14. The Deep End

The Deep End

C ass watched me with an expression of wary consternation. His ears kept shifting like a nervous cat's, turning towards sounds I couldn't hear with sharp, animalistic movements. The line between his dark brows deepened.

"Do you…" He swallowed. "Do you even want to get to know me? To be here?"

Nobody bothered to coordinate our clothing . The idle thought flitted through my mind as I examined him, a discordant note that made me frown. We were supposed to be a unit: the Merciful King and Queen, a soulmated pair, bound to the Court and to each other.

We couldn't have looked more different. The petite mortal woman in her delicate body-chains and sultry violet silk, and the brawny fae man clad in black leather and bronze linen. Agility versus brute strength, and beauty versus power.

I didn't like the contrast. Had no one looked at him and seen the perfection of his face or the graceful control of his body? Had no one looked at me and seen the lean strength of my arms or the viciousness behind my dark eyes?

"Do I have a choice?" I asked quietly, meeting his gaze without challenge or fear.

Cass flinched back, dropping his eyes. "There's always a choice," he said, his voice going husky and ears pinning back. "You're formally tied to Mercy, and thus to me, but Dani is a breaker. She's a powerful mage," he continued. It sounded like he was forcing the words out through his throat, and that pain transferred to me in a sense of tightness that ran from my jaw to my gut. "Since we're neither balanced nor strongly bound, if I cooperated, and granted her the power and access to my soul, I think she could break that connection."

I frowned at him.

He took a deep breath, not looking up at me. His wings started trembling, the feathers ting-ting-ting ing against themselves. "It would certainly hurt, and leave us both damaged, but it could still be done." Cass swallowed again. "I would, of course, still see to it that you and your family were cared for monetarily. I—" His breath hitched. He closed his eyes in obvious pain. "I will do it if you ask it of me. You don't have to be here."

That despair left me shaky, my hands trembling and skin prickling. I wasn't sure if that was because of him or because of the darkness of his words and promise, but it made me uneasy. My brows pulled together. "Why are you so eager to see me go?" I asked, unable to keep my hurt leashed. "I know I'm not exactly the finest specimen of womanhood around, but—"

"Quyen, don't think that of me," he said, cutting me off and looking back up at me with obvious exhaustion. "I want you to stay. I don't mean to be a poor partner in this, or to make you feel as if I'm unwilling to learn how we correspond. I simply…" His brow creased. "I want you to choose to stay, rather than feeling that you must, whether for the sake of your family or because you feel trapped. I'm trapped here, but you aren't. I'm willing to let you go. I'm willing to help you go. If—"

I held up my hand, and he stopped instantly, closing his mouth and watching my face. "I'm staying," I said, tilting my head as I regarded him, trying to figure out what was going on underneath all those layers of control. "I recognize that there are other options, and I'm rejecting them. You've asked me three times, Cass," I said. "Don't ask me again."

His expression eased and the tremors stilled. "Three times," Cass said softly, his mouth slanting into a smile. "Did you know that's part of faery bargaining?" At my raised brow, he tilted his head back and breathed a laugh. "It's cultural, perhaps, but with enough weight that it's respected. Ask three times, and the third answer is both truest and final. To ask again is a supreme insult."

"So I don't have to listen to you coming up with increasingly awful ways to get rid of me anymore?" I asked, putting a hand on my hip.

"I suppose not," he said, keeping his voice quiet. It was like he was trying to be unintimidating, staying seated and with his body under calm control, his deep voice feathered with his breath and his deadly wings tucked behind him.

It was making me crazy. I wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled just to get him to stop acting like I was some sort of fragile flower who couldn't handle being towered over. If I bared my teeth at him, I wanted him to snarl back.

I opened my mouth – to say what, I wasn't sure, but definitely something waspish – but the universe had my back, because someone rapped sharply on the door before I could say anything. The sound yanked my attention towards the door, and in an instant I knew that three people stood outside the door. Two were guards, standing at their posts outside the small room; one was the event manager who'd brought me here.

While I was still reeling from that knowledge, the door opened, and the event manager bowed. "Your majesties, it's time for your entrance."

Cass glanced towards me before getting to his feet, lifting his wings over the couch in a way that looked practiced rather than casual. He waited for me to join him before inclining his head to the event manager.

The walk to the banquet hall was blessedly brief, since I had to endure it in silence with tension radiating off of Cass like he was walking into shootout at high noon. The event manager had timed our arrival well; there were only two sets of people waiting to be announced, and one of them was Vad and Danica, dressed in aggressively coordinated outfits done in crushed silk and gold-on-green brocade.

Vad cast a wink over his shoulder as they stepped up to the double doors. Danica was already on his arm, her fingers laced through his like a fancy lady, with a golden signet ring gleaming on her left ring finger.

Cass cleared his throat.

When I glanced up, lifting a brow, his mouth twitched into a rictus of a smile. "It's traditional for pairs to enter like them. Hand in hand," he said, jerking his chin at Vad and Dani the moment before they disappeared through the doorway. "I'm not sure it's wise for us to follow suit. It's been an unsettling day for me. My control is… frayed."

Through the opening, I could hear the announcer say, in a sonorous voice, "Their Graces Danica and Vaduin Khellair, the Duchess and Duke of Mirage, Archangels of Mercy and soulmated trueloves!"

The event manager beckoned us forward. Moving with grim precision, Cass stepped up to the now-closed double doors.

I followed suit and lifted my hand between us. "Suck it up, your splendor," I said, smirking sidelong at him. "Duty calls."

His wings scraped as he folded them back. I thought for a moment that Cass would refuse, but he dropped his chin and sighed. "Very well," he said, and held his arm out for me.

Cass' elbow was level with my shoulder. Even though he held his arm low for me, I still had to raise my hand up by my bicep to set it on top of his loosely-fisted hand.

He was wearing black leather half-finger gloves. I thought it might have been an attempt to reduce the ease of casual physical contact.

It wasn't enough.

The doors opened, and Cass flooded into me.

Deep, four-chambered lungs, cycling air instead of a simple inhale/exhale. Power in every inch of every limb, the kind of brute strength of body I would never possess. The movement of the air felt through the tiniest shift of feathers, the churn of anxiety, the warmth of a slim hand radiating heat through leather—

It was the same awareness of him that I'd had when the high priestess had been touching the two of us, except without any buffer between us. In a heartbeat, his body was as much mine as the one I wore. It was like being caught by the Court. I was lost in someone else.

We moved forward because Cass knew to step forward. My nostrils flared with stress, my vision doubled and the sounds impossible to parse. Someone said my name, and then we were walking down a long expanse of stone in tandem towards a blurry table and the bright shapes of standing figures.

I wasn't sure how we made it all the way there without me falling over my own two feet. It wasn't as if I was any less myself, but I had no concept of how to process having two bodies. I knew Cass had to be as intimately wrapped through my body as I was through his, yet it didn't seem to matter to him. He moved with grace, and I moved with him, and somehow we got to the table and in front of our chairs and sat down.

He took his hand away from mine. My arm fell down, boneless, and I broke into a cold sweat over every inch of my skin.

All around us, people sat, and the feast began.

Danica, much to my consternation, had been correct on all counts about the events of the feast. There were people fucking (a pretty human server and one of the fae lords, who had a grand time railing her against a wall), dueling (two fae women with glamored swords, going at it over a third woman, who watched with the soft-eyed pleasure of someone wholly in love), and bargaining (I saw at least three deals struck)—and there were bugs.

The bugs were easy to detect; great big shiny bronze beetles speared to a roast haunch with what looked like giant thorns were pretty obvious, as was honeycomb that came complete with bee larvae. Beetles weren't on the list of edibles for me, but Bà was a first generation immigrant and had brought a Vietnamese fondness for silkworm and bee larvae with her. It didn't bother me to see it at the table.

I was American enough that they weren't at the top-of-list for me, but I suspected the fae would be uneasy about a human Queen. Anything I could do to be friendly with their culture would probably go far.

So, I avoided the beetles, ate a piece of the bee-laden honeycomb, and smirked with satisfaction when Cass and Danica both stared at me in shock. With a considering sound, I leaned back, requested another piece from the server, and returned to my meal feeling like I'd managed some sort of coup.

The dinner dragged on for twelve courses and probably four hours. Even to my broad palate, used to a melting pot of ethnic cuisine that included traditional Asian, African, and Middle Eastern foods, some of the dishes came out of left field. I struggled through a salad made of small, roe-like spheres of gelatinous algae mixed with some sort of spicy sprouted grain and lots of fresh herbs; steaks from an anaconda-sized snake served in a sour berry sauce with tiny, sweet-tasting flowers were unusual but delicious .

The strangest of them, to my eye, was a vase full of saltwater with a full water-lily blooming in it, roots and all, and a pair of slender eels swimming in it. Cass gave me a wary, sidelong look, forked an eel onto his plate, and cleanly butchered it.

I put on my game face and followed suit.

Vaduin, I noted, consumed almost nothing but meat and cooked grains. To my relief, Cass was rather less carnivorous, though he did put away an astonishing quantity of food. He ate the beetles and honeycomb, too, once I'd gone first. He'd probably been holding back to keep from grossing me out.

That seemed to be a theme with him: holding back. It left me curious as to what lay behind that restraint. I understood why he was being careful, if that little display in the staging room was only a taste of what could happen when he slipped the leash, but applying the same level of control to everything seemed like treating everything like a nail because you had a proverbial hammer—and it seemed like a recipe for disaster. Nobody, not even Cass, could maintain perfect control with everything forever.

Sometimes you even needed to let go. People went to destruction rooms and demolition derbies for a reason. We'd replaced gladiators with linebackers, but we still needed an outlet for our aggression so we could keep our cool when it really mattered. I ran. Cadeo skateboarded. Auntie scoured pots while watching soap operas.

As for Cass…

I glanced sidelong at him, skimming my gaze up along his imposing physique. There was no reason for him to make himself small for the world. He was the King, after all.

And life is so much more fun when the tiger's off the leash.