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Only then did she realize the full moon had already passed. Lucan closed the distance between them and yanked her close by the collar, and the thought vanished as quickly as it had come.

“We will be late, pet,” he murmured, breath ghosting over her cheeks.

Elarian glanced toward the windows. Dawn still painted the palace in muted shades of crimson and gold. The council would not gather for some time.

“I have noticed,” she replied dryly, “that your definition of late differs greatly from everyone else’s.”

“I prefer arriving before the vipers.”

“A prince cannot trust even his council?”

“Especially not the council,” he replied coolly.

She snorted before she could stop herself.

Lucan let her go, then turned toward the door. That stolen moment between them vanished, and she once again felt her stomach twisting as she followed behind him like an obedient dog.

The palace scarcely changed from one day to the next. The servants bowed in all the same places, their routine set after centuries of service. The guards saluted with lowered gazes. Music floated endlessly through the long halls while courtiers lazily strolled arm in arm as they gossiped. Behind gilded doors, lords wove new conspiracies about the Blooded Prince and his favored courtesan—the one he made crawl night after night even as the rumors grew that he had finally taken a bride.

Elarian no longer cared what they might surmise.

The council meeting passed by in a blur. She could not stop ruminating over the way Lucan slid the honey closer toward her as she ate, as if they were an ordinary couple breaking their fast together like they had every morning for decades. They both froze in that moment; had he felt it, too? The boundary they had crossed? The raw need festering deep beneath their scars, how every cut from the other was some macabre courting dance before their inevitable tumble into something worse than love?

Love.

The word disgusted her.

But obsession…obsession she understood. Craved, needed to survive.

And she fucking needed Lucan Valmere.

Needed him to dismantle her piece by piece, to shatter the cage around the monster she had almost managed to bury deep within.

When she ran with the fey wolves as a child—and later fled from the Saint—she had almost believed happiness could exist. The moon elves taught her otherwise. They forged her into a weapon of discipline and restraint. She told herself that was what love felt like: stiff, controlling, rigid.

Lucan offered her none of that.

He was a dagger hidden in velvet. She burned under his gaze even as her flesh puckered against his cool touch. Every edge of him scraped at her skin even as his unnatural tenderness held her close—a paradox wrapped in shadow and silk, binding her in a dizzying embrace.

She felt like a hopeless addict.

She felt feral.

thirty-five

Bloody Rewards

He would unleash his deadly plaything tonight.

She had grown ravenous in the last few days, a deep thirst burning in her eyes that he knew could only be quenched with blood.

Lord Kyare’s blood, specifically.

Had Lady Drevain already shared her suspicions with her bedmate? Did he, too, now look at Elarian—Eliyn to them still—and see the blade hidden beneath silk? Or would she come to him in the night, a spectral beast wrought of silver and fury, until she clutched his blackened heart?

Godsdamn you, Elarian. A groan slipped from his lips. The thought of her killing for him made his cock throb.

“…trade, but then—pardon me, my prince, should I, er, ah…come back later, then?”