Page 61 of Taste of Thorns

“Still going to tell you.” I grin. “We’re going to show Briony the fifth floor.”

He lies there unmoving and I take a hold of the edge of the mattress and jiggle it. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this.”

“Go away,” he says.

“Why are you in such a bad mood anyway?”

He doesn’t say anything, but the little Kitten steps forward.

“Did something happen?” she asks him.

“No,” he says simply, refusing to look at her.

Those green eyes of hers fill with sadness and she steps away, arms wrapping around her body. I’m not surprised. It’s like the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

I don’t like it. He hurt her feelings. If it were safe, I’d punch the dude in the ballsack.

“Don’t be a prick,” I whisper to him. He still doesn’t say anything and I lean towards him despite how much his grouchy magic irritates my skin. “You’re making her sad. Is that what you want?”

“You know it isn’t,” he mumbles.

“Then stop giving her the cold shoulder. It isn’t her fault you’re fucked up.” He turns his head and glares at me, but then he lumbers up onto his feet, and follows us out of his room and up to the fifth floor.

“What the hell is up there?” Kitten asks, unable to contain her curiosity.

“This,” Beaufort says, pushing back the door at the top of the staircase and letting her step through.

The ceiling is slightly lower up here on the top floor, but there are windows in the ceiling, allowing the starlight to pour right down into the room. Beaufort clicks his fingers, soft lighting flickers on and reveals the layout – different from the floors below. It’s one large room, with a bathroom off to the side.

There’s one giant bed resting against the far wall and along the opposite are floor-to-ceiling wardrobes probably bigger than the whole of the kitten’s room back in her own tower. There’s a desk with a chair and in one corner, bookshelves and a small armchair with a little stool to rest her feet on. The room isdecorated in soft feminine colors and it smells of a meadow full of flowers on a spring’s day.

“Did a woman used to live in this room?” she asks, surprised. “I knew this floor existed, but I suspected it was somewhere you worked out, full of weights and training equipment.”

“No,” Beaufort says, “we had it decorated this way. Ready for our thrall.”

She examines the room more closely. “You had it decorated before you picked your thrall? Before you picked me?”

“Yes.”

“If we’d waited, we’d have made it a little less girly to suit your tastes,” I add.

“I like girly,” she says, stepping further inside the room.

“So you like the room, then?” Beaufort asks.

“Of course, how could I not?”

“Go look in those drawers over there,” I tell her.

She gives me a suspicious look and then trots that way, opening the top one. It’s full of underwear – plain, silky, lacy, even frilly. Some in pastels, some in reds and blacks. Fuck, did I have a lot of fun picking out those!

“Did you buy all this ready for your thrall?”

“No, this we got more recently. Once we had a better idea of what you needed.”

She draws one of the camisoles out and holds it up against her body. It’s clearly her size.

“We want to buy you a whole new wardrobe of clothes,” I tell her. “But we thought you might want to choose.”