Page 40 of Heart of Fire (Royal Ice Dragons #3)

HANNA

“I have a friend who’s a necromancer,” I told them all, staring down at Ginelle’s corpse. There was a smile on her face even in death—though maybe it was more like a sneer, her lips pulled back from her teeth—as if she was sure she had won.

Dare raised one hand, addressing Honor’s men, not me. “ Friend may be an overstatement. I suggest we go heavily armed.”

I filled Zehr in on Ligo with Dare’s helpful commentary.

“I’ll bring him here,” Zehr said. “I think we want to keep everything confined to the house for now, as messy as it is.”

I looked back down at Ginelle’s corpse. My hands fisted at my sides. “Did the children see me… what looked like me…”

Dare wrapped his arms around me.

“I can bring you to see them and then go get Ligo,” Zehr told me. That was answer enough. The children were probably terrified of me after seeing my face when Ginelle tried to kill them. I needed to see it all from Dare’s perspective, but I dreaded it too.

“No.” I smiled, my arms wrapped around my chest. “I’m fine. We need to move fast. If you tell me everything is fine…I believe it. Go get Ligo.”

Zehr gave me a long, worried look.

“I’ve got her,” Dare told him, putting his arms around me from behind. I leaned back into him; despite his height and the leanness of his frame, he felt so solid and safe. “She’s all right. You can go.”

Zehr gave us both a look I couldn’t read, but he stepped back into the shadows.

When I shivered, Dare rubbed his hands up my bare arms. “Can I get you cleaned up? While we’re waiting for Zehr to drag Ligo back?”

“I can do it,” I told him. Beyond him, I caught the briefest glimpse of myself in the mirror. Doused in blood. My face looked pale and unfamiliar and suddenly, I hated the sight of myself.

“I know you can, Hanna, you can do anything. But can you pretend you need me for a little while?” He scooped me up into his arms, cradling me against his chest. “Where’s your bathroom?”

“It’s en suite to my bedroom. I still…sleep in the same room I have since I was a child.”

“Mm. I cannot wait to see it, I hope it’s full of embarrassing items. Journals! I bet you wrote about Kaelan. You did, didn’t you?” He was carrying me across the floor, stepping over bodies, and then up the stairs. “What kind of stuffed animal did you sleep with?”

“I don’t.”

He scoffed. “Is it a dragon? It is, isn’t it?”

“My room is to the left,” I told him, but he went right.

“Later,” he told me. “As much as I look forward to finding things to embarrass you with that even Kae doesn’t know…I don’t want to make a mess of your bathroom.”

“We’re not staying. And the house will clean itself?—”

He whistled. “I would never choose us three idiots and our cold-as-fuck kingdom over the magic of the green isle, all that family who obviously think you hang the moon, and a self-cleaning house that also cooks for you. There’s got to be some fucking assholes with big dicks and bad manners you can replace us with here .”

I let out a laugh, although it sounded shaky, and he smiled back, obviously delighted he had made me smile.

He pushed open a door and glanced in curiously. When he’d established that it was a guest room, he carried me through the gold-and-burgundy room and into the bathroom.

There was an enormous white-and-gilt tub taking up half the room, surrounded with green plants and pink flowers. He glanced up at the flowers skeptically, but as we walked across the room, the tub began to fill itself; flowers from above dropped into the water so that pink petals swirled through the water and released a faint floral fragrance.

“I’ll take the house if you’re really going to leave it,” Dare said without hesitation.

He picked up a thick towel as he carried me and set it on the edge of the sink. Then he began to undress me, though it wasn’t like any other time he had helped me out of my clothes, caught up in a whirl of lust and need. He had never moved so gently.

I started to glance behind me at the enormous mirror at my back, and he caught my chin with two fingers. Tenderly, he turned my face back to his. His green eyes met mine. “Eyes on me, Princess.”

He pulled my top off over my head, then pressed a kiss to my shoulder. I put my hands on his forearms, steadying myself, feeling a swell of longing even now. Then I caught a glimpse of my bloody hands leaving marks on his shirt, and my gaze caught on the blood streaks.

“Not a problem,” he said, pulling the shirt over his head. The tattoos on his chest and neck, tattoos that no true Ice Fae prince would’ve had, shimmered under the lights. “I hated this tunic. It was one of Kaelan’s castoffs, and it never fit quite right.”

“You’re being too nice to me, Dare. It worries me.”

He frowned, his beautiful green eyes reflecting my pain. Then he told me softly, “I’m sorry that you feel that way with me. You should be able to relax into being cared for.”

“Why?”

“You’re the best thing in all our lives, Hanna. You deserve the best from us, and I can’t change what I did in the past, but I can make sure it’s different now.”

“How are you going to do that?” My voice came out a whisper.

The things that made him pull away from me hadn’t changed. I was still a princess, and he was still a peasant. I still came from the castle, and he still came from a family that had been murdered because they wanted to burn down all the castles.

Right now, it felt like there was no one in the world who mattered besides us. But how long could that last?

“I’m going to love you so well that our past fades.”

“You think I’m going to forgive and forget?”

“No, and I don’t want you to.” His hand cupped my face tenderly. “I don’t want to forget being a dick, because I don’t want to ever fall back into my old ways. And I don’t want you to forget, because I want you to call us out if we fuck up again.”

He lifted me up off the counter, and I twined my arms around his bare chest. He carried me into the tub, setting me down gently in the warm water.

Then he began to wash me. The tub began to bubble, and the bloody water was replaced with fresh water, until I could’ve forgotten how I’d been soaked in blood.

Especially when Dare was so tenderly washing every inch of my body. The scent of the fallen roses and of the vanilla bubble bath mingled, and he had that same expression of focus and competence that I always found so attractive.

All I wanted to do was kiss him and lose ourselves in the bath, but we had work to do.

“There should be clean clothes in the armoire in my room,” I said.

He nodded and left, and I felt an unexpected surge of anxiety being alone in my own house.

He came back carrying a clean tunic and leggings. It was less sexy than the corsets and skirts or leggings I’d usually worn here on the Isle, but it was what I wanted right now.

He lifted me out of the tub and wrapped me in a thick, soft towel. I thought about protesting, and then just rested my head on his shoulder.

For just a little while, I would let him take care of me.

I needed him, and maybe he needed me to let him love me too.

* * *

We headed downstairs afterward. The bodies had been cleaned up, though I wasn’t sure where they were now, and the house was sparkling clean. The house had begun baking bread, so the scent of freshly baked bread hung in the air, mixed with the lemony scent of cleaning solution.

Dare glanced around in real wonder. “Seriously, I would not choose me .”

I let out a laugh and my fingers brushed his. We needed to talk about what I had said in the chaos of that moment when the magic made me lash out at him, but I was glad he was by my side.

“Good, you’re back.” Lynx looked up, but his gaze skipped past me to frown at Dare.

“Let’s talk to Ginelle,” I said, looking at an unhappy looking Ligo. “Which, apparently, I should have done more in life.”

“She hid from everyone by being so incredibly dull,” Dare said. Dare looked at Ligo. “You don’t seem excited to be here.”

Ligo fidgeted impatiently, but he was bringing Ginelle back to life.

“Tell me who you were working for,” I asked Ginelle.

“You already met—and murdered—our best people. My people. The Isle’s a perfect place to work. It’s known for being a hotbed of curses and plagues. But our leadership comes from the Ice Kingdom.”

Dare and I traded a glance.

I sat forward. “So what would you do next if you were still alive? Who would you make contact with now?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Dare told me. He did not sound optimistic.

“When Dare and I were leaving, and you didn’t want him to seal you in the room for your own protection…is that because you were meeting someone?”

“Yes. Tenuis. You murdered him tonight.”

“Who came with him to meet you?”

“No one.”

I kept asking questions. We tried to get all the information we could from her.

The Guild traitors would believe that everyone was dead in the castle. There was no reason for them to know what had really happened here.

“The lord will certainly come looking for me once he reaches the Isle.” She gave me a rictus smile. “You are going to die. You think you’ve beaten me, but you cannot win against the gods.”

I waved off her statement, although predictions of your death always sounded more distressful coming from a corpse.

“And this lord is part of the Ice Kingdom?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, already seeming to fade.

I glanced over at Ligo, who shrugged. “I’m sorry! I can’t keep her talking…the poison is causing her body to become immobile more quickly and which was enchanted to fight my attempts to reanimate her.”

I had a sudden impulse of his guilt, and decided to test my theory. “Well, Ligo, perhaps you shouldn’t have given it to her.”

Ligo blinked at me for a heartbeat, then tried to run.

Zehr quirked an eyebrow at him. “That is incredibly optimistic.”

Ligo had to cross through shadows in order to get to the door. No one moved a muscle. Then, Zehr rose out of the shadows, and suddenly Ligo was on the ground, groaning.

Zehr looked down at him. “We are going to have to keep you out of the way. But you can tell me all about the members you met.”

Once Ligo had been removed, Zehr returned to me.

I looked at Dare. “I can tell that you’re already seeing the logical path forward.”

“It is not logical. It’s a great way to get yourself killed.”

Lynx told me, “If we let you impersonate Ginelle…and it’s a big if…we’ll need to take you from the castle. Publicly. It will need to look like we’ve arrested you and are hiding the Queen’s death, or the Guild will grow suspicious.”

My chin rose. “I know. I understand.”

“On the plus side, it means returning to the castle, and you can see for yourself that everyone is alive and well,” Lynx told me, before he put a warm hand on my shoulder. “Thanks to you.”

I smiled, though I still felt shaky. The smile was all for his sake.

“I’d like to stay by her side,” Dare said, though nothing in his voice suggested he was asking.

But when Zehr looked at me, it was obvious he was asking what I wished. I certainly felt a little unsteady at the moment. Usually, that would have been a reason to shy away from letting anyone see me as weak.

But I wanted Dare with me. I reached out and twined my fingers through his. It felt strange and tentative, but he also felt like a warm, solid presence at my side.

“I can bring you two together,” Zehr said.

He beckoned us into the shadows. As we stepped into the shadows, Zehr took my hand and reached out to touch Dare’s shoulder. Dare stiffened as if he were uncomfortable, but then gave Zehr a nod of thanks.

Then we were traveling through the darkness again.