Jessa Slade - Dark Prince's Desire

Yelena knew scars. These must have hurt like hell. For a heartbeat, the detachment she’d cultivated since coming home wavered, her careful facade splitting as intricately as his skin. If he looked, he’d be able to see the ugly truths that had brought her to this place.... Well, not to this place in particular—where the hallway had widened into an intimidating expanse of soaring columns and flying buttresses, like the hallucinations of a first-year architecture student with a better understanding of grandiosity than gravity—but to this place in her life

Then she remembered where they were—the phaedrealii—where nothing was real, where every shifting surface was an illusion.

“Dreams,” she said suddenly.

Raze glanced back then shortened his stride to fall into step beside her. Despite his size, he moved with an almost animal elegance that reminded her of her own people as well as the more instinctual human warriors she had worked alongside. “What about them?”

“When I walked down to the lake, I said, ‘Perchance to dream.’”

His look sharpened. “You sought to drown yourself, to die?”

She scowled at him. “You know Shakespeare.”

“Along with the drunken wanderers, some poets have found their way to phaedrealii.” His hand dropped to the long knife tucked against his side. “Dreams and death are common paths to the court. Although only one leads out again.”

They had come to an arched doorway where a stairwell spiraled down. The mellow glow of the corridor did not reach past the first curve of the stair. Tiny will-o’-the-wisps drifted in the darkness, their firefly lights twinkling.

Yelena balked. “I’m not going any farther.”

The phae tilted his head. His dark hair was too short to fall into his eyes, but it had just enough length to start to curl, a quirky contrast to the unyielding slash of his high cheekbones and tight jaw. “Into death? Or dreams?”

“Neither.” She glowered; she wasn’t going to forgive him for that “drunken wanderer” crack. “Not until you tell me how you inspired the verita luna.”

When he crossed his arms, the open neck of his tunic gaped, revealing more scars descending over his collarbones to what she could see of his broad, smooth chest.

She swallowed, suddenly certain the scars were no glamour. How far down did the wounds go? The phae were known for their perilous beauty, but she sensed these marks were not meant to be alluring; quite the opposite, they were the sign of something very, very dangerous.

Still, against her better judgment, her fingers twitched to confirm the marks were real. That he was real.

He stared at her, his gray eyes hooded. “What did you dream?”

She snapped her gaze up from the taut line of his chest. “Excuse me?”

“At the portal, which should have been locked, you spoke of dreams. Dreams of what?”

She shifted, her bare feet making no sound, but uncomfortably aware of the rest of her bareness under his borrowed cloak. “What does it matter? Dreams don’t come true.”

“Here they may.” He paused, then his gaze sharpened. “The verita luna. You’ve lost the way. That’s why you wanted to know how I triggered it.”

“No, I—” The lie was bitter in her mouth, and she choked on it. Of all the places where a lie should have been easy. “It’s none of your business.”

“It is now.” He took a step toward her. “That is what brought you here. You are trapped, unable to change, just as we—” He cut himself off as he prowled behind her.

She whirled to face him again. The threatening heat of his big body made her already sensitized skin tingle. As a cat, she would have rubbed against him to release the static charge. A longing for her tigress arrowed through her, as piercing as the knife at his side. She could not admit he was right; to say it made it too true. She hedged, saying, “You think my answer is here.”

“The phaedrealii is rarely a place of answers.” When she opened her mouth to press him, he set one fingertip to her lips, silencing her. “Not that the sunlit realm is any better. But if ever you might find what you seek, it will be with me. Now come.”

His touch burned on her lower lip, and she found herself tilting toward him as if gravity had shifted. His scent—like a storm brewing in the boreal forests she called home, mist and mountain struck by lightning, wild and evergreen—lingered in her flared nostrils. The unintentional change she’d just gone through must have unsettled her more than she’d thought.

But when he turned, she followed. What other choice did she have?

* * *

Which was more dangerous: a tigress by the tail, or a tigress on his tail?

Raze’s spine tingled with awareness of the force of nature prowling behind him as they descended to his lair. She might be smaller than him at the moment, but the wild heat of her was the same in either of her forms. He didn’t doubt holding her would be risky whether her claws were feline or verbal.

But she’d tacitly confessed she’d lost the verita luna. Curiosity prickled more than the sense of danger, both sensations an irresistible lure. Just as well he was no cat or this curiosity might get him into trouble.

He glanced back, and the prickle in his spine shot out along every nerve as he found her golden-green gaze fixed on his backside. She instantly glanced away, but her pupils were blown wide and dark, not just from the low lighting in the stairwell but from something else, something more edgy.

The steep pitch of the stairs left his head level with her belly, and though his gray robe covered her now, his mind’s eye had no trouble seeing right through the rough weave to the memory of her bare curves. His previously loose trousers suddenly felt very constricting.

The werelings had wanted no part of the Iron Wars, and he’d had few dealings with them back when the phae walked the sunlit realm. He knew they were sensual creatures, prone to grand passions of the sort that had been the Undoing of the phaedrealii. Phae magic was destabilized by unruly emotion, and that unpredictable animal fever couldn’t be allowed to wreak havoc on his painfully wrought geasa. Not now, not when he was so close.

She was too close, which was why his pulse was racing as if the fever had already infected him.

“I suspect...” His voice sounded harsh, even to himself, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I suspect the depth of your longing for the verita luna brought you through the lake gate, even though it is locked.” The Queen had crafted the portal with a volatile new compound, which had no doubt exacerbated the already erratic qualities of a doorway woven from algae spores.

Yelena pursed her lips—her wide mouth was the same dusky-rose-red as the tips of her breasts had been; would her tender, inner flesh be as lush?—and he almost fumbled on the last stair.

“You started to say the phaedrealii couldn’t change either,” she mused. “Why not?”

Unbalanced by his misstep—and by his distraction at a simple pout—he spoke without thinking. “Because it would mean the end of us.”

To his relief, she was sidetracked when, triggered by his presence, light bloomed in his lair. Swirls of ammolite phosphorescence spiraled up the fluted columns of flowstone that supported the rough cavern rock far overhead. The glowing traceries branched out across the ceiling like spreading limbs and leaves, a tree of light.

Yelena’s dark pupils constricted in the sudden shine, revealing the wide pools of tigress-gold that shimmered with the iridescence around her. She turned in a slow circle, and in her wondering gaze, he saw anew the beauty of the quartz-studded walls only barely softened by the long falls of silky curtains. The lacy edges drifted on an imperceptible breeze that carried the faint mineral scent of wet stone.