“Hard,” she managed to say.
“You want to be on top?”
Release gathered through her body like a wave about to break. “I want my turn on top, and then I want you behind me, fucking me like an animal.”
“Fuck!” he shouted, and she heard flesh slapping against flesh in the background.
“I want you to ride me so hard I’m screaming,” she went on, driving the vibrator in and out. Gods, she was going to explode— “Anything you want. Anything you want, Bryce, I’ll give it to you—”
That did it. Not the words, but her name on his tongue.
Bryce moaned, deep in her throat, her pants coming quick and wild, her core clenching around the vibrator as she pumped it in and out, working through her climax.
Hunt groaned again, cursing, and then he fell silent. Only their breathing filled the phone. Bryce lay limp against the bed.
“I want you so badly,” he ground out.
She smiled. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah. Because I’m going to fuck your brains out when you come home to me.”
He laughed softly, full of sensual promise. “Likewise, Quinlan.”
Tharion sat atop the smooth rock half-submerged by a bend in the middle of the Istros and waited for his queen to respond to his report. But the River Queen, lounging on a bed of river weeds like a pool float, kept her eyes closed against the morning sun, as if she hadn’t heard a single word of what he’d been explaining about the Bone Quarter and the Under-King.
A minute passed, then another. Tharion asked at last, “Is it true?”
Her dark hair floated beyond her raft of weeds, writhing over the surface like sea snakes. “Does it disturb you, to have your soul sent back into the light from whence it came?”
He didn’t need to be Captain of Intelligence to know she was avoiding his question. Tharion said, “It disturbs me that we’re told we rest in peace and contentment, yet we’re basically cattle, waiting for the slaughter.”
“And yet you have no problem with your body being sent back to feed the earth and its creatures. Why is the soul any different?”
Tharion crossed his arms. “Did you know?”
She cracked open a warning eye. But she propped her head on a fist. “Perhaps there is something beyond the secondlight. Someplace our souls go even after that.”
For a glimmer, he could see the world she seemed to want: a world without the Asteri, where the River Queen ruled the waters, and the current system of soul-recycling remained, because hey, it kept the lights on. Literally.
Only those in power would change. Perhaps that was all she wanted Emile for: a weapon to ensure her survival and triumph in any upcoming conflict between Ophion and the Asteri.
But Tharion said, “The search for Emile Renast continues. I thought I had an easier way to find him, but it was a dead end.” Tracking Pippa’s string of bodies would have to remain his only path toward the kid.
“Report when you have anything.” She didn’t look back at him as the river weeds fell apart beneath her and she gently sank into the blue water.
Then she was gone, dissolving into the Istros itself and floating away as glowing blue plankton—like a trail of stars soared through the river.
Was a rebellion worth fighting, if it only put other power-hungry leaders in charge? For the innocents, yes, but … Tharion couldn’t help but wonder if there was a better way to fight this war. Better people to lead it.
41
A week later, Ruhn stood beside Cormac and smiled as Bryce sweated in the Aux facility’s private training ring.
“You’re not concentrating,” Cormac scolded.
“My head literally aches.”
“Focus on that piece of paper and simply step there.”
“You say that like it’s easy.”
“It is.”
Ruhn wished this were the first time he’d heard this conversation. Witnessed this song-and-dance number between Bryce and Cormac as the prince tried to teach her to teleport. But in the week since all that major shit had gone down, this had been the main highlight. Their enemies had been unnervingly quiet.
When Cormac wasn’t attending various Fae functions, Ruhn knew his cousin had been hunting for Emile. Ruhn had even gone with him twice, Bryce in tow, to wander the various parks of Moonwood, hoping the boy was camping out. All to no avail. Not a whisper of the kid anywhere.
Tharion had reported yesterday that he couldn’t find the boy, either. From Tharion’s unusually haggard face, Ruhn had wondered if the mer’s queen was breathing down his neck about it. But no more bodies had been found. Either the kid was here, in hiding, or someone else had gotten him.