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Emotion—that was emotion choking me.

Seeing Veyka like this, smiling and laughing and without any of the trappings of responsibility… I understood why she seemed to be lit by an internal flame.

She was free.

Not in the same way that she was when she escaped the goldstone palace and snuck through the mountains like a leaf on the wind. Nor was it like the freedom and power I saw coursing through her when she had a weapon in her hand and that wicked grin on her face.

Here in the midst of the festival, in a land far from her own, without a preening, traitorous court, she was free from the bindings of her position. She was free to be Veyka.

I loved that she cared so deeply for her friends. I loved her clever mind and the way she turned the cunning elemental court on its head. I loved sparring with her. But more than anything, I loved the female pressed into my side, completing me.

A tremor vibrated through me, a soft growl of satisfaction from my beast.

Veyka felt it, lifted her head from my shoulder and gazed up into my eyes.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to just then—everything was in that bright, glowing blue gaze.

She slid her hand into mine, and then we were slipping through the crowd.

I let her lead me through the crowd, between a few tents. No humans appeared to bar our way. We walked closer to the edge until we could hear the waves lapping against the sand.

Veyka paused, reaching inside her cloak—and withdrew her three little pots of paint.

“Don’t you dare,” I growled.

She rewarded my snarl with a gloriously wicked smile that had my balls contracting tight with need.

Carefully balancing the pots in one hand, she used the other to reach forward and unbutton me. First, the thick leather tunic buttoned at an angle from the top of my shoulder down across my chest. Then the knit wool tunic beneath. She nudged them apart until my chest was visible, as well as the Talisman inked on it.

“Veyka,” I warned.

What was I warning her about? I wasn’t certain. But I was sure that if she dipped her fingers into that paint and touched my burning skin with her cool fingers, I was going to die from wanting her.

Of course, she did just that.

Veyka dragged her fingers over my talisman, covering the trunk of the tree in thick white paint. The color of her hair, even though I couldn’t see it beneath her hood. She dipped her thumb into a different pot—this one black. In the center of my chest, right above where my heart rested, she blended the two colors together. Mixing us together.

With the gray she’d made, she painted the branches of the tattoo that reached across my chest, up over my collarbones. Then back down, lower… lower…

I caught her wrist. “My turn.”

She threw her cloak back over her shoulders, revealing the swells of her breasts and the swath of her soft stomach. “Do your worst, Brutal Prince.”

I considered the three colors in her palm. Black, white, and blood red.

It was a ridiculous thing, painting each other like this. This sort of frivolity… I’d always lived on the edges of it. Plenty to be had at the elemental court. The terrestrials like to revel as well, though it had a different flavor.

But enjoyment just for its own sake—never.

Duty to Annwyn.

Duty to my family.

Duty to my mate.

Yet I knew exactly what I wanted to paint. I dipped my fingertips in the red, then the black, not caring about mixing the colors. I spread it across Veyka’s chest, the thick paint providing no resistance as my fingertips caressed her skin, pebbling beneath my touch.

“You wanted me to touch you,” I reminded her as I dipped my fingers between her breasts.