Page 127 of Gemini Wicked

“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.”

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