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I sucked in a breath, a sudden and sharp strange feeling I didn't quite understand wrapping around my heart. He was a ruler who didn't want me to kneel. I was nothing more than a dirty farm girl. I had the blood of monsters running through my veins.

I rocked back to my heels, rising back to my feet quickly.

“Sire,” the Aetheriani with brown speckled wings said. “If the seals are breaking, then it would be best if you were to beget an heir. Mundanes are known to breed well and true, and with a boon granted that removes the need for ceremony and pomp.”

My mind staggered over those words, trying to piece together what he was saying. What did a boon have to do with all of that?I didn’t know the details of the year-long service, had I run up to the Rí Túath in the field and basically begged him to bed me?

“We don’t know when we will be called to fight,” Rí Túath Crystallo growled, closing his eyes for a moment as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me.

“All the more reason to ensure your lineage, sire,” said the Aetheriani with tan wings dappled with streaks of white. “One so sturdy is an excellent choice.”

Should I tell them?

I pressed my lips together. If I told them, they might force me to leave.

“Leaving a fledgling behind without a father is not what I intend to do,” Rí Túath Crystallo said, snapping his eyes open to glare at the other Aetheriani. He looked from one to the other, studiously avoiding looking at me.

Relief filled me as the pressure I was under to tell the truth vanished. He didn’t want a kid right now anyway. I didn’t need to announce the whole thing to the room and risk his advisors changing their minds suddenly, cheerleading for me to be tossed through a portal into the mundane.

This way I could stay here for a year with just the risk of a danger bang.

If he were chivalrous, he would be down to even just pretend we were doing it if I told him the truth. I eyed him, noting the chiseled jaw and curls in his hair. The exposed muscles of his arms were strong and gorgeous. He was the kind of man who could drag me by my hair without breaking a sweat, and the twinge between my legs let me know that he was exactly the type my body wanted right now.

Strong and dangerous.

“Of course, sire, but your intentions must serve the people, not yourself,” the tan winged one said.

Rí Túath Crystallo finally turned to look at me, his gaze hitting me like electricity, running up and down my spine as heat pooled, coiling in the root of my core. “Is this what you really chose? You can go home. You need not serve me and my people in this way.”

Strong, dangerous, and a good person.

“But you took me with you,” I said, my mind skipping back to our first conversation, realizing I had basically sold my body to him in exchange for an escape. I thought I would scrub floors, but in reality, I was offering to take danger angeldick.

I could feel dampness gather between my legs at the thought.

I wanted to stay.

I couldn't lie and pretend I didn’t want to.

Plus, I was well-versed with basic healing spells.

“There is no debt that needs to be paid,” Rí Túath Crystallo said. “I would help any mundane escape that place if the opportunity arose. You may go home without any obligation.”

His words floated through me, stroking a soft part of my heart that had survived under layers of hardened shells, developed by the unrelenting needs of survival. It had been so long since someone gave me a choice, a real choice.

The choice was to go home and risk the school coming after me. It sounded like there was something brewing, and it was unlikely that anyone at the school would have the attention to spare to hunt me down, but it was always a risk. The other choice was to stay here and sleep with a creature whose nether parts carried a big, serious question mark in my mind. Rí Túath Crystallo's younger brother was one of the few Aetheriani at the school, and none of the mundanes I had spoken to knew of anyone who had slept with them. The knowledge I had of his malehood was based on rumor. Even so, it was a rumor I didn’t want to gamble with.

“Will it injure me?” I asked, my voice soft.

“It will not,” Rí Túath Crystallo said.

“There are several mundanes living in this city with Aetheriani partners,” the brown speckled Aetheriani said. “They are all healthy, strong, and able to walk around fine a few hours after mating, I’ve been told.”

"None of that," Rí Túath Crystallo growled at the advisor. "She is here now, she doesn't need the stories."

I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips.

I could leave and go back home to a place I hadn’t seen in years and hated before I left. Or, I could stay here for a year, get to sleep with the hottest male I’d ever seen. The whole begetting thing I wasn't worried about.