“You wouldn’t let me sleep, so let’s talk,” she growled. “Let’s talk about how you castigate me for doing what my family tells me to do when I have never participated in the invasion of entire nation-states at their behest!”
His temper spiked, but he tried his best to keep his tone calm. “I do not expect you to understand my father’s vision—”
“Gaheris’s vision,” she mocked. “You accused me of parroting my grandmother’s words, the night of the duel without bounds, but you’re just as bad, if not even worse! You’re a parrot and a puppet on a string and a dog on a leash—”
Alaric’s self-control slipped. He inched his face closer to hers. “I’m not the only one who married the enemy at the behest of a superior, Lachis’ka.”
She surged closer to him as well, a vicious triumph blazing in her eyes. “So you admit that Gaheris is your superior. What are you, then? Night Emperor in name alone?”
Alaric couldn’t believe that he’d let such a sentiment slip. He had always prided himself on his ability to play word games with the best of them, but Talasyn rendered his mind blank whenever she wasn’t driving him out of it entirely.
In this moment, it was the way that their faces were a heartbeat apart. It was her accursed nightdress. It was the burning of her fingertips around his wrist.
“We’re done discussing this,” he said curtly.
She bristled. “You are my consort. You don’t get to order me around.”
“You are my empress,” he shot back. “You answer to me.”
“As long as we are in the Nenavar Dominion, where husbands obey their wives, it’s my word that’s your law! How sad for you, to have two masters.”
“Lachis’ka.” Blinding fury guided him further over her side of the bed. The tip of his nose grazed hers. “Shut up.”
“Or what?” the insufferable woman shouted, right in his face. “What will you do, Your Majesty?”
Alaric lunged forward, without having any idea as to what would happen when he got there. He moved with instinct, with the dark rage of the Shadowforged set free at long last. In the mood that he was in, he thought that he just might go for Talasyn’s jugular—
—but, instead, he kissed her.
Although Talasyn had known that there would be consequences to letting her temper get the better of her yet again, she had let it happen, because it felt good to have a justifiable target for all of her anxious fury. She had wanted Alaric to be the flint that she struck against; she would have said anything to make it so. She had gladly tempted fate, come what may.
Yes, she had known what she was doing.
She just hadn’t been prepared for the consequences to be—this.
His lips on hers. Again.
It was nothing like the chaste peck that she’d given him at the altar or the swift yet gentle way in which he had reciprocated. This was the Belian ruins once more, blistering, all-consuming. She was still clinging to his wrist for some reason, but her free hand whipped up to slap him—
Only for her palm to meet the side of his face without any real vehemence, her fingers curling at his clean-shaven jaw. His own hand curved at her neck, his thumb pressing into her clavicle as he licked at the seam of her lips, just like before. And, just like before, she opened her mouth to him, and a low, primal sound rumbled in his throat as he hungrily pushed forward.
Talasyn felt as though she was burning up, her heart a wild thing, and she was falling, she was melting back onto eiderdown and silk sheets. Alaric followed her, their lips still connected, his enormous frame pinning her to the mattress as she looped her arms around his neck.
Some tiny corner of her brain was busily trying to figure out how an incendiary argument could have ended with him shoving his tongue down her throat, but all attempt at rationality soon vanished amidst the clamor of sensations as he palmed her right breast. As the hard length of him ground against her stomach. All while he kissed her as though he were channeling every last bit of frustration left over from the Hurricane Wars.
She whimpered into his mouth when his hand glided over her breast in a rough caress. Her nipple peaked under his touch through silk and lace, and he muttered an unintelligible oath against her lips. His voice was so gravelly that it added to the growing warmth between her legs.
So this is what it feels like, she thought in a daze.
To have someone roll her nipple between his fingers, teasing, caressing, unspooling delight all the way down to her core. To have someone ply her with open-mouthed kisses, fierce and relentless, the hard length in his trousers rocking against her belly.
But this wasn’t just someone. This was Alaric, her husband, her enemy, her dark mirror, and the Lightweave in her veins soared in triumph, recognizing him for what he was, calling out to his shadows, and everything was golden, was eclipse, was forever, was theirs alone.
More. She raked her nails down his back. Touch me everywhere, let me know how it feels, let me have this, I want, I need—
Alaric broke the kiss, dragging his lips from her mouth to the slope of her neck. Talasyn’s eyes fluttered open—when had she closed them?—and her spine arched as he sucked and nipped at the column of her throat, his hips rolling against hers. He was so long and broad. He covered her utterly, and maybe she could belong to this, if nothing else. His teeth scraped at a particularly sensitive spot on her neck and she shivered, her fingers tracing the shell of his ear. Her frenzied gaze slid to the Dominion insignia woven into the silk canopy—the coiled dragon rearing up, claws out, wings outstretched, ruby eyes gleaming, surrounded by a field of stars and moons.
The sight jolted her back to reality. Made her aware of the world again.
She couldn’t do this.
They couldn’t do this.
It would only end in ruin.
“Wait,” she gasped out.
He immediately stopped what he was doing, raising his head to peer down at her, cradling the side of her face in one large palm, the pad of his thumb rubbing along her cheekbone as he waited, as she’d asked him to. His eyes were liquid silver in the muddle of moonbeams and stardust, seeing her for what she was, seeing her as what he’d turned her into, this disheveled, undone mess of a girl.
She meant to tell him that they had to stop. Truly, she meant to. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She felt feverish and unsatisfied, the heat at the apex of her thighs pulsing with an unbearable ache, an emptiness. Her hand rose up to clutch at his shirtfront.
“Alaric,” she whispered.
He went tense at the sound of his name. His eyes darkened.
And then, with a growl, he fell upon her.
Or maybe she pulled him in. She had no idea who’d moved first. She knew only that the winter of her soul burst into springtime flowers the moment that he captured her lips in another shattering kiss. A kiss that seemed to beg the same things that her entire being was crying out for.
Don’t think.
Just feel this.
There’s only us.
Leaving her panting for breath, just as he was, he switched to her neck again, nibbling and sucking almost hard enough to bruise, inhaling the amber-and-rose perfume called dragon’s blood that had been dabbed on her pulse point. He mumbled “Tala” into her skin over and over, the vibrations rippling through her in tremors like tiny earthquakes, and a bittersweet tear dripped from the corner of her eye because talliyezarin was a weed on the Great Steppe but tala was the Nenavarene word for star, and there was no way that he could have known that, but she could pretend. She wrapped one leg around his lean hip and his kisses to her throat turned feverish and he rucked her gossamer skirt up her thighs and suddenly—