Page 35 of Mated to the Mad Marquess

Chapter 10

Malcolm

Malcolm awoke from a vivid dream of bedding his mate. A dream that wasn’t a dream—not entirely. Waking with a stiff cock wasn’t so unusual. Waking up rock hard, sac full and aching, certainly was.

Solis floated into the room then, looking smug.

“You fucked her,” Malcolm accused. “Without me.”

You fucked her first, without me,Solis snapped.

“It wasn’t planned. It just happened.” Malcolm adjusted himself as his soul lounged beside him on the bed.

My time with her wasn’t planned either. She needed comforting, so I went to her. Perhaps we should make a deal. We fuck her together from now on.

“Deal,” Malcolm grunted.

She’s . . . sad.

Malcolm ran a hand down his face. “I know.” He hated it. Hated duty and the burden of keeping his word, the burden that would hold him stationary while his mate responded finally to the call of her god-blood. He’d cast it all off if he could.

It tears at me, her sadness. But we could just keep her, yes? We don’t have to let her go.

“Maybe we can change her mind, but I can’t keep her prisoner forever.” He rubbed the grit from his eyes. “I need to think about all of it and figure out what to do.”

I can’t bear her melancholy. Leaving us makes her sad, so we just keep her. Then she won’t be sad.

“Holding her in a cage would make her hate us. If we were smart, we’d send her away now to a place where angry mobs may never reach her and deal with the king ourselves. This is our land. The monster is our responsibility. And if we wait any longer for her to leave us, that pain will only grow. Hope could make us desperate. You especially so.”

No, Solis whimpered.Not yet. We want her with us. At least let her stay while she’s willing!

“I need to ponder every outcome and pick the one that is best for us, for our mate, for our people. You only ever act on sentiment, always thinking with your heart or your cock. There’s no in-between. Just like . . .” He let the words he didn’t want to dwell on fall away, but of course his soul knew them anyway. There had been a time when he listened to Solis always.

You still haven’t forgiven me for that, have you?Solis said somberly.

Malcolm scratched at the scruff on his chin. He’d missed his morning shave yesterday, thanks to the attack on the fortress. “I thought we should visit home more. But you said—”

Our parents are immortal. They aren’t going anywhere,Solis remembered. Malcolm had given him a name after that. He couldn’t bear thinking of his soul as entirely himself anymore. That would mean he was just as responsible for the bad choices they’d made.

“We drank and chased giants and every skirt that smiled at us while our mother watched her true mate slip into madness and die here in these walls. Alone. Then she succumbed to the mate sickness.Alone.” But of course, hewasjust as responsible.

Her letters finally reached him in the Rasika Mountains of the Unseelie Provinces. The first letter explained that one of her father’s phantoms had gotten the better of him—his mother had never trusted those creatures born of shadow and fire with only one clear purpose: whisper wicked madness into the ears of others. But father’s god blood made him reckless. He kept the creatures as guards, enjoying the challenge. The notes following detailed the growing madness in her husband. She had to move him from their manor at Reedholm to the fortress to keep him away from people he could hurt.

He’d attacked her on the way, injured his own true mate. Malcolm should have been there, should have helped his mother bring him to Skugborg, but when Malcolm made it home, his mother and father had already been buried.

If these words do not find you in time, know that you are precious to us now and always. Be happy, my son, his mother had said in her final farewell. He could tell by the faintness of the handwriting that she was weakening as she wrote it. Her true mate was gone. Her heart had lost its reason for beating.

Solis lay beside him in the bed in the same position, shoulder to shoulder, shadowy head on the adjacent pillow, hands folded over his stomach, tail stretched out alongside his leg.

“Walk the stars in eternal peace,” Malcolm said to the ceiling, a prayer he’d prayed thousands of times before, “and know that, although I failed to act like it, you were precious to me, too.”

Now and always, Solis said.

* * *

Malcolm spent the next week avoiding his mate. First, he dutifully distracted himself, writing letter after letter, detailing the events of their first days at the fortress for the King of Night. He paid Clapa in silver buttons, a ribbon, a piece of string, and a silk handkerchief to deliver his missives. With her speed and her ability to grow and shrink her size, she conveyed his messages in half the time a human courier could.

The other letters, he sent to the neighboring estates—Dagrun next door, and the Lord and Lady of Whiteholm in the South—warning them of the darkness that disturbed the woods. He explained the nature of phantoms. The creature would nest and would attack anything that posed a threat or came too close. He sent further warnings to all his land stewards and the elders in Reedlet, advising that he was seeing to the monster, but that the matter would take some time to resolve, and that no one should go near the old forests in the meantime. He crafted rudimentary maps of the location in the woods south of the fortress and west of Reedlet.

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