Page 36 of Heart of Fire (Royal Ice Dragons #3)

DARE

As Hanna returned to me, it began to rain. I was used to snow, not rain, and the gentle mist that fell upon my face and soaked through the shoulders of my cloak while it was still warm outside felt strange.

Hanna had dressed in isle clothing—a dress with a plunging neckline and a skirt slit up the side. Her hands were in her pockets, and the scabbards at either side of her hips made them look broader as she walked toward me, with the sexiest sway in every step. She was so damningly beautiful.

I didn’t know when I had lost my mind for her. It happened slowly for me, unexpectedly unfolding. She’d grown into a craving and then, beyond that, into a need.

I had never fallen in love before, and I was not happy to realize I had.

She smiled at me as she approached, her smile as always like the sunshine brightening the world after a long eclipse. “Thank you for keeping me from burning my world down. Literally.”

Part of me went weak when she was soft with me. Most of our relationship had been all hard lines. But I loved the tender side of her. I didn’t acknowledge her gratitude, though. “What’s our plan?”

“We’re going to track down the Lady and figure out who else is involved. Eledora believes she’s the rising priestess of a particular goddess; she’ll become the embodiment of the god. No one has seen the Lady, which is driving Eledora mad. But she was able to give us some leads to track down other cult members who will hopefully help us root out the leaders.”

“And what exactly are we supposed to do with this cult when we find them? I assume we could have your sister and her men destroy them, but then you wouldn’t know just how deep it went.”

She nodded. “The Guild will use magic to extract all their information.”

“That’s not chilling at all. I certainly hope we stay on their good side.” I was watching her closely.

She let out a bubbly laugh. “You can stop looking at me like that,” she said, touching my arm affectionately. “I have not been enchanted by Eledora. I pointed out to her that there was no need. Our goals align completely.”

“That generally doesn’t matter to the kind of people who like to be in power. They still want to have something over you. Some way to control you.” I had spent my life with those kinds of people.

No matter that Hanna would help her anyway, Eledora would call in her vows and make it impossible for Hanna to disobey her. I didn’t know Eledora, but I knew her type.

Part of those vows would involve making Hanna lie to Honor…and to me.

“I guess I told you that embarrassing story for no reason,” she said with a smile.

“I wouldn’t say no reason. I enjoyed it very much.”

She pulled a face. “You are the worst sometimes.”

“Pretty much all the time,” I disagreed. “So Eledora’s plan was to…be helpful to us and send us off to do as we already intended?”

“Her plan doesn’t involve you,” she said, tucking her hand through the crook of my arm as the two of us began to walk. I felt a frisson of pleasure every time she touched me so casually, even though that contact was pragmatic when we were pretending to be married. “But of course, I want you with me. We can break into the house of this family and search for anything to do with the House of Restoration…Eledora believes they are involved.”

“Criminal activity. Always a delight.” Being with Hanna certainly was fun .

“I thought we could pretend to be servants, looking for a new position,” she told me as she looked down at a piece of paper, scrawled with an address. “I know we can brute force our way in, but they’ll have inconveniently elaborate security and I don’t want the House of Restoration to see us coming.”

We were walking down dark streets, lit only by the flickering lanterns; there were few people out and about now that weren’t drunk or preying on the drunk. “Now?”

“You don’t want to?” She gave me a quick flash of a look that was too knowing.

“It’s too late at night. No one would think we were knocking for innocent reasons, and no one is going to open the door for us.”

“Do you think you know the Isle better than I do, Dare?” she sounded exasperated.

“That’s not what I said.”

“I get so tired of bickering with you.” She still gripped my arm, but she held her body away, her cleavage no longer pressed to my side. “How are we going to manage our marriage once we don’t have wars to win?”

She was picking a fight because of the vows. Our current bickering did seem senseless, even for us.

If she were going to lie to me or pick fights under the influence of magic, I wouldn’t hold it against her.

But that still left me with the question of how to respond.

“We can do it your way.” My voice came out sharp. “There. I’m not bickering.”

She scoffed. “No, it’s fine. We can wait for morning. You’re right—I’m just a stupid princess. Like you said earlier when you said you didn’t have any sympathy for me.”

“I have never once called you stupid.”

Her eyes flashed. “You very much have.”

“When?”

“When we were on the boat back to the Isle, before I escaped you! You said sometimes you think I’m stupid, and sometimes you know I am.” Her chin lifted defiantly, as if she’d carried those words for a long time.

While the magic might drive her to push me away, I really had done my own part to push her away too.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said woodenly. I didn’t even sound convincing to myself, and when she was yelling at me, I couldn’t quite bring myself to apologize, even though I knew I should. “I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings.”

“You don’t hurt my feelings,” she said crisply, in a tone that suggested I wasn’t important enough to hurt her feelings.

“Why’s that?” When she started to pull away from me, I laid my hand over hers to keep her holding my arm. “Because I’m just a peasant?”

If the magic were compelling her to start a fight with me, well…the two of us had plenty of things to work out.

“Because you don’t even want to be married to me!” She turned to face me. Her eyes were wide, upset, and my first impulse was to smooth everything over, to say whatever I needed to say, before she blurted out, “You’ll always choose your ghosts over the living! I’ll never be enough for you.”

“Don’t,” I warned her.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” The raindrops on her face were beginning to look like tears. “You said whatever you had to say to get me to marry you in that moment, and you’ve regretted it ever since. You can’t stop talking about divorce!”

“Because Kae will murder me,” I said through clenched teeth.

She shook her head, her face disbelieving. The rain blew around us both harder now, soaking her hair to her face, turning it dark brown. “That’s a joke.”

“It’s not.”

“I guess you’re too big a coward to fight for me anyway.” She took a step back. “You know, I can believe you love me, Dare. Even though you’re not brave enough to say it. But I can’t believe you love me enough .”

“If you’re trying to get me to say I love you, you’re going down the wrong path.”

Her lips pressed together tightly, as if she were holding back all her rage.

And then she let me have it.

* * *

HANNA

Dare’s cloak was drenched to his body, his wet tunic revealing every hard line and plane of his broad shoulders and lean torso. His jaw was tight, his fists clenched at his sides, as if he were bearing up against the storm ravaging us both.

“You are never going to love me like I deserve to be loved.” My voice was shaking, and it sounded like anger. “You’ll never desire me like Kaelan does, because your only obsession is your hatred for the Royals.”

“Can you stop talking about Kaelan for ten minutes?” His voice was tight, clipped, furious. “Have you told Thorne yet? That there’s only one man that matters to you, and it will never be him? It’s always Kaelan.”

“No. No, I love Thorne. But you’ll never find joy with me like Thorne does, because you don’t want to be happy. Because being happy would mean letting go of your past, and that’s all you are: spite and sarcasm and fury. I thought it was just a facade at first, but there’s nothing there underneath it, is there?

My voice shook because I wanted to hold back my words. Everything I said felt true…sometimes. But I would never have launched every fault and failure at him like this.

I loved him.

Every word I said was obviously ripping Dare apart.

It was ripping me apart too.

I wanted to tell him through our mental link that it was all a lie, but I couldn’t. The magic prevented me from betraying my vows.

I couldn’t even open the connection between us. Was it the vow or our own faults that had raised a wall?

“You’ll never feel like I’m good enough for you,” I said, taking another step back. “Because in the end, I’ll always be a Royal. And deep down, you refuse to be who you really are. A noble son, not a peas?—”

“Don’t finish that fucking sentence.” He cut me off, sharp as a blade dug into my side.

I took another step back, still shaking my head. “There it is. Your true love appears at last, Dare. Your rage. There was never going to be enough room in this relationship for the three of us.”

I turned and fled.