27. Florian

Chapter 27

Florian

We were still snuggled up in bed when there was a knock on the door. I blinked, looking up at Cove, then the door to my bedroom. He didn’t look the least bit bashful about his nakedness, or the fact that he was in my bed and our clothes were strewn around the room. He just looked at me in question, because of course his manners were too good to invite people to come into my room.

“Enter,” I finally managed to squeak out.

It was a member of the kitchen staff, carrying a tray of food.

She smiled at us both, bright and sunny. “Morning, m’lords. How are you this morning?”

Then she marched over and, extending the legs of the tray, set it in front of me.

“We’re doing quite well, thank you,” Cove said, smiling back. He turned and rearranged the pillows so that we could both sit up in front of the tray, without letting the sheets slip and making the whole thing creepy and awkward by flashing her too much skin. “It’s very kind of you to bring food. We could have gone to the dining room.”

“Ladies Ivy and Fawn came down to the dining room first thing, and they decided it would be a good idea to send you breakfast,” she said, hurrying out, and then back in again with a second tray. How the heck much food had she brought us?

Tea and orange juice and toast and sausages and a huge bowl of fresh strawberries and cream...it was an impressive spread and made me feel more than a little decadent.

Especially when right there in front of the woman setting out the food, Cove pulled a strawberry from the dish, dipped it in the whipped cream, and held it out to me.

I hesitated a second, glancing at the server, who was blushing and deliberately not looking at us, but...she didn’t seem annoyed or disgusted. No. She was smiling. She ducked her head when she got the last of the food situated and stepped away from the bed. “Was there anything else I could bring you, Lord Dawnchaser?”

I looked up at her, where she was standing at the end of the bed, head bowed respectfully but eyes back on me. Not frightened. Not nervous. Not sly or smug.

And she’d called me Lord Dawnchaser. Like I was him...but at the same time, not him.

“No, thank you. This is all perfect. We appreciate your thoughtfulness, and my aunt and sister’s.” I leaned forward and took a bite of the strawberry Cove was still holding in front of me, nodding to her.

Cove gave her a sort of salute with the other half of the strawberry, then popped it into his own mouth. As he chewed, his eyes rolled back and he gave a little moan, which she took as her cue to leave, and none too soon.

“Fuck me that’s good,” he muttered as the door clicked shut behind her. “We can’t grow them that good back home. The winters get too cold.”

I sat up fully and leaned into him, picking up another strawberry. “Well that’s what we have here in Dawnchaser lands. Heat and humidity for days. It might suck to live in sometimes, but it makes for amazing berries. And peaches. Plums. Cherries. All the fruit, really.” I held the berry in front of his mouth, letting him take a bite, then watching the red juice drip down his lush lower lip until he licked it away. “If that’s what it takes to keep you, I’ll fill the house with every kind of fruit you could ever want. We’ll have it for every meal.”

He smiled back, leaning forward to take the other half of the berry from my fingers then licking the cream from my thumb. “I’ll enjoy every single thing you feed me, Florian, but it’s not why I’m staying.”

When he kissed me, the taste of berries exploded on my tongue, and it was almost as perfect as the taste of Cove Moonstriker.

I was about to suggest we forget all about looking for my father and make the day a repeat of the night before, spending the whole of it in bed, doing all the filthy things we could imagine, when my phone started buzzing on the nightstand.

Ugh.

I grabbed it to decline the call, but when I saw the number, I paused. It was the number my father had called from before.

“Florian?”

Shit. I hadn’t told Cove about Father’s other call, so I couldn’t easily explain...I shook my head but put a finger over my lips as I accepted the call and put my father on speaker.

“Today is the day,” my father announced, before I had a chance to so much as say hello. “We’re going to be rid of the Moonstriker once and for all.”

Across from me, Cove lifted a brow. Clearly, he wasn’t too concerned about today being the last day of his life, because he grabbed another strawberry from the bowl and held it out toward me.

“How exactly do you plan to achieve that goal?” I asked my father, before leaning in to take a bite.

Father scoffed aloud, and Cove popped the other half of the berry into his mouth, watching my phone like it was showing the latest episode of Housewives of Amalion City. “You’ll bring him out to the gazebo on the lake at two, and I’ll handle the rest.”

Oddly, Cove shuddered at the sentence. I focused on him, concerned, and it wasn’t hard to see that he was positively repelled. I’d never seen him look so bothered by anything. He wasn’t frightened of Father, I was sure, so what...oh. Of course. Father knew what Afton had done. He must also know where it had happened and thought to use that against Cove, in some extra-twisted form of psychological warfare. He thought Cove would be off his guard, being unexpectedly exposed to a place where he’d once been violated.

Somehow, that look on Cove’s face had me pushing back against my father’s demands in a way I never had before. “What the hell makes you think he’d trust me to bring him to an isolated corner of the estate alone? He’s a clever man, Father, and he trusts this family exactly as much as we deserve—which is to say not at all. He’d never?—”

“Oh please. Just offer to bend over for him. Your cousins say you’re already doing it. That you’ve got him ready to name you the Dawnchaser with or without Soz. Or is that it? You’ve decided to use him to help you take the position from me, the way my poor dear father took an accidental tumble down the stairs?” The sneer in his voice would have hurt me once, and I honestly couldn’t say why that had ever been true any longer. Why had his twisted, poisonous opinion ever mattered to me? “But you don’t have Soz to help you give me that little push down, do you? They don’t want you.”

Nausea bubbled up inside me at the words. Soz. Father was saying that he had used Soz to kill his own father, just as I’d been railing against the very concept of for days.

Poor Soz.

“No, Father. I’m not using Cove Moonstriker to try to take your position.” Somehow the words came out dead calm, even though I was the opposite of that on the inside. “As far as my bonding Soz, I would never use them to kill you. Not for all the money and position in the world.”

It was all true, without a whisper of a doubt in my head. I wasn’t using Cove, and I would never ask Soz to kill anyone on my behalf. That was good, since Father had always had an uncanny knack for knowing when people were lying to him. Maybe because half the words out of his own mouth were always lies.

Cove reached out and took my free hand in his, squeezing it tight. When I looked up at him, there was warmth and understanding in his expression. Of course there was. With the hand not holding mine, he grabbed another berry, like this was a normal morning and this conversation, this idea of me betraying him to my father, was nothing important at all. Meeting my eye again, he mouthed, “Agree to bring me.”

Again, of course. This was the reason Cove had come to Dawnchaser lands to begin with. He wanted this confrontation, wanted the chance to stop my father once and for all.

I wanted to scream and run and demand that no, Cove would never even be in the same postal code as my father again. I wanted to lock the dear, sweet man in my closet and protect him from the world.

But that wasn’t rational. It was because I loved him and wanted to help protect him. It was because my father always had something held back, some plan B and C and who knew how many other contingencies that were designed to land himself on his feet and Cove dead. At this moment, there was nothing worse I could imagine than Cove dead and Father returning.

“I should hope not,” my father said, snide and arrogant as ever, and it took me a moment to remember what he was responding to—the facts that I had no intention of using Cove or Soz to kill him. But he wasn’t hearing me and my truth either, only what he wanted to hear. “You’ll bring the Moonstriker. Then you can run and hide. I’ll handle everything else.”

There were a thousand things I wanted to say to that. Questions I wanted to ask him. Like if he thought there was a chance in all the hells that the Moonstriker stone, Iri, would ever bond him. If he thought the other families would suddenly forget what he’d done because he committed another murder. But none of that mattered. Nothing he said would be genuine; none of it would give me a moment’s peace about who and what my father was. I already had the answers I needed on that front.

I knew who my father was.

The problem wasn’t a lack of knowledge. It was that I would never be satisfied with the monster who had helped create me. But Father couldn’t help me with that even if he wanted to. He was what he was, and nothing would change it.

So I looked Cove in the eye as he nodded to me, and I gave a sharp nod of my own. “I’ll find a way. I’ll bring the Moonstriker.”

“Alo—” Father started to speak again, but I hung up the phone. I wasn’t going to promise him I’d bring Cove alone, because I’d be damned if I would let Cove face him alone. No, I was going to bring every single person willing to come with us to face the bastard.