Page 61 of Gemini Queen
And I’m deeply worried about Ronin.
A disciplinary bite is a two-way tie, and this one between me and my troublesome student feels particularly potent. All night I’ve been suffering, like a phantom pain in my flesh, the dull throb of his untended bite and the hectic burn of his fever. He clearly needs me, but he simply won’t tolerate me. Uncharacteristically, I find myself at an utter loss about how to proceed with him.
Dear God, I should never have bitten him.
If I’m being entirely honest about my motives—given his flirtation with me, my wolf’s fascination with him, and the pull of this forbidden attraction for a student ten years my junior—my own conduct has scarcely been beyond reproach.
Softly I whine, swimming in guilt.
The urgent hammer of knuckles on my door drags me from my remorse and drives me to my feet. I push onto my back legs and rise, bones lengthening, tail dwindling, fur vanishing as I will my human form to take shape.
“Lucius?” Vasili’s low voice is ragged with strain. He rattles the knob, but it doesn’t budge. With students like mine in the house, not least the amorous Ronin, I sleep with that door securely bolted. “Damn it, will you wake the hell up?”
I thrust my legs into my trousers and hasten to the door before he wakes the whole household.
My most difficult student is pacing on the dark landing, his tall frame encased in the black silk turtleneck, high boots and riding breeches he wore to dinner, which passes as casual for Vasili. But his gilded hair is disheveled and he hasn’t shaved, which for him passes as haggard.
He’s taller than I am, which he milks for every molecule of advantage. His disapproving gaze skates over my naked chest and tangled hair as though he expects me to spring fashionably forth in full professorial attire from my bed at one a.m.
I carefully tamp down a spike of annoyance.
Our relationship is damnably complex, two alphas warily circling, both thoroughly accustomed to dominance. There’s shifter blood in Vasili, a Protean ancestor somewhere in his Mogadon DNA. That distant legacy supplies just enough genetic fodder to give him those fangs he despises but uses so effectively to sow terror in the student body, although not enough to permit him to actually shift.
And alpha shifters of any moiety, few though we are these days, take care to give one another an exceedingly wide berth.
I’m the best headmaster for a warlock of his formidable talent, since he terrifies Agrippina and I don’t trust Zerxes. Still, tolerating such prolonged proximity to a rival alpha is discomfiting at best and dangerous at worst. I allow him as much leeway as I can without ceding my place entirely as dominant alpha in thisdomus.
One of these days, Vasili’s own alpha instincts will drive him to challenge me. It’s bred into his DNA to challenge me. Indeed, given Ronin’s current condition, Vasili may very well challenge me tonight.
I make my tone and my face carefully neutral. “What is it, Mr. Romanov?”
“It’s Ronin and your fucking bite,” he hisses, every syllable dripping with venom. “I can hear him through the wall. He’s delirious in his bed. You need to come. Now.”
Worry for my student clenches my chest and churns my gut.
Never mind that the reason Vasili can hear Ronin in his bed is probably because they’re sharing it, which is likewise a conduct violation since Ronin’s barely nineteen. Of course, when they’re not creeping in and out of each other’s beds, the pair of them put on a thoroughly convincing display of hating each other’s guts.
This volatile dynamic between them is another matter to which I’ve deliberately turned a blind eye in order to give my subordinate alpha his space.
“Damnation,” I mutter, tying my hair in a hasty tail and pulling a shirt around my shoulders. I don’t bother buttoning it as I push into the chilly confines of the hall.
“You’ll need a candle,” Vasili says shortly. “Thanks to our fucking queen claiming her fucking mate, lights are out in the bedrooms, and the flashlights are all shorted.”
“Thank you, Mr. Romanov.” Striving to project an air of calm I’m far from feeling, I find the candles I keep for emergencies and light one for each of us. I’m thankful Vasili waits in the hall, giving me my space as well. We’ve never actually spoken about the fraught dynamic between us, but he’s exceedingly perceptive, with a keen nose for danger.
He knows that, to each other, we’re deadly.
Clutching our candles like two Gothic monsters in a vintage horror film, shadows leaping high on the walls beside us, we climb the stairs and stalk the darkened corridor to Ronin’s room. Vasili swings the door wide and pushes in first.
But I’m right on his heels.
By the pale glow of the waxing moon pouring through the glass, I don’t need to see Ronin to know his condition has taken a profound pivot for the worst. At this proximity, my body ignites with the fever that’s burning in his blood, a physical fever fueled purely by relentless and overwhelming sexual need.
Merciful God, I’d thought myself prepared for this, but I was so utterly wrong.
Roninneeds. He’s writhing in that bed, gripped in the ravenous maw of a mating rut.
Sweet saints above. I did this to him. I did this tome.
