Page 155 of Fortune's Blade

Leaving just Louis-Cesare and me.

He decided to join me in bed, spooning up at my side, careful not to jostle me. He kissed my hair, which was about the only option right now. “This is a lot,” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

We just lay there and breathed for a while.

It was nice.

“You know,” he said, after a few moments, “You’re rather a legend among the dragonborn.”

“I am?”

“Hmm. The soft little human who took on Steen twice and finally ended him, all by herself.”

I shot him a look. “I wasn’t all by myself. You and I doubled teamed him or I would be a cinder right now. Not to mention Ray and his boys.”

“Hmm. It was more fun to tell it the other way, though.”

I would have punched his arm, but didn’t have the strength. “You did that deliberately.”

He chuckled. “In concert with Lord Rathen. It did help to get the rest of the houses on board. I think he shamed them into it.”

I sighed and managed to throw an arm over my face. “I hate politics.”

“And yet, in the short time you’ve been here, you have achieved more than anyone could have hoped. Killed Aeslinn’s chief operative in Faerie. Helped to stop an invasion. Succeeded in bringing the dragonkind together into a firm alliance which, as far as I understand it, has never been done before.”

“And lost my sister. Again.”

My voice roughened; I couldn’t help it. Because the rest of that . . . yeah, it was important. But the part that mattered to me personally, I had failed.

Damn it! I missed her so much!

“We’ll find her,” Louis-Cesare promised. “I gave you my word, remember?”

I dropped my arm to look at him. “But you can’t know that. You can’t even know for sure that they’re still alive.”

“No, not through reason,” he agreed, his eyes going distant. “But I feel it. Don’t you?”

I concentrated, my mind searching for them, for any trace at all. I didn’t find it, but there was something there . . . something warm. Or perhaps that was simply Louis-Cesare’s arm around me.

“And while I don’t know what awaits us,” he added. “I do know you. And your sister. And your parents. I know what you can do.”

Parents, I thought. There was that word again. Along with sister, husband, brother-in-law.

Family.

The words felt strange to even think, like something that applied to other people, not to me. But they were mine, all of them. I just had to go and get them.

And I would.

Louis-Cesare laughed, whether reading my mind again or my face, I didn’t know. But his arms tightened as much as possible right now. And I felt his lips on the top of my head.

“Frankly, the gods should tremble.”