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“What’s gotten into you?” she hissed as she adjusted her mask.

Her husband’s eyes flashed silver. “I don’t want to share.”

Now she was just hopelessly confused. “Share what?”

He frowned. “You really don’t know?”

“It’s not as if I can read your mind!” she cried, irate.

Alaric closed the distance between their faces again. Talasyn glared up at him. If he tried to kiss her again,now, after being so frustrating, she would kick him in the groin.

But he didn’t—at least, not on the mouth.

He went straight for her neck instead.

“I don’t want to share,” he repeated, nipping at a sensitive spot below her jaw. “Not with Mantes, not withanyof them.” He held her by the waist, his fingers kneading at the exposed skin of her lower back. “I don’t give a damn what your court says. I don’t care if it’s par for the course that you take favorites. You swore yourself tome.”

“This …” She was having a difficult time stringing words together. It was the feel of his hand on her spine, the sharp shock of lips and teeth at her throat, the buckling of her traitorous knees. “This is all because I danced with—”

He tilted his head, all the better to lavish her neck with furious, biting kisses. The golden antler of his stag mask slid cool across the corner of her mouth. “I rather doubtdancingwas all your suitors had in mind.”

It was the unfairness of the allegation more than anything else that finally gave her the strength to push him away. “If so, that’s their problem, not mine! What are you mad atmefor?”

Alaric stumbled back. “I’m not madatyou—”

“Could’ve fooled me—”

“I’mjealous, Talasyn,” he snapped.

“Then you’re an idiot!” She stomped her foot, becausethatwas what he had reduced her to. “Didn’t we promise each other on Belian that there would be no dishonor between us? Why does my word mean nothing to you?”

She stopped short, a hook catching at the pit of her stomach. Her worddidmean nothing when it came to him. Just not in the way he thought.

I will raise my armies in your defense.

I will stand with you against your enemies.

Talasyn had sworn all that, at their wedding and at her coronation. But it could never come to pass.

Alaric swallowed, his wide frame tensing. After an age, he spoke. “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry, too,she thought.For everything that has to happen.

And because she didn’twantto be sorry, because she felt petty and mean and selfish, because her duty had been so clear to her but he’d messed her up and she wasn’t sure if she could really save him, Talasyn took refuge in the lingering flames of her wrath, hoping that they would reignite his own. Hoping for another fight, because that was the language she understood.

“Youshouldbe sorry,” she said. “Honestly, those other men out there wouldn’t be such a pain in the—”

His mouth was on hers before she knew it. Punishing,possessive. Almost desperately so. Before she could make up her mind whether to return the kiss or follow through with kicking him, he pulled away, his gaze dark, a muscle working in his jaw. “Talk about other men again …”

“You started it, Alaric!”

And somehow she was shrieking that right in his face, somehow she was surging up on her toes and—

—the next series of kisses came hard and fast. It felt like a war in its own way. They kissed and bit and pulled until each was breathing harshly against the other’s mouth. Their masks clacked together, and the metalwork dug into her skin once more. She wrenched herself away from him to remove her mask altogether, but before she could do so he took advantage of the pause to walk her backward, his hands on her hips, guiding her to the antechamber’s sitting area, where he pushed her down onto the gilded chaise lounge until she was leaning against the cushioned backrest.

Alaric was a forest god as he fell to his knees before her, golden antlers gleaming in the light. He hooked her left leg over one broad shoulder, dotting a hurried kiss on the ankle peeking out from amidst the straps of her shoe. Then he litteredmore feverish kisses along her bare calf as his hand slipped under her right buttock to angle her center toward his wandering mouth.

Once he’d gone past her knee, Talasyn was shuddering, her undergarments soaked through. His first nip to her inner thigh caused her to cry out, and gods, if it wasn’t the most exquisite form of torture as he took his sweet time sucking bruises into her flesh, the pain and pleasure forming a heady cocktail that made everything else melt away. She needed relief—needed it so badly that she felt as though she were back on the Great Steppe in high summer, craving water to slake the thirst parching her throat. She closed her eyes and the Sardovian sun burned in the darkness to the sound of string instruments emanating from the ballroom.