Page 55 of Crowned By the Fae King

Cass frowned. I did, too, enough of my focus on him that my body automatically mirrored his.

Quyen, I thought, leaning into my sense of him a little more, letting myself get swept up in my soulmate. Look at Quyen.

His eyes slowly skimmed across the crowd to land on me. He started breathing too hard, heart pounding and lips parting. Quyen? The thought wasn't spoken clearly, so faint and fuzzy that I might not have been able to parse it if it had been anything other than my name.

I could never have left, I realized. Not with this on the table. Not with him on the other end of the line.

I tapped the corner of my eye, smiling at him. Eyes on me, I said again, elation flooding my veins. I really was touching his soul. Six weeks of swimming through wild magic had turned the bond between us into a canyon.

Fear spiked through me. Cass shoved himself to his feet, still staring at me, but with his ears pinned back. The claws of his gauntlets drove into his palms, sending pressure radiating through my hands. Stay. Out. Of. My. Mind, he bit out, the sharp focus of the words hitting me so hard I reeled backwards.

Cass, wait—!

Every light in the ballroom cut out, plunging the room into black. People shrieked in surprise. Something crashed to the ground, the tinkling sound of glass skittering through the perfumed air.

I hit the wall. It recoiled, terror skidding through my veins. For one hideous moment, I stood in a bubble of pure nothingness, the world so dark my vision sparkled and no sound reached my ears, before all the lights came back on, blazing even brighter than before.

The courtiers milled, uneasy laughter ringing in sharp bursts across the room. Musicians struck up again with determined revelry.

My eyes caught on Vaduin, who stood with his hands on the back of the decorative throne and his head bowed, breathing hard.

No one stood next to him. Cass was gone.

Girl Talk, Take Two

Idanced. What else was I supposed to do? I'd fucked up with Cass – ignored my instincts in favor of how excited I was to maybe be able to match his stunning power – and now I was alone at a revel in the wee hours of the morning. The least I could do was to see it through.

Talien flirted with me as we whirled across the dance floor. Ace declined to dance, but introduced me to several lords and a lady who would. When Vaduin dragged Cass back sometime around five in the morning, the lights dimmed, but nothing worse happened. Not wanting to publicly force the issue, I didn't join him, and he didn't come to me.

Danica did, though. She found me hiding in the shadow next to a pillar, nibbling on a plate of cut fruit as I watched Cass doing his political duty with Vad at his shoulder, talking to the guests as they started filtering out.

"Hey," she said, a little cautiously, leaning on the wall next to me.

I glanced over. Earlier in the evening, she and Vaduin had both been decked out in their gold-and-white Archangel regalia, but now she was in a simple, dark blue dress, and he was in a similarly toned-down outfit. Even after a night of dancing and partying, Dani looked beautiful. Her mussed hair and slightly-smudged eyeliner made her look like some boudoir painting, lovely and sensual.

"Hey," I said back.

She chewed on her lip. "Vaduin said he didn't know why Cass was so upset, just that it was something to do with you. Do you want to talk about it?"

I ate a piece of melon to keep from having to answer right away. Dani was probably trustworthy, but there were plenty of listening ears. I didn't want anyone getting any weird ideas about the things I could do, and I didn't want to air my dirty laundry in public.

"I fucked up," I said at last. "He asked if he could think about whether it would be okay with him for me to lean into the way I can feel him, and then I just kept doing it." I flushed, the shame of that chilling my skin as I looked at the beautiful dance floor he'd made for me, a bouquet that might last forever. "I pushed him too far."

At least he'd been focused enough on me – angry enough with me – to show it with pinned-back ears and sharp words. I didn't know how the Court might act if it was flooded with ire directed at its Queen, and I really, really didn't want to find out.

"That's normal, I think," she said. The corner of her mouth tugged back wistfully. "God knows I fucked up with Vaduin often enough."

"I don't get that." I shook my head, the breeze of my movement cold against the sweat on my neck, and remembered the electrifying feel of Cass raking those metal gauntlet-claws across my nape. "I just… we're supposed to be soulmates, right? Perfect matches? You'd think it would be easier than this."

"I suspect…" She paused, chewing on her lip again with her brows furrowed. "I suspect it's never smooth, or clean." Danica sighed through her nose and gave me a rueful smile. "Every soulmate pair I know of went through some sort of upheaval along the way. Granted, it's a pretty small sample size, but it feels like that should be true, right? The two of you were on your own trajectories before, and now you're on the same one, or at least on a collision course for one. That doesn't seem like something that would happen without some major upheaval."

I sighed, my eyes going back to Cass as he milled about. It wasn't difficult; the man was a solid six inches taller than most other people in the room, and nobody but Vad got within five feet of him. "I don't like adding to his problems. It seems like his life was already fully exploded before I came along."

Her bright laugh sang through the air. A few ears turned towards us, the fae tracking their surroundings as much with sound as sight. "Yes, that's definitely true. Honestly, though, it might make things easier for the two of you, tonight notwithstanding. He's usually so self-possessed. Controlled, I guess. The fact that he's actually upset enough to do something about it is maybe a good sign."

"Maybe, but I sure hope it's not like this for long," I said, making a face. "Even without paying attention to him, all that tension is making my muscles ache. Better than the way he affects the palace, but it's not great." I sighed through my nose. "I'm fairly sure that some of the reason he affects me so much is that he's trained his reflex healing to manage most of his emotions."

Dani's face grew thoughtful. "That might be a trait of most powerful mages," she said slowly, like she was thinking about the words as she said them. "I had the misfortune of meeting the crown prince of Raven Court this year. He's a famous glamor-mage, and he wears glamor on every inch of his skin. I'm pretty sure he controls his expressions with it."

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