Page 18 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Blair, two years before Gatilla’s death

It was deep into the night, and Blair was still trying to clean her wounds while she waited for them to close fully. It took too long, thanks to the iron slowing her healing to the rate of a lesser fae. Every form of metal was bad. After Nefarian steel, which was utterly deadly, silver and iron inflicted the worst damage.

Blair closed her eyes and gritted her teeth against the pain as her fingers pulled another ribbon of shredded fabric out of a wound. Her aunt hadn’t allowed her to take off her flying leathers and silken shirt before Riven whipped her.

She still saw the pale elf’s pained face in her mind. The remorse on his remarkable features the moment he went up to the platform with her and his elegant fingers unfurled the whip. His teeth, bared against the command. But he had no choice. He couldn’t resist Gatilla’s order, even if he wanted to.

None of her slaves could.

Blair blinked a few times, trying to shake the image off. Hells, she wasn’t too fond of the elf. All the less because Caryan had taken some liking to him. He had been the one to enslave the elf in the first place and bring him here. Why, Blair hadn’t yet found out.

Blair had taken the lashing without a sound. Without a plea or scream. Without any reaction at all, just as any witch would have done. After that, she’d returned down to the council chamber and sat bleeding through the whole meeting.

War. They’d be flying to war against Palisandre.

It was deep into the night when wing beats filled the air and Caryan appeared through her window. He leaned against the wall, his powerful arms crossed in front of his body, no trace of the mighty, black wings from a moment before. He’d dismissed them the moment he set foot in here as he always did. Blair once asked whether she could touch them, but he denied her. She never dared to ask again. Afraid of another rejection.

She found his dark eyes resting on her naked, still bleeding back. She got up from the chair and slowly walked toward him, dropping the towel already stained red with her blood as she went.

He just kept looking at her in that stoic way of his. His eyes, still and dark and ancient, and his irises faded to a gloomy red. A horizon announcing doom.

“Addressing me as Caryan, Blair? You’re getting reckless,” was all he said when she paused in front of him.

She resisted the urge to crane her neck. She already felt small but having him looking at her like that made her feel tiny. Young, but in a bad way. He had that effect on her. Always. She always tried to look alluring around him, to say something witty and sharp.

In the beginning, she even tried to make him laugh or smile. But Caryan never smiled, let alone laughed, which only made her feel more stupid for even trying.

Being reprimanded didn’t make it any better.

She covered it as she always did—with teasing. “My commander. Seriously?”

His remarkable eyes shifted into a prickling amber that promised a challenge, not unlike her own as he took her in.

So fucking beautiful.

“I mean it,” he retorted, unmoved. “Leash your temper.”

“Oh, I mean it too, believe me,” she crooned right back.

“That you bow to no one? ”

She grinned at his tone. Hells, he was still pissed. She could see the dark tendrils of magic coming off him.

She stretched out a hand to touch him, but he caught her wrist in midair.

“It’s been three fucking weeks,” she whispered when his face stayed stern, no trace of softness. No, he was ancient and cold. If she was fire, he was eternal stone under a glacier. And still, she burned and burned and burned. Three fucking weeks without seeing him. Touching him. Tasting him. It almost drove her mad. It was that way since they started sleeping with each other and the fire hadn’t ceased. Quite the contrary. All she could think about was him.

Whenever her aunt sent her away, it made her restless, nervous, and aching.

He kept her locked in place when she tried to yank her hand back. With an effortlessness that made a completely different form of heat pool between her legs. Fuck, she needed him everywhere.

He just tilted his head slightly when she attempted to wriggle free a second time. “Sometimes I wonder what will get you killed faster—your stubbornness or your temper.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “My temper? I thought you liked that about me.”

“I can’t deny a certain attraction.”

“I need to touch you,” she said then, no longer caring that her voice had fallen to a whispered plea. Unashamed of how plaintive she sounded. It was true. She needed him more than she needed blood, food or even water. And the thought that her aunt would be sending her away earlier than planned… that she won’t even have two more nights with him, made her want to cry.

“Please, Caryan…” she whispered again when he kept holding her. Before him, she’d never begged for a thing in her life. Certainly never for a man. Hells, she’d never let herself be under a man before, but now that was what she lived and died for.

Letting go of her wrist, as if he could hear every dark thought she’d ever had, he said, “Then get down on your knees and beg for it.”

** *

The night was waning. The moonlight danced over his perfect face, his honed, sweat-slicked angelic body when they finally parted. He got up, as always. Never holding her. Never staying through the night. He went to the window, gazing up at the moon.

She swallowed down her pride, her hurt, and just watched him, memorizing every detail of his chiseled body, although she already knew it by heart. Every ridge and pane.

It truly hurt to look at him.

Next to him, even she felt common. Average. It was a kind of beauty that made you ache.

She sat up eventually. Slowly, so slowly, her mind came back to reality. To what her aunt declared before. War.

“So it’s truly going to happen. We are going to war with Palisandre?” Blair asked, still not quite believing it.

“Those lands are drained of their essence. It’s the only logical next step to acquire more magic.”

“She already has enough magic as it is.”

He glanced at her. “Greed and the thirst for power are insatiable.”

Blair frowned. “You make it sound as if you agree with her.”

“I don’t. I just have been wandering the grounds of this world for too long.” There it was again, the fact that Caryan was so old it was hard for even her to grasp.

She didn’t like the change in his tone though. His voice was lush with menace and marvelously unsentimental.

“We don’t even have an army,” she said, feeling foolish already for even trying to talk him out of this.

“Gatilla thinks we don’t need an army with these runes on my body. She finished them the night before.”

Caryan didn’t look at her as he said that. He merely stretched out his right arm where the gold-and-black runes Gatilla gave him writhed over his skin like a beautiful, strange kind of snake. He looked at them as if they weren’t part of his body though .

Blair got up and carefully walked up to him to look at them more closely. It was a language so old it was long forgotten by the world. Symbols, drawn and inked into his flesh with the help of Ciellara, the silver elf— the only one still versed in the dark languages. When Blair asked her once, she said those runes came from the depths of the black hell, the last of the nine hells, itself. That those words had been whispered in the tongues of the devils when the fae had still been as fragile and mortal as humans.

Before magic spread over the lands.

Silver elves themselves were more legend than anything. Books said they had been hunted down to extinction like the angels, too feared for their strange powers and the never-dying knowledge of the worlds that flowed through their blood. Books Blair read as a child. Books that sounded like fairy tales, talking about the other worlds. About the nine hells and the Abyss. Vivid stories that came along with a glossary of hellish beasts.

Ciellara, the last silver elf in existence. She’d spent her life hiding away from everyone when Gatilla found her. A secret daughter of Evander, evil tongues hissed in shadows and dark corners. They said she’d brought shame over her house, over her father Regus, the right hand of the former king of Palisandre, when she refused a mating bond.

Blair didn’t know whether that was true. But Ciellara was hunted, had been hunted, and would be for the rest of her life.

With silver elves, secrets never died. And secrets were dangerous. Deadly.

Her aunt had offered Ciellara shelter in exchange for the runes. Gatilla had her working on Caryan, carving wild, raw magic into his skin with a needle made of monster bone, ink from the hells, and infernal fire from the dwarfen forge deep below, close to the hot and living core of this world.

With those runes, Gatilla and Ciellara turned Caryan into an abomination.

But the tattoo on Caryan’s body—seeing it with her own eyes, Blair couldn’t deny that, apart from the unholy power it was brimming with like a heartbeat, it was also breathtaking.

Horrifying. Mesmerizing.

Blair bit back the need to ask how Caryan had managed to bear the pain. It was said that there was no greater pain than infusing a body with magic. One tattoo took an eternity. And Caryan had a lot.

Blair swallowed.

The endless hours he’d spent in the darkest, hottest core of the amethyst tower, chained to the altar. Only to be taken apart and pierced together anew by that unholy magic. Forged anew. Bit by bit.

Gatilla put him through hell. And he still came out unbroken.

Someone other than Caryan would have long ago gone mad from the pain. It was dark, dark magic. Some before her aunt had tried to do the same but failed. Black heretics. Feared and utterly skilled mages and witches. But the result had always been madness for the receiver of such runes. Had always ended in a fatal bloodbath, the dark creation usually killing everyone around, including the heretics themselves.

Blair was grateful that Caryan was alive, the forgotten gods help her, but the truth was—he shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t have been possible.

She carefully touched his skin, the runes there. She hissed and pulled her hand back at the singeing pain the touch evoked before the runes dispersed like a swarm of bees, slithering away from her hand as if they didn’t wish to be touched.

A sinister kind of power sizzled through the air then.

Blair drew in a sharp breath as she sensed the magnitude of Caryan’s unfettered power for the first time. As if it had been hiding from her senses all that time and only now revealed itself.

No, not he. Her aunt. Because she held the reins of his power, controlled it.

But when had Caryan grown so powerful? When in the last two years? And that was even without him having access to the reservoir.

It was so strong, so endless, it knocked the breath from her lungs.

Finally, she said, “Palisandre has cellars and cellars full of weapons forged of Nefarian steel.”

No matter how powerful Caryan was, she still didn’t want that war. And no matter how powerful, they still had brought the angels down with Nefarian steel. Caryan might be the strongest fae in existence, but he was not immortal.

He offered her his profile as he answered, “Not anymore. There is no Nefarian steel left in this world, your aunt made sure of that.”

“What? You can’t know that for sure.”

“I do, as a fact, know for sure.” She sucked in a sharp breath at the reprimand.

“Well, even if that is true, there is always some secret stash of someone clever who likes to trade. One arrow is more than enough to kill you.”

His eyes flickered when he looked back at her fully. As if he would weigh his next words carefully. “Maybe. But I’m immune to Nefarian steel.”

A confession.

Her eyes widened. She wanted to ask—because of the runes? But she kept quiet because it would ruin the moment.

So she clamped down on her damn curiosity and asked instead, “How do you feel?”

It was the closest she ever got to talking with him about what Gatilla had done to him. She’d once before asked him and he said nothing. Just nothing. She’d never asked again.

His face was severe in the dim light, the candles accentuating his cruel beauty. Desire undid her so hard she could barely breathe. She needed him again. She resisted the urge to run her fingers past the sculpted muscles of his abdomen and down. Shit, they had one night, and she didn’t want to spend it talking about war, selfish as it was. No, all she wanted was to stay in his arms forever and let the world pass them by .

She thought that, again, he’d leave her without an answer, but he finally said, “It feels strange, I must admit.”

She could imagine. No more torture. No more pain. Just all that power.

She leaned in and whispered against his naked chest. “We can’t go to war. There will be too many casualties.” Gods help her, she remembered her mother’s vivid stories about the Demon Wars all too well. She couldn’t risk their lives. She couldn’t allow anything to happen to them.

“Another war is coming inevitably, Blair. Whether you want it or not.”

“We struck a truce with Palisandre.” She sounded almost defiant.

“I’ve waged more wars than I can count. A brittle alliance can never be mended. It can only break, and it will.”

“Gatilla’s been planning that for a while now, hasn’t she?” She didn’t bother to keep the bitterness from her voice. The spite.

“She has.”

“You could have told me.”

“I couldn’t. She forbade it,” he answered dryly.

“You could have found a way.” He could have left something for her to see. To find.

“It won’t have changed anything.” The casual frankness of his answer felt cruel.

So cruel she took a step back from him. “Maybe it would.” It sounded childish.

All the more as he retorted, “No. It would have been all the same.”

He was so unfazed, so free of remorse, that she let out a warning snarl, baring her teeth at him. He was right, but this was wrong. She deserved to know. The gesture would have sent every other man fleeing for his life, but Caryan didn’t so much as spare a side-glance at her.

As if she was nothing more than a nuisance. A fly on his food. Gods, she’d love to throw something at him. The bottle of wine she’d had, that chair. Or probably, most likely, herself .

“Do not, Blair.” His voice was a cold, but subtle, silken warning before he turned his powerful back on her, the runes twining and untwining, ever-changing, dancing over his shoulder blades.

She hissed. “Fuck you.” No one, not even Caryan, turned his back on a witch.

All he said was, “You know what the most tiresome truth is you learn when you gaze into the Abyss of eternity? It’s that everyone is so predictable.”

Blair felt as if something tried to crack her open. “I’m not.” She felt like a child the moment she said it. But fuck him. Fuck this. She was tired and bloodless, and she just learned they’d be flying to fucking war tomorrow. “You know what? You’re a fucking ass sometimes!”

He whipped his head to her so quickly, his pupils flaring open. Despite her anger, she took a step back, banging into the desk behind her. He stepped closer, watching her in that cold, assessing way of his that always made her feel as if she was a book and he was reading all her ridiculous little secrets.

His sullen mouth pulled into the shyest hint of a smile when he noticed her startled heartbeat. Her breathing. For a second, she glimpsed the yawning fissure deep inside him. Before his face shuttered.

“Careful, Blair.”

Two simple words laced with hundreds of years of violence. It was always that tone of his that sent a thrill through her body and bones. A dark king’s voice.

“You look scared,” he drawled.

She was. Sometimes he did scare her. Even now, although she’d had him over and in her for the better part of a night.

But the look in his eyes was just so deadly.

It scares me that I love you, that’s what she also wanted to say. That I could lose my mothers, could lose you. It got stuck in her throat.

Her eyes widened as he trapped her, keeping her against the desk.

“Are you?” he asked. Oh hells, the bastard knew her all too well .

She leaned in, taking his lower lip between her teeth, and bit down until she tasted his blood filling her mouth.

Then she whispered right into him. “Just fuck me.”