Chapter Twenty-Six Zephyr

My lost eye pains me like hellfire.

This happens when I am under strain. But the hellish pain in my eye is naught compared to the volcano of heartbreak and outrage erupting in my heart.

Although the Avalon night is summer-warm, I crouch on my heels before the witchfire hearth and hug my knees for comfort.

At the edge of sight from my remaining eye, I can just discern Ronin, huddled wretchedly at the table over the messy remnants of our abandoned supper. He remains precisely where he has lingered since Zara cleared the room for this long-delayed encounter.

My former lover's face is buried in his hands, midnight hair streaming over his fingers and pooling on the table before him like inky tears. His white-knuckled fingers dig cruelly into his face. As though he would peel off his own skin to escape this ruin of all that is left of our love.

In fact, he's digging those digits into his own skin so harshly he'll surely do himself an injury.

Not that I would care, for my own sake.

But Zara will not thank me if her warlock is damaged under my watch.

With a reluctant sigh, I adjust my eyepatch over my empty socket, straighten my stiff and aching body, and tread toward the table with leaden feet.

My approach is not silent. But he—this consummate hunter and killer of men—he betrays no sign that he hears .

I clear the residue of old rage that clogs my throat. Swallow down the bitter bile of old regret.

"Ronin," I say gruffly.

"How can you even stand to look at me?" His muffled voice barely seeps through his palms. "I ruined your face for nothing. Spurned your love for nothing. Halfway blinded you—for nothing. And Gwen, she… died anyway. She always felt guilty that I—killed my own lover—for her sake."

His voice splinters and his shoulders shake. I am no mind-reader, not like he is. But I require no telepathy to know he is weeping.

A perverse and terrible ache of tenderness—for him , this treacherous mortal lover who betrayed me—seeps through my frozen heart.

"Stop scrubbing at your face," I say roughly. "It won't bring her back. Besides, if you damage yourself, Zara will have my very head on a serving platter. One whiff of physical pain through that bond you share, and our queen will descend on this chamber like a Valkyrie."

Ronin huffs out a harsh breath that acknowledges this truth. But at least his shoulders stop shaking.

Zara is a safer subject for him than Gwendolyn.

Safer for both of us.

"Word to the wise. You'll not get the shifters off her tonight," he mumbles through a raspy throat. "She's almost fertile, and they're in full rut. All three of them. Even Vasili, though he hides it better than the rest of that lot. Denies it, even to himself. But he's pissy with rut."

This sounds more like the Ronin I knew.

"'Tis a useful insight. Though if Zara wishes to open her womb in this realm, she need only drink enchanted moon tea or wine to conceive. This I have told her before. A certain herb, mixed with either, will open any womb in Avalon." I unbend enough to splash common wine from the pitcher into his long-dry goblet. "Fortunately, I have never opposed the notion of sharing her. We Unseelie royals have long been polyamorous."

He grunts and lapses back into brooding silence.

But at least he's stopped tearing at his own face.

I fortify myself with a long swallow from my own cup and savor the fruity bite of Avalon apple laced with pomegranate. A poor antidote to the bitter brew of rage I've been quaffing by the dram since the night took my eye.

"Let us speak plainly," I say at last, frowning down at his lowered head, "if speak we must. Ronin… how… for moon's sake, how could you possibly ever imagine I meant to steal your sister?"

His hands drop at last to reveal his ravaged face. His amber eyes are reddened and his lashes spiky with tears.

Damnation.

My unruly heart twists like a wrung cloth.

Ever since we were boys, striking up our unlikely friendship, playing at kings-and-castles near the standing stone portal on his Welsh estate, I've never been able to abide his tears.

"Bollocks. How could I think anything else?" His voice scrapes, raw with disbelief, through a throat thick with grief. "Your mum and my dad arranged that blasted betrothal between you and Gwen before we could toddle. Always looming over us, wasn't it?"

"Indeed, it was." Under the cutting strap of my eyepatch, my brow furrows. "But then there was you. My secret friend, my would-be brother, and then… in time… more." Harshly I clear an obstruction from my throat. "After that night—after we came together at the Beltane fire—I knew I would never take any other Pendragon to my bed."

His topaz eyes fire with mutiny. "Yet you pitched up for Gwen anyway, right on the blooming night that contract called for—"

I lower my cup to glare. "I ‘pitched up' to repudiate that moon-cursed contract and steal you instead."

"Left it a bit late then, didn't you?" he demands with mounting heat. "My poor sister was in hysterics. She bloody begged me not to let you drag her off."

The vast extent of his incomprehension is truly hopeless. For too long, he has doubted me.

For too long, he has hated me.

My hands lift in a gesture of utter futility.

"My mother, Queen Maeve, was not… an easy woman," I say carefully. This is so clearly a gross understatement that my Unseelie throat, which is physically incapable of uttering an untruth, nearly closes around the words.

I hack through the obstruction with the ruthless sword of truth. "That infernal contract was purely Maeve's doing. I—needed every minute of that time—to persuade her to undo it."

"But you're the la-dee-dah Dark Fae King. The omnipotent almighty tyrant of the Unseelie realm. You're bloody King Henry the Eighth, only there's physically less of you." He looks me over, in all the militant splendor of my dragonscale armor, with a blatant disbelief that drips with scorn and mockery. "Nothing happens here except by your command."

"In those days, believe me, Maeve wielded far more power than I did." I meet his skepticism with my own exasperated grimace. "As you can surely appreciate, Ronin Pendragon, 'twould serve me no purpose to steal you away to the Faerie realm, only for my wrathful royal parent to send you straight back!"

In truth, my monstrous mother—with her carnal appetites—would have been equally likely to snatch up an exotic morsel like Ronin, with his beauty and power, and make him her own slave and concubine.

That abomination, I could never have borne.

My own wrath is rising and my patience slipping. After all, am I not the wronged party in this hellish mess? That Ronin lost his sister is none of my doing. But it is, most assuredly, his fault that I lost an eye.

"By all that is right and proper," I grit, "it should be I who condemn you for having so little faith in me. So little trust in our love."

The harder I fight for control, the swifter it slips like sand through my fingers. I lean forward, grip the table's edge until my nails leave crescents in the wood, and glare at this bedamned creature who stole my tender heart, then valued it so cheaply.

"That night…" I breathe deeply "…the night we finally came together… that night meant everything to me. Yet to you, very clearly, it meant nothing—"

"Nothing?" Ever the warrior, he shoves to his feet and glares right back. "For fuck's sake, Zeph! When you turned up trespassing on my roof—at the same damn hour the contract said you'd come for Gwen—even then, I only meant to throw the knife to warn you."

"Pity your hand slipped," I say tightly.

"You moved just as I threw." By the moon, he even dares to sound indignant.

I've heard this from him before. Amidst a blinding snowstorm on a night without moon or stars, chaos reigned on that roof.

But he is mortal.

He can lie.

And I've clung to my grievance against him far too long to relinquish it so easily.

He frowns at my stubborn silence. "Bollocks, how'd you even survive the fall? I—searched the rocks under Pendragon Tower straightaway, I searched till dawn, but you were nowhere. I… assumed the tide took you."

These are memories I scarcely care to revisit. The forced recollection clips my syllables and abrades my courtesy.

"I was barely conscious. I can scarcely recall. But Xhevith plucked me from the sea—and brought me straight to Ash." My fists clench and unclench. "'Tis fortunate for you I didn't tear down that tower around your ears and seed your farmer's soil with acid in wrathful retribution. Believe me, I was tempted."

Ronin folds his arms across his chest and scowls.

For a breath, I'm utterly distracted by his furious beauty. His decadent mane of midnight hair spills in a wind-whipped tangle down his back, his golden skin is flushed with passion, and the mortal witchery called psi fire makes golden flames dance in his eyes. The inky fire of his tattoo—an adornment that is new, in the years since I traced and tasted every handspan of his skin with my tongue—that tattoo wicks above his collar to lick along his neck.

What's more, he still wears those damnable leather pants that encase his narrow hips and sinewy thighs like a glove. In proper dragonscale, he would look truly wicked. For he is a dragonrider. He rides that behemoth Maxim without a trace of fear, by all appearances he glories in dragon flight, and I hold utterly no doubt my Xhevith too would tolerate him.

If Ronin were ever my consort, he would have that right. To share my dragon, to wear my colors, to warm my bed—

"So what happens now?" he says abruptly. "An eye for an eye?"

Rudely interrupted in my ogling and musing, I release the table and fall back in shock. Mine is a reaction I'm far too startled and too appalled to hide.

In earnest truth, no matter what's passed between us, I'd rather take my own remaining eye than ever wield my blade against him.

No doubt he can read these thoughts—and the others too—in my face. Where I'm concerned, he was always far too perceptive .

It occurs to me that I'm tempted to ask him what he would like to happen.

Most of all, what he would like to happen between the two of us.

But I'm nowhere near prepared to hear him answer.

"Now…" In desperate search of some safer inspiration than these unruly musings about my unresolved feelings for my former flame, I glance toward the closed door that leads to the royal bedchamber.

Beyond that door, the hushed murmur of my queen and her harem— our harem, if I can ever manage to win them—beckons me.

Yet the deep baritone rumble of my own Seelie consort is (uncharacteristically) silent.

"Now," I sigh, "I must somehow persuade Ash not to challenge you to lethal combat to avenge my lost eye and shattered heart. I fear that persuasion will be no easy feat."