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His smile reminded me, in a flash, why grown men shivered at the sound of his name in the world above. The Silent Death at work, again – I should have known. He hadn't survived a hundred and thirty years of thwarting the Mother right under her porcelain nose just to sit back when a handful of miffed alves threatened to render months of work useless.

‘Well.’ I fell down on the edge of the bed and began to loosen my braid with snappish yanks, sending him a wry grin. ‘One less opponent to worry about. I’ll just pretend that justifies the questionable methods.’

I don’t think I ever claimed to be a male of spotless morals, he signed as he squatted to pull his knives from his boots, then loosen the boots themselves.For a few moments, his fingers were occupied with those tasks; then he added, pleasantly,But if you feel very guilty about the bastard, you’re free to wake him early with a fried egg and ginger tea tomorrow.

I snorted. ‘I’ll sympathetically make him ginger tea when he wakes up two hours past noon and we have handled the discussion already. Anyone else you quietly chained up in unused rooms or knocked out in the fields?’

He sighed and shook his head as he shoved his boots aside, wings drawing taut behind his naked back.

‘How very mild of you,’ I said.

There was nothing mild about the gleam in his dark eyes.Don’t tell yourself it’s a matter of kindness. I would get questions if half the group were to stay away tomorrow.

‘Mm-hmm,’ I said, nodding earnestly. ‘And if not for that bit of cold calculation, you’d end them all without a second thought for the sake of our plans, of course.’

Of course.He sank down on the bed beside me, crossing his legs as he met my gaze. The look in his eyes was half laughter, half bitter sincerity.Sometimes it seems you don’t take the depraved depths of my soul even half as seriously as you should, cactus.

I cocked my head, my unbraided hair a mess of loose strands around my shoulders. ‘Ah. That stone heart of yours, incapable of feeling love or any emotion of all? Silly of me to forget about that.’

He didn’t smile.Can’t deny I’m a rotten bastard.

‘Of course you’re a rotten bastard.’ My dress smothered my words as I pulled it over my head; the green cloth smelled faintly of ink and sweat and the tea I’d spilled at my desk that morning. ‘But that doesn’t mean I didn’t see you laugh at Hallthor’s jokes at dinner.’

Now he did chuckle, even though there was little humour to the breathy sound.His impression of Naxi is eerily accurate, admittedly.

‘It is. And youdolike some of them, as much as you’re trying to deny it.’

He closed his eyes.Weren’t we planning to sleep?

‘We were,’ I admitted, pulling off my underwear and chucking it into a corner. ‘Do you need any help getting those trousers off, then?’

He did not need help, but I took an unreasonable amount of pleasure in assisting him anyway, stripping off the sturdy black cloth to reveal inch after inch of muscular thighs and calves, kissing the spots where veins and tendons bulged below his skin. By the time I finally pulled the last of his clothing off, his half-hard cock had swollen into a full-fledged erection.

At the sight of his half-lidded eyes, my nervousness ached a little less painfully.

Sleep?he signed as I clambered into his lap, straddling him.

‘Are you sure?’ I murmured.

He kissed me.

Our tumble was quick and messy and somehow ended with me wiping seed from my left eye as we collapsed laughing and panting into our blankets. For a few moments, nothing else in the world seemed to matter, even the possibility of failure no more than an irrelevant note in the margins.

Then Creon darkened the lights with a few quick hand motions, and in the gloom of night, the urgency seeped straight back into the marrow of my bones.

I knew the feel of his body in my arms. Knew the way his chest rose and fell against me, knew the satin softness of his skin and the rough patches of his callouses, the rippling of his muscles as he shifted under the blankets. I knew the way he wrapped his wing around me, keeping me safe from the world outside, locking me forever in his grasp.

But most of all, I knew the silence.

In the darkness, the shapes of his fingers hidden from my eyes, he was once again fully and completely voiceless, nothing but the whisper of his breath and his hands on my body to tell me whatever was happening in that lightning-quick mind. And of course he never complained. Of course he told me not to worry. Of course he’d never repeated the confession that had escaped him in the water of the Sunstone Bay three months ago, that hedidmiss his voice, fiercely and desperately. But everything he wouldn’t say echoed through the shadows of the night, and I lay asleep for far too long after his breath grew slow and shallow, my mind spinning, running over my plans and arguments again and again.

They might tell me I was being unnecessarily concerned.

They might tell me none of my theories made sense.

They might …

But it was too late and I was too tired. A downy weight stifled my thoughts, lured them back into the territory of dreams; I fell asleep with my plans unfinished, slipping unnoticed into the day that might shatter my promises.