Niniane never took her attention fully away from Tiago. She was already braced when he lowered his head and gave her a goaded look. He bared his teeth at her in a classic sign of Wyr aggression. She put her hand on his forearm. She could feel the current of tension jumping through his body like a live wire.
He was incredible. His outside appearance was scary enough. Inside, his Power was barely held in check by the uncertain leash of his temper. She had heard that he called the lightning when he lost his temper. She had not realized he contained the lightning. She felt like she had been given the merest glimpse into the vast unseen landscape that lay cloaked inside him.
Raw emotion flickered in his dangerous face, and her heart melted.
I know, I’m sorry it’s hard, she whispered gently in his head. She stroked the hot skin of his forearm with a light touch, then she slipped his gun back into its holster underneath his arm. I didn’t do what I was told again. But Tiago, I am supposed to become a monarch. I can’t take orders and I can’t just run.
If she had not been touching him, she might have missed the slight ragged edge to his indrawn breath. Her heart melted further.
Carling spoke another foreign word. Her Power pulsed in the unnatural stillness. Down the hall, humans jerked in surprise and cursed to find themselves disarmed. The Vampyre Tiago had thrown into the stairwell raced back into the hall and slowed to a stop, his gaze locked on his mistress. The lightning-struck Vampyre twitched and groaned as his rapid healing resumed.
A feral growl sounded behind Niniane. It came from the Vampyre climbing through the hole in the wall. His glowing red eyes focused on Tiago, his long fangs distended. Tiago swept Niniane behind him with one hand as he shifted to meet the threat.
Carling said in warning, “Cowan, stop.”
The Vampyre launched with a hiss at Tiago. Tiago flowed into a defensive posture, sword held en garde.
Carling blurred. She caught hold of the Vampyre by the back of his neck. Her beautiful face was winter-cold, dark eyes twin shards of ice. In a move so fast Niniane couldn’t track it, Carling tore the Vampyre’s head from his body. The Vampyre’s body fell to the floor. Carling looked down into the face she held between her hands. The Vampyre’s mouth worked, as if he would say something, to plead for his life or to scream. Then his head and body crumbled into dust. Carling brushed her fingers together. She murmured, “He was always such an impetuous child.”
Niniane stared at the small pile of dust on the floor that used to be a thinking, reasoning creature. She stuffed her fingers against her mouth. Tiago shifted, holstered his own gun, put a heavy arm tight around her shoulders and hauled her against his side. She leaned against him, rested her head on his chest and closed her eyes. She wanted to crawl into that hidden country inside of him.
A noise from the stairwell made her jump. She made a muffled noise against Tiago’s shirt and his hold tightened on her.
The Dark Fae Commander Arethusa stood in the stairwell doorway, along with Hughes and a couple of the hotel security staff. They stared at the wreckage in the hallway, at Niniane and Tiago, and at Carling.
Niniane cleared her throat. She forced herself to say in a calm voice, “Everything is fine now. Scott, the bill for repairs on this should go to the Elder tribunal.” If the tribunal had an issue with that, they could take it up with Carling. Elder politics tended to be hard on architecture and the general population. Niniane looked at Carling and silently challenged her to deny it. Carling curled a nostril, but as her Vampyres had been the ones to initiate an actual attack, she kept silent.
Hughes nodded and backed into the stairwell. His expression was a study in horrified dismay.
Niniane’s gaze met the Dark Fae Commander’s hard stare. Arethusa had the tall, lean build that was typical of most Dark Fae, but instead of giving her a willowy look, her leanness was coiled with long muscles that gave her a pantherlike grace. Her black hair was pulled into a tight queue at the base of her neck, and her large gray eyes and angular face were cold with censure as she regarded Tiago’s arm around Niniane’s shoulders.
The Commander said, “You meddle where you do not belong, sentinel. Release the Dark Fae heir now or face the consequences.”
Niniane’s temper spilled over. She straightened and stepped away from Tiago, her hands in fists. “That will be enough, Commander,” she snapped. Arethusa’s gaze swept up to her face. “Please inform Chancellor Aubrey and Justice Kellen that I will meet with the Dark Fae, along with Councillor Severan, in the penthouse in two hours.”
“Your highness—” began Arethusa, her gaze turning flinty.
Niniane said between her teeth, “I am not having a good week, Commander. It is not a good idea to try my patience right now because at the moment I don’t have any. That will be all.”
The Dark Fae Commander’s mouth tightened as her gaze flicked back to Tiago then to Carling, who lifted one slender eyebrow. After a moment Arethusa gave a curt nod and stepped back from the doorway.
Niniane concentrated on getting her breathing under control. She focused on a mote of drywall dust dancing in the air. She growled, “Now I am going to take a shower. I am going to put on some real clothes, and I am going to calm down. Does anybody on this floor have a freaking problem with that?”
No one replied. Okay, fine. She took that as a no. She nodded to herself and headed for the stairwell.
The leashed lightning that was Tiago shadowed her. She had just stepped into the doorway, when Tiago said, “Just one thing.”
The rich, strong sound of his voice shocked her. She realized he had not spoken aloud since he had appeared. She swiveled.
He stood in the doorway facing Carling. His broad shoulders filled the space. Niniane could just see the outline of his profile. The planes and angles of his face were serrated. He hadn’t sheathed his sword. The tiny hairs at the back of her neck rose as he pointed the tip of the sword at Carling in naked threat. Every one of Carling’s people took a step toward him.
“If you do anything that puts her in danger again, I will burn down your world,” he said. The lightning was in his voice.
Carling’s eyes lit up. She smiled at him and said softly, “You might try.”
Tiago’s savage aggression. Carling’s sinuous deadliness. It was just too scary.
Niniane shouted at both of them, “Oh, for crying out loud!”
She left them to their standoff and stomped down the stairs.
Death prowled behind her. She couldn’t hear him but she knew he was there. She wouldn’t turn around again. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing him how freaked out she really was.
She reached the next floor down. That stairwell door was guarded by two uniformed police who stood aside as she approached. She smacked the door open with the flat of her hands and stormed down the hall. Last night she had been too sick to notice the number of the suite they had occupied, but it was easy enough to find. It was the only door with another pair of guards, a male and a sandy-haired lanky woman, standing at attention. Their bright smiles at her appearance vanished, and they paled as they looked at what followed in her wake.
She paused in front of the suite door and glared at it because she didn’t have a keycard. The sandy-haired woman opened the door for her. Not trusting herself to speak, Niniane gave the woman a curt nod before she stomped inside.
Then she reached the suite’s living room and came to a stop. Someone had come in to clean while she had been kidnapped. The breakfast dishes had been removed. The table gleamed with polish and a fresh bouquet of flowers. The coffee table was bare of gun parts, Tiago’s canvass duffle set against one wall. She could see the corner of her bed in the other room. It had been neatly made. The second bedroom door was closed. The heavy living room curtains had been drawn to reveal a bright, sunny Chicago day outside. A cerulean sky was dotted with fluffy white clouds.
She pressed her fists against her temples as she struggled with a sense of disorientation. It looked s
o normal out there in the sunshine, outside of this hotel filled with crazy people. She turned as Tiago entered the room and finally sheathed his sword. He unstrapped the scabbard and laid it on the table. Then he removed one of the shoulder holsters and put that on the table too.
The cataclysm that had consumed his expression had vanished as if it had never existed. His face had become a smooth blank.
Had he calmed down already? How did he do that? She hadn’t calmed down, not in the slightest.
Then he looked at her.
No. He wasn’t calm at all. The cataclysm still raged inside him.
Her breathing grew ragged and her mouth shook. Something breakable uncurled inside her, causing her to open up her arms to him. For the space of a single heartbeat she pleaded with him in silence. Please don’t reject this. Don’t turn away from me.
Tiago took the short distance toward her in a lunge. He snatched her up. She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung tight as he held her in a grip that threatened to cut off her air supply. His dark head lowered, and he buried his face in the crook of her neck.
She cupped his head with a hand, stroked his short hair and murmured to him. She hardly paid attention to what she said. The words didn’t matter. “I know. I’m sorry. I was scared too. I was so scared. Thank you for coming after me. Thank you so much for finding me.”
He sank to the floor and sat on his heels, bringing her down with him until she straddled his lap. He rocked her, savoring with desperate focus all the sensual evidence of her, the weight of her body and shape of her graceful, delicate bones, her arms holding on to him as tightly as he held on to her, the touch of those small, gentle fingers.
When Niniane had disappeared, he had gone to a place he had never been to before.
He had panicked.
He reassembled his guns in seconds. He informed Cameron so she could mobilize police and call in a forensic witch to analyze the Power in the bedroom before it could fully dissipate. He called New York. Then he strapped on his guns and his sword and came to a complete standstill, because he did not have a clue how to track Niniane through the maelstrom of energy that had taken her.
She had vanished into thin air. She was just gone. The horror of it, the wrongness, had opened up a black hole inside of him that sucked away everything else—any sense of decency or perspective or moral compass—it all vanished until what had been left behind was a howling beast that would savage anyone or anything that got in its way.
Desperation drove him up to Carling’s floor, which had turned out to be a stroke of sheer dumb fucking luck. He hadn’t been capable or clever. He went to ask Carling to help him track Niniane down. He had been prepared to do something he had never done before. He had been ready to beg. Then he caught a whiff of Niniane’s delicate fragrance in a place where it should not have been, and the beast consumed him.
If Niniane became endangered again, he might do more than just burn down Carling’s world. He was a destroyer by nature. As the Wyr warlord, he could channel that violence in controlled, targeted ways that achieved a great deal of good.
The beast inside him was an entirely different matter. Unleashed, it might engage in wholesale slaughter.
And the beast wouldn’t care.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. Even he didn’t know who he was trying to reassure, himself or her. His lips moved against her fragile skin. “It’s okay now.”
She nodded, her cheek pressed against his. His heartbeat pounded against her breastbone. He was more than twice her size. He was as big as a moose, and as he was wrapped around her, he felt exactly like the right size. He felt like home.
I’m in so much trouble.
She froze. Wait. Did I just say that out loud?
“What do you mean?” Tiago said. He ran his big hands up and down her back. “What kind of trouble are you in? What happened?”
“What happened isn’t my fault,” she sniffled. “I’m just sayin’.”
He raised his head and frowned at her. The raw, bruised look had not quite left his eyes. She had never seen him look like that before. She put her forefinger to the deep line between his brows and tried to smooth it away. He pressed his lips to her palm. The exchange did nothing to sway his attention from other things. He said, “How did you disappear, and why do you feel and smell like Carling’s Power?”
“Actually,” she muttered, “it’s not so much what she did to me, as it is what she did to you. She has a Djinn who is indebted to her. He owes her three favors, or he did—he’s now down to two. She had him transport me from the bedroom up to her suite. She said it was to teach you a lesson.”
He growled, a deep rumble that vibrated through her frame. “What did that crazy bitch do to you?”
“Shh, remember everything’s all right now,” she murmured. She cupped his face in both hands and searched his eyes. They were obsidian without any telltale flickering of white. She stroked his lean cheeks. He was such a proud man, and he was so handsome when he wasn’t looking like he might tear down skyscrapers or dismantle nations with his bare hands. “She healed me, and we talked for a bit. That’s all.”
His eyes narrowed. “Healed you,” he said.
She opened her eyes wide. “Completely, Tiago. It’s the most amazing thing. See for yourself.” She pulled back so that she could lift the top of her lounge suit and show him the silvery scar. “It hurt like a son of a bitch too. I could feel it knitting together inside.”
Tiago touched the small scar. The brush of his blunt calloused fingers was featherlight. “It doesn’t hurt anymore?”
“Not a bit. I feel like I did before the attack.” She fingered the tiny stitches. They looked like baby spiders against her pale skin. Ew, actually.
He frowned. “Those need to come out.”
She was opening her mouth to tell him she could take them out later when he picked her up and deposited her in an armchair as effortlessly as one might move a house cat. He opened his duffle bag, took out a toiletry kit and pulled out a small set of clippers. Then he knelt in front of her. She squirmed.
He smiled at her, a real smile and not his usual sardonic grimace, the kind that crinkled the edges of his eyes and revealed the handsome set of his features. “You sit still, faerie,” he ordered as he pushed up her top. She kept her knees pressed together and angled to the right as she tried to do as he said.
He bent close to make sure of the snip. His gigantic hands that were so gifted in killing were remarkably gentle as they brushed over her skin. She stared at his broad shoulders and dark bent head, and dug her fingers into the arms of the chair, her stomach clenched against a stir of arousal.
His smile deepened. He could sense it, she knew. He could scent the changes in her pheromones. Blood heated her cheeks. She felt exposed and trapped in the armchair with his large powerful body pressed against her legs, but she didn’t want to push him away. He snipped the stitch and told her, “Here comes the tug.”
She nodded and he pulled the stitch out. He soothed the area, quite unnecessarily she thought, by massaging it with the ball of his thumb. Then he bent close again to remove the second stitch.
She waited for him to move, to straighten away from her, but he did nothing. Instead he tilted his head and stared at her scar. Something unfamiliar moved over his normally aggressive expression. It was a quiet reflectiveness that opened a window to that landscape hidden inside him and revealed—pain.
Her forehead crinkled. He was angry, irritable, rude, protective and sarcastic, comforting in danger and calm under fire and unrepentantly, aggressively antisocial. He was simply an unconquerable spirit. It hurt her to think of him in pain or distressed. She put her hand over his as it spanned her rib cage.
What he did then shocked her to her toes, as he bent close and pressed his lips to the scar. A quaking started deep inside. It spread out and collapsed her like a house of cards as he straightened and sat back on his heels. She threw her arms around his neck and fell against him, shaking and c
linging to him as if he were the only stable thing in the world.
And she was afraid. She was very much afraid that it might be true.
“What is it?” he asked. That rough rich voice of his was throttled down to a quiet murmur. He hugged her tight and rocked her. “I thought things were better now.”
She had to clear her throat before she could speak. “You listen to me,” she said. She pulled back, grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him. It was like trying to shake a Mack truck: quite patently impossible. “Please don’t argue with me, threaten, posture or deflect. Just listen to me, Tiago.”
He frowned. “I’m listening.”
“Carling hates you. I don’t understand it or know why. She didn’t say. Maybe you know?” She paused, and he shrugged, his expression blank. “Okay, we’ll put the why aside for now. But she does. She hates you. I could see it when I talked to her. I think she would love to find an excuse to kill you.”
His eyebrows rose. “She might try,” he said.
She wanted to smack him, but the problem was she didn’t think Tiago saw his attitude as posturing. “Yes,” she said with emphasis. “She might if she thought she could get away with it, but I’m sure she doesn’t want to make an enemy of Dragos.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’m quite sure of that.”
She stuck her stiffened finger under his nose. “Don’t laugh,” she ordered. “This is not a laughing matter.”
His face straightened, but the smile remained a lazy ghost in his eyes. “Yes, your bossiness,” he said. He grabbed her finger before she could jerk it back and kissed the tip of it. “No arguing, threatening, posturing, deflecting or laughing.”
“You’re not taking me seriously.” Her eyes burned and a leaden rock settled in her chest. She looked down.
His big hands settled on her shoulders. “Hey,” he said. The laughter had vanished from his quiet voice. “Look at me.”
She refused. He bent his head to try to catch her gaze. She ducked her head further.