Of silk and steam, p.24
Of Silk and Steam, page 24
Barrons finally lifted his head. “Hell,” he whispered gruffly. “I didn’t hurt you?”
Mina shook her head. “I’m not breakable, Barrons.”
He rolled off her, and she caught a flash of dark, dark eyes as the sudden rush of air left her feeling startlingly naked. The ache of his body echoed within her, and she could still feel the ghostly press of his weight upon her. Her hand lifted as he turned. Then hesitated.
Barrons scraped a hand over his face as he sat on the edge of the bed. “I never meant for that to happen,” he said, his hands clasped, elbows resting on his knees.
In that moment she felt a distance between them that seemed like one she would never—could never—breach. Biting her lip, Mina sat up, drawing the sheet to her breasts. The sashaying tickle of her unbound hair curled against her lower back. And her hand hovered there, not quite daring to touch him.
“Not like that. I just thought I should give you blood to help heal you. Christ—” He cupped his hands over his face and dragged them down until they formed clasped palms in front of his mouth.
Was that regret she heard in his voice? Mina’s heart dipped and she forced herself to reach out. Her hand slid down the long, smooth muscle on the right side of his spine, tracing the dips of each vertebra. Barrons tilted his head toward her, the smooth profile of his face catching her gaze. Mina opened her mouth, but the words couldn’t come out.
“And I don’t regret it,” he told her somewhat fiercely. “I should. For treating you like that, for taking what I’ve wanted for so many years… But I wouldn’t take it back, Your Grace. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“I don’t regret it either,” she whispered.
Doubt darkened his expression. “I don’t even know if you mean those words.” His voice grew tight. “But I want you to. Perhaps I want it too much.” His head bowed, the words roughening even further. “You’re free to go. I have no right to keep you here. I have no claim upon you.”
What? Mina froze.
As he stood, her fingers fell from his back, dragging over the taut muscle of his buttocks. Barrons hauled his trousers on and snatched his shirt from the ground. Two steps took him to the door, and there he hesitated.
There was no expression on his face as he turned, his hand hovering on the doorknob. “You’re the only thing tying me to the past, and perhaps it’s time to let you go. Perhaps it’s time to let it all go.” A world of regret echoed in his eyes. “I’m sorry that I kept you long after I should have. If you get dressed, I shall escort you to the wall. It’s as far as I can go, unfortunately, but I have no doubt you’ll make it home safely.”
And then he was gone, his footsteps echoing briskly down the hallway while her heart slowly started beating again in her chest.
I thought you said that you couldn’t let me go.
Nineteen
Pride kept her immobile for long seconds. Pride, that strange burning feeling somewhere in her chest and, more practically, a lack of clothes.
The room was a mess. So was she. Dragging herself to her feet, Mina tucked the sheet in between her breasts to anchor it around her.
His final words echoed in her ears: Perhaps it’s time to let you go. She was going home, back to her queen…and all she could feel was a lump of solid iron weighing her chest down.
This was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? Mina pressed her knuckles to her lips. She didn’t know what to do.
For years she’d had a plan and moved toward it. Barrons had never been supposed to happen. And good God, what if he could help her?
What if she was making the biggest mistake of her life?
She didn’t have time to think her way through this mess. She had to make this choice, and she had to make it now. War was coming and the rookeries would burn beneath it, destroying people she’d come to know—and even admire a little. And Barrons would stay here until the end, trying to protect the people he cared for.
They’d make sure he died, Morioch and the prince consort and all his Falcons… But she could stop that from happening.
Oh God… Mina sailed out of the room after him, clad in nothing but the bedsheet and filled with an absolute terror of the unknown. Her choice, such as it was, had been made.
* * *
“Don’t you dare walk away from me.”
He was halfway down the stairs when the duchess’s voice rang through the hallway. Leo spun on his heel. Sailing down the hallway with what looked like the bedsheet wrapped around her, the duchess looked as though she were going to faint. Her cheeks were dangerously pale, red marks marring her throat from the scrape of his stubble and her mouth kiss-swollen.
His heart jacked into his throat. Walking away from her had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. The right thing to do, though it had nearly killed him. He didn’t think he could do it again. “What are you doing?”
“There are certain matters we need to discuss.”
He couldn’t do this. “Not now. There’s very little time for you to escape. If you get dressed—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Leo couldn’t say a damned thing. A surge of fierce want nearly brought him to his knees. Don’t do this. Please don’t do this… “If this is a game—” His throat thickened.
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Blade stepped out, the sound of soft murmurs behind him. He half closed the door, green eyes raking the duchess from head to toe. “That the latest fashion in the city?”
Her cheeks bloomed with spots of red. “I need to speak to you as well as Barrons. Give me a moment to get dressed and meet me in the parlor.”
Blade arched a brow. “Did you just forget where you are, luv?”
She turned on him, furious and glorious. “Do you want me to help you defeat Morioch or not?”
Leo’s gaze locked on her. Hard.
“As me ladyship commands,” Blade said after a faint hesitation. “But I ain’t got a lot o’ time right now for games.”
“No, right now you need a way to save the rookery and your wife. And I need clothing,” she told Blade.
Blade considered her for a long moment. “I’ll fetch you summat, but Leo’s playin’ lady’s maid.”
“Considering he’s directly responsible for the demise of my last set of clothes, I’ll accept that condition.”
Blade laughed under his breath. “Didn’t you tell me one time that she ain’t so bad once you clip ’er claws?” he murmured to Leo as he shut his door behind him, presumably to fetch the duchess something to wear.
Finding himself the recipient of that hot amber stare, Leo cut her off with an abrupt slice of the hand.
“Not here,” he said, climbing the stairs. “If you have something to say to me, then we’ll do it in private.” The last thing he wanted was his brother-in-law chortling under his breath about the situation.
“I have something to say, all right.” She turned, dragging her voluminous sheeted skirts behind her as she marched back to her designated rooms.
Oh, there was fire beneath the ice, of a certainty. Leo strode after her, shutting the door behind him with a sharp click. “My apologies. I thought you wanted to leave, and I have things to see to, if I’m to see my family safe. Christ, what did you expect? Did you want me to beg you to stay?”
He glanced at the bed and its mess of blankets, feeling a heated throb cut through him. Guilt. Anger. Hurt. Emotions he wasn’t entirely certain he was in control of. It had taken everything in him to let her go. “We fucked, Mina,” he said, enunciating the word clearly. “Nothing more. I must have missed the moment when you actually laid yourself on the line, gave me a damned inch in this or trusted me enough to—”
“That moment happened right here,” she yelled, pointing at the chair. “Do you honestly think I would simply give myself to anyone? To a man I didn’t…didn’t want?”
That slowed him down. He glared at the chair, fragments of memory assaulting him and arousing him instantly. Hot little cries of pleasure in his ear, her nails raking down his back… Dangerous thoughts. They turned him from his purpose, made him forget everything he needed to remember about her. The duchess had been raised to play games. She excelled at them. And somehow, what he wanted from her was not just to win, not anymore. This had become more than a game. “It didn’t mean anything. You said so yourself.”
“I lied. It meant more to me!” she cried, her eyes glittering with fierceness and rage and…something that made his gut muscles clench as if for a blow. “Why are you angry with me? Do you want me to tell the truth? I wanted this to happen. I’ve wanted it for years!”
“Why are you angry with me?” he countered with arms flung wide, though his breath caught. He couldn’t let himself believe it… Because if she was lying to him… “You were the one who said you didn’t want me, that I had no hold over you. So why be angry now? Isn’t this what you want?”
Mina cupped her palms around her upper arms as if to brace herself against the words echoing in the room. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want from me.”
Did he dare answer that? The words were a strangled admission of something he’d never let himself admit. “You know what I want.”
Someone to give a damn about him. Someone to care. A warm bed to crawl into when he returned home from court in the early hours of the morning. Soft, welcoming arms and a sleepy, murmured greeting. A smile in the darkness as he tipped her face up to his to kiss it.
Everything that he saw in Blade’s face when he looked at Honoria, or Lena’s tender smile when she cupped her hand against Will’s cheek when she thought they were alone. He wanted that. He wanted it so fiercely that sometimes he thought he’d choke on it, and yet he’d never dared put it into words.
Those bright eyes closed, her head lowering. “Then perhaps I don’t know how to give it.”
A pregnant pause thickened the air between them, full of want and need and everything unspoken. This was the precipice. The moment in which either of them could take a step forward to meet somewhere in the middle…or never meet at all. A moment full of risk, but he felt stronger now because of a hope there that hadn’t existed before.
He hadn’t understood the depths he’d sunk to until then. A bleak place full of shadows that threatened to envelop him. But there was a light now. A glint of a future. He just had to take it by both hands.
And so he did. He stepped forward, his hands cupping her cheeks and tipping her chin up. Mina looked at him, her eyes full of something he’d never seen there before. “Why?” Her voice was raw. “Why me?”
His thumbs stroked the silk of her cheeks. “Because it was always you.”
Again more silence as she digested the words, her eyes so far away that he felt for a moment as if he’d lost her. The light from the window reflected in her irises.
“I like it when you call me ‘Mina,’” she admitted. “It drove me insane at first that you would dare, but…I miss it. You’re the only one who does, did you know that? The only one with the courage to do so. You always push me. Always. And sometimes I’m not ready to be pushed. Sometimes it scares me that you get under my skin the way you do.” She took a shaky breath, hands curling in his shirt. “You frighten me, but I’m trying…I’m trying to stop pushing you away. It’s not easy for me.”
With her hair tumbled down around her shoulders and her hands clinging to his shirt, she looked far younger than she ever had.
He’d never, ever expected her to yield. But she had. And that was all he’d been asking for, really, for her to meet him halfway. Halfway to…whatever the hell this was.
Leo slid his arms around her, crushing her against his chest, his hand cradling her scalp. So small in his arms. As if that backbone of steel was finally threatening to crumble…and he didn’t want it to. Curling his fingers in her hair, he tipped her face up to his and pressed a kiss to her lips, tasting the sweet heat of her mouth.
And that spark between them hissed to life again. A connection he’d never been able to fight, no matter how much he knew this was a fool’s dream. Moaning deep in his throat, he pressed her back against the wall, following her with his hands and mouth. Mina was liquid fire in his arms. Everything changed. Everything. No more holding back. Her teeth bumped his in their desperate attempt to consume each other. Lashes fluttered against his cheeks as she sought to breathe, hand twining in his hair. Oh God, her breasts. His hands cupped them, mouth dropping to her throat, where he could taste the faint saltiness of her skin, lower, nipping at her collarbone…
A hand pushed against the middle of his chest and he drew back, gasping for breath, his blood a conflagration of need.
But the look on her face stopped him from taking more, the way she searched his eyes as if looking for the answer to some question he didn’t know. Mina licked her lips, face paling. “There’s something I need to tell you. And if I don’t tell you now…”
The air between them charged with something potent, something dangerous. He studied her gaze. “What?”
“For the last ten years,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I’ve been working to overthrow the prince consort. I have the means to do it too, if I can find the manpower.”
The entire floor dropped out from beneath him.
Part Three
The Tower
Twenty
“So you been workin’ to overthrow the prince consort for years.” Blade leaned against the fireplace in the parlor.
“Yes,” the duchess replied. Blade’s enormous tomcat, Puss, jumped into her lap. Mina hesitantly scratched its scarred ears and it leered at her, if cats could be said to leer. There was something sad in her eyes as she dragged the cat into her arms, her chest vibrating with its purr. “It began the year I ascended to the duchy.”
She’d lost her cat, Leo recalled. Found its body butchered in the center of her bed. He stretched his arm out along the back of the daybed, his fingers brushing against her shoulder. Just that, but she gave him a grateful look.
“I seem to recall you votin’ ’is way several times,” Blade replied.
“Of course. There could never be any doubts cast my way. So I voted for him when the outcome was unaffected by my choice or when it was a small concession or even on those rare occasions when we agreed.” Stroking the cat, she glanced at Blade. “You doubt me and yet you never asked why I voted for you to live three years ago.”
A Council vote in which Mina, as the seventh councilor, had held Blade’s life entirely in her hands. Leo stirred. He’d wondered.
“Thought you wanted Vickers dead, which I did for you,” Blade replied, his eyes narrowing.
“Partly, but you had already dueled with the duke—and won. The prince consort wished you dead for it. And we were never friends, Blade. But I let you live.”
“Why?” Leo asked.
Taking a deep breath, Mina licked her lips. “Because I have never worked alone.”
You could have heard a pin drop in that moment. Leo’s fingers curled into her shoulder, mind racing. Who was she protecting? Not once had the duchess ever revealed an alliance. No friendships, no romantic entanglements, barely any strategic associations at court.
But her words came back to him, about voting for the prince consort on smaller matters, keeping her cards entirely close to her chest. If she’d had an alliance, then it was one that must never be guessed. Someone she could be seen with and never have doubt cast upon their precise relationship.
Someone no one would believe…
He sucked in a sharp breath, incredulous. Of course. The one person she could spend time with and never be suspected, because the prince consort had asked her to take his wife in hand. “The queen,” he whispered, knowing it for the truth and yet instantly rejecting it. “The queen is doing this.”
The human queen everyone saw as a puppet. The same bloody woman who’d simply sat there without a hint of protest when the prince consort condemned him.
Mina nodded very minimally.
“Strike me blind,” Blade breathed. “The bloody queen.”
“She knighted Blade so that he would be in a position to fight Vickers,” Leo said. “That’s why you voted for him to live.”
“Usually we plan our moves, but Blade storming into the Ivory Tower to rescue Honoria was too good an opportunity to pass up,” Mina admitted. “Alexandra obviously saw some purpose to keeping you alive, so I followed her lead, hoping it was for the best.”
Bloody hell. Leo’s mind was working, still throwing up moments that seemed, in hindsight, something that should have alerted him at the time. All these years the two women had been playing the court in tandem. He couldn’t quite describe the way he felt.
“So ’ow’d you plan on overthrowin’ ’im?”
“She’s the leader of the humanist party,” Leo said.
The duchess continued, repeating everything that she’d told him earlier. About channeling funds through Sir Gideon Scott, the head of the Humans First political party, of how she and the queen had sold most of the jewelry the prince consort had given her and mortgaged the House of Casavian’s unentailed properties to create a business company. Small investments at first. Shipping, insurance, bonds, the Exchange…even a coffee plantation in the colonies that reaped reward. Building on that with every step over the years until the funds had begun flowing in.
The extent of it was stunning. Too impossible to believe. But he did. He had to. There was no other explanation for this, and Mina’s knowledge of the humanists was too comprehensive for her to be making this up.
All these years, they’d been fighting on the same side. She wasn’t the enemy; she never had been. And though he had admired her for her wits and courage, that was nothing compared to how he felt now. He felt as if the floor had dropped out from under him again.
