So I said, “I want a distraction.” It was breathless. “I want—fun.”
His body again tensed behind mine.
And I wondered if he somehow didn’t see it for the lie it was; if he thought … if he thought that was all I indeed wanted.
But his hands resumed their roaming. “Then allow me the pleasure of distracting you.”
He slipped a hand beneath the top of my sweater, diving clean under my shirt. Skin to skin, the calluses of his hands made me groan as they scraped the top of my breast and circled around my peaked nipple. “I love these,” he breathed onto my neck, his hand sliding to my other breast. “You have no idea how much I love these.”
I groaned as he caressed a knuckle against my nipple, and I bowed into the touch, silently begging him. He was hard as granite behind me, and I ground against him, eliciting a soft, wicked hiss from him. “Stop that,” he snarled onto my skin. “You’ll ruin my fun.”
I would do no such thing. I began twisting, reaching for him, needing to just feel him, but he clicked his tongue and pushed himself harder against me, until there was no room for my hand to even slide in.
“I want to touch you first,” he said, his voice so guttural I barely recognized it. “Just—let me touch you.” He palmed my breast for emphasis.
It was enough of a broken plea that I paused, yielding as his other hand again trailed lazy lines on my stomach.
I can’t breathe when I look at you.
Let me touch you.
Because I was jealous, and pissed off …
She’s mine.
I shut out the thoughts, the bits and pieces he’d given me.
Rhys slid his finger along the band of my pants again, a cat playing with its dinner.
Again.
Again.
“Please,” I managed to say.
He smiled against my neck. “There are those missing manners.” His hand at last trailed beneath my pants. The first brush of him against me dragged a groan from deep in my throat.
He snarled in satisfaction at the wetness he found waiting for him, and his thumb circled that spot at the apex of my thighs, teasing, brushing up against it, but never quite—
His other hand gently squeezed my breast at the same moment his thumb pushed down exactly where I wanted. I bucked my hips, my head fully back against his shoulder now, panting as his thumb flicked—
I cried out, and he laughed, low and soft. “Like that?”
A moan was my only reply. More more more.
His fingers slid down, slow and brazen, straight through the core of me, and every point in my body, my mind, my soul, narrowed to the feeling of his fingers poised there like he had all the time in the world.
Bastard. “Please,” I said again, and ground my ass against him for emphasis.
He hissed at the contact and slid a finger inside me. He swore. “Feyre—”
But I’d already started to move on him, and he swore again in a long exhale. His lips pressed into my neck, kissing up, up toward my ear.
I let out a moan so loud it drowned out the rain as he slid in a second finger, filling me so much I couldn’t think around it, couldn’t breathe. “That’s it,” he murmured, his lips tracing my ear.
I was sick of my neck and ear getting such attention. I twisted as much as I could, and found him staring at me, at the hand down the front of my pants, watching me move on him.
He was still staring at me when I captured his mouth with my own, biting on his lower lip.
Rhys groaned, plunging his fingers in deeper. Harder.
I didn’t care—I didn’t care one bit about what I was and who I was and where I’d been as I yielded fully to him, opening my mouth. His tongue swept in, moving in a way that I knew exactly what he’d do if he got between my legs.
His fingers plunged in and out, slow and hard, and my very existence narrowed to the feel of them, to the tightness in me ratcheting up with every deep stroke, every echoing thrust of his tongue in my mouth.
“You have no idea how much I—” He cut himself off, and groaned again. “Feyre.”
The sound of my name on his lips was my undoing. Release barreled down my spine, and I cried out, only to have his lips cover mine, as if he could devour the sound. His tongue flicked the roof of my mouth while I shuddered around him, clenching tight. He swore again, breathing hard, fingers stroking me through the last throes of it, until I was limp and trembling in his arms.
I couldn’t breathe hard enough, fast enough, as Rhys withdrew his fingers, pulling back so I could meet his stare. He said, “I wanted to do that when I felt how drenched you were at the Court of Nightmares. I wanted to have you right there in the middle of everyone. But mostly I just wanted to do this.” His eyes held mine as he brought those fingers to his mouth and sucked on them.
On the taste of me.
I was going to eat him alive. I slid a hand up to his chest to pin him down, but he gripped my wrist. “When you lick me,” he said roughly, “I want to be alone—far away from everyone. Because when you lick me, Feyre,” he said, pressing nipping kisses to my jaw, my neck, “I’m going to let myself roar loud enough to bring down a mountain.”
I was instantly liquid again, and he laughed under his breath. “And when I lick you,” he said, sliding his arms around me and tucking me in tight to him, “I want you splayed out on a table like my own personal feast.”
I whimpered.
“I’ve had a long, long time to think about how and where I want you,” Rhys said onto the skin of my neck, his fingers sliding under the band of my pants, but stopping just beneath. Their home for the evening. “I have no intention of doing it all in one night. Or in a room where I can’t even fuck you against the wall.”
I shuddered. He remained long and hard against me. I had to feel him, had to get that considerable length inside of me—
“Sleep,” he said. He might as well have commanded me to breathe underwater.
But he began stroking my body again—not to arouse, but to soothe—long, luxurious strokes down my stomach, my sides.
Sleep found me faster than I’d thought.
And maybe it was the wine, or the aftermath of the pleasure he’d wrung from me, but I didn’t have a single nightmare.
CHAPTER
49
I awoke, warm and rested and calm.
Safe.
Sunlight streamed through the filthy window, illuminating the reds and golds in the wall of wing before me—where it had been all night, shielding me from the cold.
Rhysand’s arms were banded around me, his breathing deep and even. And I knew it was just as rare for him to sleep that soundly, peacefully.
What we’d done last night …
Carefully, I twisted to face him, his arms tightening slightly, as if to keep me from vanishing with the morning mist.
His eyes were open when I nestled my head against his arm. Within the shelter of his wing, we watched each other.
And I realized I might very well be content to do exactly that forever.
I said quietly, “Why did you make that bargain with me? Why demand a week from me every month?”
His violet eyes shuttered.
And I didn’t dare admit what I expected, but it was not, “Because I wanted to make a statement to Amarantha; because I wanted to piss off Tamlin, and I needed to keep you alive in a way that wouldn’t be seen as merciful.”
“Oh.”
His mouth tightened. “You know—you know there is nothing I wouldn’t do for my people, for my family.”
And I’d been a pawn in that game.
His wing folded back, and I blinked at the watery light. “Bath or no bath?” he said.
I cringed at the memory of the grimy, reeking bathing room a level below. Using it to see to my needs would be bad enough. “I’d rather bathe in a stream,” I said, pushing past the sinking in my gut.
Rhys let out a low laugh and rolled out of bed. “Then let’s get out of here.”
For a heartbeat, I wondered if I’d dreamed up everything that had happened the night before. From the slight, pleasant soreness between my legs, I knew I hadn’t, but …
Maybe it’d be easier to pretend that nothing had happened.
The alternative might be more than I could endure.
We flew for most of the day, far and wide, close to where the forested steppes rose up to meet the Illyrian Mountains. We didn’t speak of the night before—we barely spoke at all.
Another clearing. Another day of playing with my power. Summoning wings, winnowing, fire and ice and water and—now wind. The wind and breezes that rippled across the sweeping valleys and wheat fields of the Day Court, then whipped up the snow capping their highest peaks.
I could feel the words rising in him as the hours passed. I’d catch him watching me whenever I paused for a break—catch him opening up his mouth … and then shutting it.
It rained at one point, and then turned colder and colder with the cloud cover. We had yet to stay in the woods past dark, and I wondered what sort of creatures might prowl through them.
The sun was indeed sinking by the time Rhys gathered me in his arms and took to the skies.
There was only the wind, and his warmth, and the boom of his powerful wings.
I ventured, “What is it?”
His attention remained on the dark pines sweeping past. “There is one more story I need to tell you.”
I waited. He didn’t continue.
I put my hand against his cheek, the first intimate touch we’d had all day. His skin was chilled, his eyes bleak as they slid to me. “I don’t walk away—not from you,” I swore quietly.
His gaze softened. “Feyre—”
Rhys roared in pain, arching against me.
I felt the impact—felt blinding pain through the bond that ripped through my own mental shields, felt the shudder of the dozen places the arrows struck him as they shot from bows hidden beneath the forest canopy.
And then we were falling.
Rhys gripped me, and his magic twisted around us in a dark wind, readying to winnow us out—and failed.
Failed, because those were ash arrows through him. Through his wings. They’d tracked us—yesterday, the little magic he’d used with Lucien, they’d somehow tracked it and found us even so far away—
More arrows—
Rhys flung out his power. Too late.
Arrows shredded his wings. Struck his legs.
And I think I was screaming. Not for fear as we plummeted, but for him—for the blood and the greenish sheen on those arrows. Not just ash, but poison—
A dark wind—his power—slammed into me, and then I was being thrown far and wide as he sent me tumbling beyond the arrows’ range, tumbling through the air—
Rhys’s roar of wrath shook the forest, the mountains beyond. Birds rose up in waves, taking to the skies, fleeing that bellow.
I slammed into the dense canopy, my body barking in agony as I shattered through wood and pine and leaf. Down and down—
Focus focus focus
I flung out a wave of that hard air that had once shielded me from Tamlin’s temper. Threw it out beneath me like a net.
I collided with an invisible wall so solid I thought my right arm might snap.
But—I stopped falling through the branches.
Thirty feet below, the ground was nearly impossible to see in the growing darkness.
I did not trust that shield to hold my weight for long.
I scrambled across it, trying not to look down, and leaped the last few feet onto a wide pine bough. Hurtling over the wood, I reached the trunk and clung to it, panting, reordering my mind around the pain, the steadiness of being on ground.
I listened—for Rhys, for his wings, for his next roar. Nothing.
No sign of the archers who he’d been falling to meet. Who he’d thrown me far, far away from.Trembling, I dug my nails into the bark as I listened for him.
Ash arrows. Poisoned ash arrows.
The forest grew ever darker, the trees seeming to wither into skeletal husks. Even the birds hushed themselves.
I stared at my palm—at the eye inked there—and sent a blind thought through it, down that bond. Where are you? Tell me and I’ll come to you. I’ll find you.
There was no wall of onyx adamant at the end of the bond. Only endless shadow.
Things—great, enormous things—were rustling in the forest.
Rhysand. No response.
The last of the light slipped away.
Rhysand, please.
No sound. And the bond between us … silent. I’d always felt it protecting me, seducing me, laughing at me on the other side of my shields. And now … it had vanished.
A guttural howl rippled from the distance, like rocks scraping against each other.
Every hair on my body rose. We never stayed out here past sunset.
I took steadying breaths, nocking one of my few remaining arrows into my bow.
On the ground, something sleek and dark slithered past, the leaves crunching under what looked to be enormous paws tipped in needle-like claws.
Something began screaming. High, panicked screeches. As if it were being torn apart. Not Rhys—something else.
I began shaking again, the tip of my arrow gleaming as it shuddered with me.
Where are you where are you where are you
Let me find you let me find you let me find you
I unstrung my bow. Any bit of light might give me away.
Darkness was my ally; darkness might shield me.
It had been anger the first time I’d winnowed—and anger the second time I’d done it.
Rhys was hurt. They had hurt him. Targeted him. And now … Now …
It was not hot anger that poured through me.
But something ancient, and frozen, and so vicious that it honed my focus into razor-sharpness.
And if I wanted to track him, if I wanted to get to the spot I’d last seen him … I’d become a figment of darkness, too.
I was running down the branch just as something crashed through the brush nearby, snarling and hissing. But I folded myself into smoke and starlight, and winnowed from the edge of my branch and into the tree across from me. The creature below loosed a cry, but I paid it no heed.
I was night; I was wind.
Tree to tree, I winnowed, so fast the beasts roaming the forest floor barely registered my presence. And if I could grow claws and wings … I could change my eyes, too.
I’d hunted at dusk often enough to see how animal eyes worked, how they glowed.
Cool command had my own eyes widening, shifting—a temporary blindness as I winnowed between trees again, running down a wide branch and winnowing through the air for the next—
I landed, and the night forest became bright. And the things prowling on the forest floor below … I didn’t look at them.
No, I kept my attention on winnowing through the trees until I was on the outskirts of the spot where we’d been attacked, all the while tugging on that bond, searching for that familiar wall on the other side of it. Then—
An arrow was stuck in the branches high above me. I winnowed onto the broad bough.
And when I yanked out that length of ash wood, when I felt my immortal body quail in its presence, a low snarl slipped out of me.
I hadn’t been able to count how many arrows Rhys had taken. How many he’d shielded me from, using his own body.
I shoved the arrow into my quiver, and continued on, circling the area until I spotted another—down by the pine-needle carpet.
I thought frost might have gleamed in my wake as I winnowed in the direction the arrow would have been shot, finding another, and another. I kept them all.
Until I discovered the place where the pine branches were broken and shattered. Finally I smelled Rhys, and the trees around me glimmered with ice as I spied his blood splattered on the branches, the ground.
And ash arrows all around the site.
As if an ambush had been waiting, and unleashed a hail of hundreds, too fast for him to detect or avoid. Especially if he’d been distracted with me. Distracted all day.
I winnowed in bursts through the site, careful not to stay on the ground too long lest the creatures roaming nearby scent me.
He’d fallen hard, the tracks told me. And they’d had to drag him away. Quickly.
They’d tried to hide the blood trail, but even without his mind speaking to me, I could find that scent anywhere. I would find that scent anywhere.
They might have been good at concealing their tracks, but I was better.
I continued my hunt, an ash arrow now nocked into my bow as I read the signs.
Two dozen at least had taken him away, though more had been there for the initial assault. The others had winnowed out, leaving limited numbers to haul him toward the mountains—toward whoever might be waiting.
They were moving swiftly. Deeper and deeper into the woods, toward the slumbering giants of the Illyrian Mountains. His blood had flowed all the way.
Alive, it told me. He was alive—though if the wounds weren’t clotting … The ash arrows were doing their work.
I’d brought down one of Tamlin’s sentinels with a single well-placed ash arrow. I tried not to think about what a barrage of them could do. His roar of pain echoed in my ears.
And through that merciless, unyielding rage, I decided that if Rhys was not alive, if he was harmed beyond repair … I didn’t care who they were and why they had done it.
They were all dead.
Tracks veered from the main group—scouts probably sent to find a spot for the night. I slowed my winnowing, carefully tracing their steps now. Two groups had split, as if trying to hide where they’d gone. Rhys’s scent clung to both.
They’d taken his clothes, then. Because they’d known I’d track them, seen me with him. They’d known I’d come for him. A trap—it was likely a trap.
I paused at the top branches of a tree overlooking where the two groups had cleaved, scanning the ground. One headed deeper into the mountains. One headed along them.
Mountains were Illyrian territory—mountains would run the risk of being discovered by a patrol. They’d assume that’s where I would doubt they would be stupid enough to go. They’d assume I’d think they’d keep to the unguarded, unpatrolled forest.