Page 176 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

“It is always a pleasure, Lord Riven,” the face in the wall greets him before he enters.

The scent of Melody and Caryan hits him in the back of his throat with its intensity. There are so many facets—arousal, blood, desperation—he finds them hard to detangle. It’s worry that drives him into the kitchen and on into the bedroom, where Melody’s scent is the strongest.

He pauses in the doorway and stares at the ruffled silken sheets, drenched with Caryan’s and her irresistible scents.

“She is gone.” Caryan’s voice sounds from behind him, making him spin around on his heels.

Caryan stands on the terrace, his huge wings stretched out todry them in the hot wind, the landscape outside entrenched in permanent summer. Fae don’t feel cold the way humans do, so Riven supposes the increased heat of late has something to do with Melody. It’s turned hotter since she’s been here, but maybe it’s just in his mind. His wild mind, still drunk from too much sex and fig wine—and there, Caryan’s and Melody’s scents, lingering on his skin as if part of his own, on his tongue, on his lips.

Abyss, he can taste them there.

“What happened?”

Caryan turns at the rawness in Riven’s voice, and what he’s no doubt sensing over the bond too. The angel is so breathtakingly beautiful that the sight of him renders Riven speechless. It’s so rare to see Caryan with his wings out and only a few have ever seen him for what he truly is and have survived the encounter with the last fallen angel.

“She got drunk and fell asleep,” Caryan offers, his voice carrying no emotion at all.

Riven stalks over to the kitchen, to the two empty glasses and the almost empty bottle next to it. He grabs it and pours the rest into one of the glasses, then drinks it in one go to dull the edge his whole self has whetted itself into since last night.

It doesn’t help at all that their scents are still riding him a bit hard.

At that very moment, the wind shifts, wafting another wave of arousal mixed with unmistakable fear from the bathroom. A mockery, thrown right into his face.

Riven bares his teeth against it, against what it does to him and his own senses.

It is insane.

Caryan and he have had women together over the years, yet it has never felt this way before. Last night it took all his self-control not to rip Melody’s clothes off and take her while Caryan claimed her lips, her mouth, her breasts…

Abyss, her soft skin, her scent, the way she felt under his hands when she came. And the sight of Caryan ashe fucked her lips. The way he looked down at her while he did it, his eyes morphing into that gold…

So beautiful. So alluring. So tantalizing. So fatal.

Riven tilts his head back and runs a hand through his hair, trying to ground himself again, to release some of the tension even the orgy couldn’t assuage.

In vain.

“Go on. Ask. I can feel it all over you,” Caryan demands coolly, his eyes black and reflective like polished onyx flecked with gold, revealing nothing.

“Have you…?” Riven lifts his chin towards the bathroom again, still trying to make sense of what he is smelling. Sex, yes. But the fear and desperation and blood and tears don’t match the arousal.

A sudden shudder runs through him. Did Caryan…

No. His instinct tells him that he wouldn’t, because so far, Caryan has been uniquely lenient toward her. But then, didn’t Riven say himself that Caryan could be cruel? Was cruel before, as was the nature of the angels—their mercilessness? One of the reasons they were hunted down to extinction. Destroyers of worlds, some called them, for their ability to jump from world to world—or to eliminate one for that matter if they deemed it necessary.

Riven has never considered his friend, his brother, to be unnecessarily cruel. But if Melody’s effect on Caryan was even a shard of the effect she had on Riven, he might just have taken her against her will.

“There are more interesting things than bedding a mortal girl,” Caryan says with a snarl, as if he felt Riven’s thoughts.

“I thought… forgive me, Caryan, but…” Riven hesitates, unsure whether pushing would be wise. Hells, their scents make thinking hard. What is wrong with him? But last night changed him in a way he hasn’t yet deciphered. Whatever happened, it altered something in his very core, tied his soul to Caryan even tighter, but to Melody too.

“But what?” Caryan’s voice cuts through the air.

“I thought she would… mean something to you. Something beyond her heritage,” Riven adds.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Another snarl, revealing fangs.

“I saw the gold in your eyes when you looked at her last night.”

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