Chapter Twelve Ronin

When my eyes pop open with a start, a misty dawn's streaming into our digs, right past those open curtains we definitely left closed last night. A summer breeze, crisp with briny sea, tickles my sleepy face.

The balcony doors that overlook the courtyard—the same doors we always lock for security reasons—are swinging wide open.

What the fuck?

At the sight of those open doors, my Valyrian foresight gives a nasty ping.

My alarmed gaze darts over the canopy of our medieval bed to the naked sleep heap of my mates' bodies, spilling from a twist of blankets.

Zara's snuggled up tight with Neo, both smothered in sleeping alpha, with Max and Vasili flung possessively over the top. Lucius is sprawled face down and snoring with one heavy arm thrown over my hips. Plus he's got a territorial palm planted on Zara's lower tummy, right over her womb, which is sweet as fuck.

Thank gods for my mates. When they're about, all's right as rain.

Still, somehow, my jangled sense of unease is mounting.

My anxious eyes chart a course across our peaceful pad to Zara's desk.

There.

Just beside a tidy stack of Neo's spell books and alchemy texts, a glassy pair of dead eyes stares back.

I shoot up to sit with a gasp.

Bloody hell.

That's… a severed head. Propped right there on Zara's desk .

A severed head with feral features, pointy ears, and a spill of lavender hair.

That's a dead fucking Fae.

Whoever he is, he's not been dead for long.

And there's a live one sprawled in Zara's chair. With his booted legs crossed arrogantly on Zara's desk.

Holding Zara's crown in his steepled hands.

My gaze skids over the green leather gauntlets gripping that crown, over the knotted bulge of biceps and delts filling out that Avenger suit of supple dragonscale. I lock onto a face so familiar it'll be blazoned on my noggin till the day I kick the bucket. High cheekbones, narrow nose, ruthless mouth so delicate it's deceiving, all framed in a sleek curtain of forest-green hair, held back from a cruel face by the braid that circles his brow like a coronet.

Only the green eyepatch that slants across that familiar puss and covers one socket is new.

But even that I've glimpsed before. From afar. In the scrying glass.

Thanks to my thunderous gasp, he's spied me, sitting bolt upright and mother-naked, dragging a twist of sheet over my hips to preserve what little's left of my modesty.

His single eye, a perfect orb the color of cloudy jade, holds my riveted stare. One slim green brow lifts in a mocking arch.

"Good morrow, Ronin," he murmurs, in that voice like water trickling over rock. His tone's sharp and brittle as glass. "Have you missed me?"

"Zephyr?" I scrape out.

Fuck. I can't breathe.

It's him. The Unseelie King. The fucking Dark Fae who nabbed Zara and fucked her and mated her last term. The same Fae who came for my sister, once upon a time.

Oh gods, Gwen—

Grief claws at my chest like an angry cat. I rub a hand over my jackhammering heart and fight like blazes to breathe.

Of course I always fancied he'd pitch up here eventually. Fancied he'd come dragging trouble at his heels like the trailing end of a bullwhip. Fancied when he did, I'd be ready.

Now here's him, cool and composed as the blooming Queen of England (except, you know, for that severed head he's casually nudging with his boot).

And here's me, gasping for air like a gaffed fish.

Locked onto that sly mocking stare, I swallow hard against the fist of nerves that's throttling my throat.

"Took you long enough to pitch up here, mate." My voice is a shredded rasp, but I'm flat out amazed it's working.

Any rate, I've got to keep the volume down, or I'll startle my mates. They'll be startled enough in a tick when they see that Dark Fae and his severed head, won't they?

Of course our drop-by guest doesn't bother answering. Slowly his gaze wanders over my tattooed chest. Over the inky dragon, spewing flames, that claws across my pecs.

He's not seen it before. But he has to suspect the truth.

I did it for him.

For the pain of losing him.

After I fucking killed him.

Every prick of that needle etched the pain of my guilt and my grief and my doomed love for this fucking Dark Fae permanently into my skin.

Now, while I tingle under his cold stare, his suspicious gaze slides down my naked abs. It narrows on the fistful of sheets I'm clenching over my dick.

This has to be the worst possible time in history for me to pop a boner. With him looking like he'd rather slit my gullet than fuck me.

But of course that's what's happening.

Same as always. Even now, under that inscrutable Unseelie stare, I'm hard for him.

Him? Un-fucking-likely he's having the same reaction. He's impossible to read, always has been, even for a pedigreed telepath like me.

And the fact I can't read him makes me mental.

While the awkward silence stretches between us, I scowl into his broody face. "For fuck's sake, Zeph. Zara's been bonkers with worry over you—and the other one. Supposed to follow her right back from Avalon weeks ago, the both of you, weren't you?"

I pause again, but of course he only sneers.

Figures.

Why do I always have to fall for the most difficult blasted men ?

I heave a sigh and beg the gods for patience. "Why didn't you bloody answer the scrying glass when I rang?"

His lip curls in a snarl that reveals a tiny hint of fang.

"A scrying glass is not a telephone, Ronin Kilcannon Pendragon. Nor am I an answering service." His whispery murmur turns dark with malice.

Because when a Dark Fae knows your true name, there's naught that comes from it but evil.

Caught short by the threat, I prickle with nerves. Once upon a time, I trusted this deadly creature. I more than trusted him. I blooming loved him.

But he betrayed my trust.

Now, thanks to him, Gwen's dead.

He's no telepath, but I am, and I must be broadcasting my emotional mess on all channels. Against the honed line of his jaw, a muscle flexes.

He pulls in a slow hiss.

"I was… vexed to learn of your sister's passing. As I was vexed to be parted from Zara." His broody gaze drops to the crown he's gripping. "Unfortunately, I was given no choice in the matter. Nor was Ash. I have been… most occupied… in Avalon."

Without even looking, his booted toe gives a careless nudge to the severed head propped against Neo's stack of textbooks.

I'm a trained fighter and I've seen loads worse, so I take a sec to appreciate with a warrior's eye the clean slice across the cadaver's gullet.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but that was clearly the killing blow.

The strike's clean enough to attribute to those crossed swords jutting over Zephyr's slim shoulders. I know those blades, like I know the supple green dragonscale that encases his lethal frame. I know what he's capable of.

It's just the bitter hatred for me that's lurking in his whisper, poisoning his stare like venom, that's new.

Well, I've bloody well earned that hatred, haven't I?

I'm the sole reason for that eyepatch he's sporting.

I clench my jaw and scoot back till my spine hits the high carved headboard of Zara's bed. At the maneuver, my arse gives a twinge, because Lucius finally gave me that knot of his right before we slept. (Which was epic.) We were still locked when I nodded off .

Even now, hours later, my headmaster's arm is still wrapped round my thighs. But Lucius is twitching, his steady rhythm of snores dissolving in a wolfish grumble.

Bollocks. He'll be up any tick now.

I scrub a hand over my face, bristly with morning stubble, and think about popping out for coffee. Gods know, we'll all need it. But I'm naked under this sheet, and I'm feeling more than a bit self-conscious about flashing my junk—complete with hard-on and a Prince Albert piercing he's never seen—to my pissed-off first love.

I settle for airing my litany of grievances. "Why the everloving fuck did you stay away so long? If Gwen only knew you survived… if she'd not seen you plummet from Pendragon Tower…"

Fuck me. I can't even finish. Not out loud.

If he'd answered me in the glass even once, if he'd eased my guilt over killing him for her sake, if he'd done anything but what he did, my twin might still be alive. At least, she would've had more petrol in the tank to fuel her fight against Damien Gemini and those witchy bitches who were hazing her.

She might've not… hanged herself… in the midst of our troubled freshman year.

Damn it to hell, Gwen.

"Why did I stay away?" Zephyr's cruel voice cracks through the air like a whip. "Why did you throw the knife?"

I shoot him a tortured look. "You know why. Bleeding hell, Zeph. What else could I have done?"

He flourishes a graceful hand before his ruined socket, over the green eyepatch that hides his only flaw. That's his souvenir of the night he fell from the roof of the Pendragon family home with my knife buried in his eye.

"Does the sight of me now please you?" His harsh words flay me and claw at the open wound I carry in my chest instead of a beating heart. "To see firsthand what you've done to me? To witness the nightmare I've become?"

The whiplash snap of his voice shreds the morning hush.

Lucius rolls over to his back with a sluggish grunt. "What…?"

Then a flurry of naked limbs and scrambling bodies erupts from the bedclothes beside us .

"Well, now you've bloody done it," I mutter and wait for the storm to break.

"Oh my God." Zara emerges, stunned and disheveled in a wild tumble of teal curls, from her sea of alphas. Color floods her riveted face. "Zephyr?"

She flings back the blankets with a happy cry.

Instantly Max dives to cover her naked curves with his naked torso, his dragon eyes flaming, pinning his mate flat to the mattress and growling at this rival male who's invaded our lair. The pungent scent of leather and brimstone floods the air.

"Jesus, Max, take it easy. It's Zephyr!" Zara's simultaneously trying to soothe our possessive alpha dragon and push him aside.

Needless to say, Max is having none of it.

Still in rut then, obvi. Probably will be for days.

Next to her, Neo's rubbing his sleepy peepers and fumbling for his glasses and generally trying to wake up.

With a ferocious snarl, a naked Lucius—also clearly still in rut—leaps into a protective crouch beside our bed. He plants his bristling body between us and the intruder, guarding the shit out of his mates and fighting not to wolf out and just rip Zephyr's blooming throat out.

That leaves center stage to Vasili, who uncoils from our sea of blankets like a cobra rising from a basket.

"Well, well." My boyfriend's malicious murmur drips into the riveted silence like acid. "Look what the cat dragged in. Posed like an artistic composition from the Surrealist period titled Missing Fae with Severed Head ."