaned on our bedroom door, as usual wearing almost close to nothing, her devastating form hidden under a pale grey-white nightgown, obsidian hair loose and piled to one side revealing her slender neck. “When that friend shares his room with his wife, and when that friend’s wife is curious to see if you’d bleed more if you were hung upward on a hook or pierced through with a stick like a little skewered chick.”

My brows rose. Has she just called herself my wife?

Whatever shadows I’d seen from Nesrin before were gone, all blended between a thicket of fear and hate. “This, us, we have been—”

“Bow,” Snow said, taking a step close to her. “When you see me, you will bow.”

“W-What?”

My wife stood nose to nose with Nesrin, her stare deadly. “Even at his old age your father knew how to bow. Oh, he even bowed all so well. Has he not taught you?” She took a step closer to her and Nesrin faltered another step back. “Bow. Do it without me putting a boot on your neck, dear, because no one comes up for air once they are under my foot.”

The councillor sent me a look of plea before turning to Snow again. She was my queen and hers, too. If Snow wanted her to bow, she would have to bow.

Smartly, she did, and without a second look at the room, she left.

My brother snickered and exaggerated a courtesy. “My Majesty.”

She gave him a grin and began moving about my room, trailing a finger over the furniture, the walls, and stopping at a library on the corner before pulling a book out. “I didn’t know this room was open to the public.”