Excerpt Claimed

Nicki Clark inched her fingers along the thick ridge of the stone wall, grateful as always that the kingdom of O?ros had a deep and abiding love for ornamental frescoes over every door, window and empty roofline in the city. She hadn’t tried escaping the palace at this particular point before, but the descent so far had been easy.

Getting down the last several feet would be more of a trick.

“One...two...” she muttered, planting her right foot solidly as she eased her way down. She didn’t have to jump the entire distance, not yet. The wall was smoother below this point, but it was nevertheless hewn out of thousand-year-old chunks of stone. She could get purchase for at least another yard, then drop. Her shoes were sturdy and her grip strong. Besides, she’d already done this a dozen times in the weeks she’d been trapped inside the gilded palace like a caged lion.

She shimmied downward, her heart rate picking up. She’d not scouted out this specific four feet of wall, she’d merely glimpsed it in passing from down the alley when she’d been out shopping the day before with her three friends. It’d looked promising, but the space below her was currently hung with early morning shadows, and she couldn’t see beyond the next small jut of stone.

She swung a foot out experimentally?—

And nearly fell off the wall when it was forcibly stopped by someone’s hard grasp. A grasp that was infuriatingly familiar.

Nicki gave her foot a hard shake. “Back off, Stefan.”

The diplomatic ambassador of the royal family of O?ros held fast.

“If you insist on clambering over walls to escape the confines of the royal palace, you should at least do a better job of picking your locations,” Stefan said in his cool, superior voice. When he wanted, like now, he could speak English without so much as a trace of the thick accent she’d heard him use when he spoke his native tongue. As usual, she wished he would stick to O?rois so she didn’t have to listen to his complaints about every detail of her existence.

“So far as I can tell, there’s nothing beneath me but you. And if you have your hand on my foot, it’s not a far drop. So go away.”

“I’ll catch you.”

Nicki took a moment to rest her head against the cool stone. Solid rock was more reasonable than Stefan when he got that tone. But she couldn’t give in to him—not on this, not on anything. And she definitely couldn’t let the drop-dead gorgeous demigod know how he made her feel.