her fist, he guessed the courtly gesture had expired sometime since he last walked the sunlit realm. A pity, for the touch told him much. Under the pads of his fingers, he felt calluses with a reserved strength behind them. This was no pampered house cat.
Also, the simple touch was a pleasure.
She, however, did not seem particularly pleased as she plucked the cloak from his slackened grip and slid it over her shoulders, wrapping it tightly around her waist. Scaled for his breadth, the folds went nearly twice around her until she secured the belt. The gray cloth looked rough and dowdy against her creamy skin. With a whisper of magic, he could match the cloak to the amber glow of her eyes, reweave it as a silken gown to skim her curves....
With a ruthlessness to befit his name, he crushed the fantasy. He wore the crude homespun because every twitch of his power sustained the geasa. He needed all his magic to find the flaw in the wards.
And she was the key.
“There was a phae portal in that lake,” he confirmed. “But it should have been closed. I am uncertain how you got through. Or how to send you back. What were you doing when it opened?”
“Nothing.” She wrinkled her nose. If she’d had whiskers, they would have twitched. “I was looking at the moon, and it turned red.”
Bloodied water. Raze glanced at the cell door. The slow weep from the iron had halted, and the metal seemed to quiver with silent intensity. The silence of attentive listening.
“Come.” He reached for her arm, but she avoided his touch, as lithe as a tabby arching away from an unwanted petting. “If you want out, I need to be in the center of my power.”
She stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Do I have another option?”
Inclining his head, he considered briefly. “No.”
She swept one hand ahead of her. “Then after you.”
He stepped ahead of her, making his way down the corridor.
Leading had never been his intent. Despite the legacy that made him a prince, in the desperate days of the Iron Wars he had become a soldier. He’d served as vizier only because so few survived, but now, with the barrier between the phaedrealii and the sunlit realm fading, he knew he had to finish what they’d been so loathe to do: seal the court forever.
If he didn’t, no one—not the phae, not the werelings, not the humans—would escape the bloodbath.
Chapter Three
Yelena followed the hulking phae, making note of the twists and turns of the corridors in case she needed to find her way back. She didn’t trust him—no one should trust any of the phae—but something about that black iron door made her hackles prickle and she was relieved to step away.
Plus, she needed to keep this Prince Raze in sight. Somehow he had triggered the verita luna. Was it a phae trick? But maybe the trick would help her sisters with the change.
She reached down inside herself again, feeling for the glorious power of the tigress, but found only fleeting wisps, all that remained after her nightmare in the desert—
No, she’d sulked enough. This was her last chance to find her way back to what she was. Though the brief change had relieved some of the pressure inside her, she couldn’t be without the verita luna for much longer or she’d go crazy.
How had he done it? Her skin still tingled with the aftermath of the change, but more, she remembered the feeling of him pinned between her legs when she’d straddled him in both her forms. He was big and solid, formidable in a way she had not expected. She’d had no real dealings with the phae, not when they’d kept to themselves for so long, but she’d always thought they were wispy, languid, sort of metrosexual-y.
Not this one.
She let her gaze trace the expanse of his wide shoulders narrowing to lean hips. The sleeveless gray tunic revealed what she’d thought were Byzantine tattoos down both heavily muscled arms, but the ambient light coming from nowhere caught a faint pale gleam within his darker skin, and she realized the marks were scars.
Yelena knew scars. These must have hurt like hell. For a heartbeat, the detachment she’d cultivated since coming home wavered, her careful facade splitting as intricately as his skin. If he looked, he’d be able to see the ugly truths that had brought her to this place.... Well, not to this place in particular—where the hallway had widened into an intimidating expanse of soaring columns and flying buttresses, like the hallucinations of a first-year architecture student with a better understanding of grandiosity than gravity—but to this place in her life
Then she remembered where they were—the phaedrealii—where nothing was real, where every shifting surface was an illusion.
“Dreams,” she said suddenly.
Raze glanced back then shortened his stride to fall into step beside her. Despite his size, he moved with an almost animal elegance that reminded her of her own people as well as the more instinctual human warriors she had worked alongside. “What about them?”
“When I walked down to the lake, I said, ‘Perchance to dream.’”
His look sharpened. “You sought to drown yourself, to die?”
She scowled at him. “You know Shakespeare.”
“Along with the drunken wanderers, some poets have found their way to phaedrealii.” His hand dropped to the long knife tucked against his side. “Dreams and death are common paths to the court. Although only one leads out again.”
They had come to an arched doorway where a stairwell spiraled down. The mellow glow of the corridor did not reach past the first curve of the stair. Tiny will-o’-the-wisps drifted in the darkness, their firefly lights twinkling.
Yelena balked. “I’m not going any farther.”
The phae tilted his head. His dark hair was too short to fall into his eyes, but it had just enough length to start to curl, a quirky contrast to the unyielding slash of his high cheekbones and tight jaw. “Into death? Or dreams?”
“Neither.” She glowered; she wasn’t going to forgive him for that “drunken wanderer” crack. “Not until you tell me how you inspired the verita luna.”
When he crossed his arms, the open neck of his tunic gaped, revealing more scars descending over his collarbones to what she could see of his broad, smooth chest.
She swallowed, suddenly certain the scars were no glamour. How far down did the wounds go? The phae were known for their perilous beauty, but she sensed these marks were not meant to be alluring; quite the opposite, they were the sign of something very, very dangerous.
Still, against her better judgment, her fingers twitched to confirm the marks were real. That he was real.
He stared at her, his gray eyes hooded. “What did you dream?”
She snapped her gaze up from the taut line of his chest. “Excuse me?”
“At the portal, which should have been locked, you spoke of dreams. Dreams of what?”
She
