Page 62 of Gemini Wicked

The balcony doors that overlook the courtyard—the same doors we always lock for security reasons—are swinging wide open.

What the fuck?

At the sight of those open doors, my Valyrian foresight gives a nasty ping.

My alarmed gaze darts over the canopy of our medieval bed to the naked sleep heap of my mates’ bodies, spilling from a twist of blankets.

Zara’s snuggled up tight with Neo, both smothered in sleeping alpha, with Max and Vasili flung possessively over the top. Lucius is sprawled face down and snoring with one heavy arm thrown over my hips. Plus he’s got a territorial palm planted on Zara’s lower tummy, right over her womb, which is sweet as fuck.

Thank gods for my mates. When they’re about, all’s right as rain.

Still, somehow, my jangled sense of unease is mounting.

My anxious eyes chart a course across our peaceful pad to Zara’s desk.

There.

Just beside a tidy stack of Neo’s spell books and alchemy texts, a glassy pair of dead eyes stares back.

I shoot up to sit with a gasp.

Bloody hell.

That’s… a severed head. Propped right there on Zara’s desk.

A severed head with feral features, pointy ears, and a spill of lavender hair.

That’s a dead fucking Fae.

Whoever he is, he’s not been dead for long.

And there’s a live one sprawled in Zara’s chair. With his booted legs crossed arrogantly on Zara’s desk.

Holding Zara’s crown in his steepled hands.

My gaze skids over the green leather gauntlets gripping that crown, over the knotted bulge of biceps and delts filling out that Avenger suit of supple dragonscale. I lock onto a face so familiar it’ll be blazoned on my noggin till the day I kick the bucket. High cheekbones, narrow nose, ruthless mouth so delicate it’s deceiving, all framed in a sleek curtain of forest-green hair, held back from a cruel face by the braid that circles his brow like a coronet.

Only the green eyepatch that slants across that familiar puss and covers one socket is new.

But even that I’ve glimpsed before. From afar. In the scrying glass.

Thanks to my thunderous gasp, he’s spied me, sitting bolt upright and mother-naked, dragging a twist of sheet over my hips to preserve what little’s left of my modesty.

His single eye, a perfect orb the color of cloudy jade, holds my riveted stare. One slim green brow lifts in a mocking arch.

“Good morrow, Ronin,” he murmurs, in that voice like water trickling over rock. His tone’s sharp and brittle as glass. “Have you missed me?”

“Zephyr?” I scrape out.

Fuck. I can’t breathe.

It’s him. The Unseelie King. The fucking Dark Fae who nabbed Zara and fucked her and mated her last term. The same Fae who came for my sister, once upon a time.

Oh gods, Gwen—

Grief claws at my chest like an angry cat. I rub a hand over my jackhammering heart and fight like blazes to breathe.

Of course I always fancied he’d pitch up here eventually. Fancied he’d come dragging trouble at his heels like the trailing end of a bullwhip. Fancied when he did, I’d be ready.

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