Page 33 of Garden of Poisoned Delights

THEN GO BACK IN SO THEY CAN RESCUE YOU PROPERLY

Hektor laughed and picked Flick up, nuzzling his nose. Baz wasn’t overly concerned about their reunion just yet—he was more worried about the forbidding look on Emile’s face as he approached. Baz got to his knees before Emile could reach him, and Hektor looked down at Baz, bewildered, before getting to his knees as well.

“We don’t have to,” he whispered to Baz. “He’s just Emile.”

Baz gave Hektor a warning look—when had the king become just Emile—and turned his gaze downward as Emile reached him. Emile’s boots came into view, and Baz closed his eyes briefly as Emile gathered his hair in one hand, the most affection he could show with half the docks watching the chaos behind them.

“I see you’ve taken to burning ships in your spare time.” The words were right, but Emile’s voice sounded flat, deadened with too much emotion. Baz clenched his hands on his thighs.

“That’s me, your majesty,” Hektor said. “It isn’t real fire.” He whistled, and the gathering crowd gasped as the illusions disappeared. “Most of our captors jumped ship.”

“Then we’ll have to fish them out,” Isiodore said, and Baz heard boots moving around him on the dock. Emile tugged his hair lightly, and Baz glanced up at him. There was pain behind Emile’s eyes, but only Baz would know how to look for it.

“I should have told you,” Baz said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“We’ll discuss this later, my hawk.” Emile tugged again, and Baz got to his feet, “at home.”

* * *

Emile was very quiet as they made their way back to the palace.

Logically, he knew that there was no reason for him to be angry. Bazyli hadn’t thrown himself on a ship to flee home to Mislia—Bazyli had no desire to ever see Mislia again, unless he was allowed to burn the pleasure houses down to cinder. He’d been lured to the ship. Bazyli wasn’t even hurt, and the people who’d attempted to kidnap him were already in official custody. Emile wanted them all hung up on the palace gates, and was having to remind himself that he wasn’t that sort of man anymore.

If Bazyli had been killed, perhaps he might have become that man again, which wasn’t entirely a welcome thought, that his mental clarity relied so much on someone else’s safety. Emile knew the power of grief and how deeply it stung, and losing Bazyli would break him in a way that he didn’t think would ever be fixed.

Baz was quiet in the carriage, kneeling though Emile hadn’t told him to. His dominance was at a height, enough that a servant and one of the hostlers had knelt just from Emile walking past them to the carriage. He suspected Baz would prefer not to kneel at the moment, but Emile was not entirely interested in what Bazyli preferred.

“I’m fine, Emile,” Baz said, his deep, lovely voice filling the quiet of the carriage. “I wasn’t hurt.”

“Yet,” Emile said, not looking at him, twitching the curtain back to stare out of the window. “You won’t be unless you speak to me again without permission.”

Baz drew in a soft breath, but he said nothing else as they made the trip back. It was a short one—people tended to defer the right of way to the royal carriage—but it felt as if it took an age, and Emile brushed off both Baz and the footmen who tried to help him out of the carriage, only just managing not to snap that he might not be able to keep his consorts safe but he could at the very least descend a carriage on his own.

He was being a beast and he knew it, but the anger was the only thing keeping the panic at bay for the moment, and Emile was still the king. Adrien’s succession was assured, but that didn’t mean he was necessarily safe. A show of weakness could rile up nobles who were content to mutter instead of plot seditious acts, and that was the last thing he wanted.

Emile took the back hallway to the royal residence, which was mostly used by servants. The only sound was the click of his boots on the tile, echoing in the empty hall, with Baz smart enough to know Emile wanted him to crawl without having to tell him. When they entered the residence, Emile breezed past the door to his bedroom and went instead to the Star Chamber, which had become Baz’s space entirely. There were plants of all kinds in little pots throughout the room—climbing, flowering vines with bright blooms adorning the bathing pool and its waterfall, lilies floating serenely in the water itself. There was a table with jars for tinctures and clean, cut cloth for poultices near the bed, and little, white Mislian nightflowers bloomed even as Emile stood there, tense and wary, feeling the slight hum of the goddess that lived in Baz’s mind.

“She will not wish to be here tonight,” Emile said, staring at the flowers growing almost frantically at his feet. Ambrosia did not always understand their play, especially when Baz was in need of more pain than usual…or when Emile was in need of giving it. “I will take care of him, Lady Ambrosia.”

There was a strange breeze that came from nowhere, and a shiver danced up Emile’s neck, but he was used to this by now. He finally turned and saw Baz, kneeling near the bath with flowers in his dark hair, and if he were in a less dark mood, he might have smiled. Baz claimed to have been terrible at being a whore, but he certainly knew how to make himself look appealing, kneeling next to a waterfall of tropical flowers with his hair unbound and slightly tousled, looking just nervous enough to make the sadist in Emile take notice. Emile’s collar was around Baz’s neck, but the only other jewelry he wore were the piercings on his nipples and a ring they’d exchanged at their very private wedding ceremony. With Ambrosia having decided it was all right to leave them to it, Baz’s eyes were a beautiful, deep shade of dark blue.

He was breathtaking, and while Emile couldn’t see the tattoo on his chest, he knew that in place of the Archmage’s old dragon were vines featuring a few intricately rendered, meaningful flowers—the little, white Mislian night flowers, a red carnation, a red rose, even the clover he’d forced down Emile’s throat the night they met in the garden. There was a sunburst design added as well, which wasn’t so much to declare Bazyli belonged to Emile as it was a private reminder of their conversation about love, how you had to turn back toward the sun if you didn’t wish to wither on the vine.

“Why is my submissive still dressed in my presence?” Emile snapped, aware his mood was making him an intolerable dominant and that his submissive could refuse to pretend otherwise.

“My dominant did not tell me to strip,” Baz said, and his voice was even, but he looked…unsettled, perhaps, and Emile had a horrible feeling that Baz was worried about him, about his feelings. “Is that what you want?”

Emile wasn’t in the mood for banter. “Yes.”

Sensing his anger, Baz rose to his feet and stripped, elegant and graceful as he always was. His skin was pale as snow, and the bruises from the caning Emile had administered last week at Baz’s request on his birthday were just beginning to fade.

“They took my brother,” Bazyli said, folding his clothes in a way he wouldn’t have if he were trying to vex Emile or play brat in the way Emile appreciated. “I rushed off without thinking. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, you should be. I am the king, Bazyli. Do you think that if you needed to find someone, perhaps asking the most powerful man in the country might have been more useful than rushing like a fool off to the docks?”

“I didn’t. You don’t know how many times I had to do this, in Mislia,” Baz said, sitting on the raised edge of the bathing pool to take off his sandals. “I reacted, Emile. I didn’t think.”

“Yes, and you shouldn’t do that. I would advise you stop talking if you do not want me to leave you here with your plants and your excuses.”

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