Page 42 of Queen Takes Rook
“It’s more than that.” Mehen shook his head. “You don’t give a fuck about the Zaniyah clan in general.” He slipped into the pool with us, submerging completely despite the heat. He came up slinging water like a dog. “Why them, and not Keisha Skye?”
“Because Keisha tried to hurt me already.”
He shrugged. “Mayte hurt you by not telling you about the geas.”
“But—” I wanted to say that was different, but even I knew that didn’t make sense. Mayte had hurt me. She’d lied to me. She’d hidden everything until I dragged the truth out of her.
Yet I still gave her my blood, made her daughter my heir, and took her to my bed.
“Let me say it another way,” Guillaume said, drawing my attention back to him. He danced one of his blades across his fingers, twirling it like a pencil. “Any other queen powerful enough to free Leviathan would have put him down like the rabid monster he is and saved herself the trouble of breaking him to her Blood. But not Shara fucking Isador.”
Mehen swam around me, a dark, lithe shape in the water, flashing emerald scales. “Why did you save me, Shara?”
“I dreamed you.”
He swept back around, making me jerk my head around to keep sight of him. “So? Nightmares don’t mean a motherfucking thing. I had nightmares for centuries.”
I was starting to get irritated. Not at them, exactly, but at my failure to figure out what they were trying to tell me. “I wanted you, okay? So I took you.”
He swept toward me in a rush of water and pushed me back against the boulder, lifting me up out of the water so we were eye to eye. “You wantedme, when I would sooner tear you limb from limb and gnaw marrow from your bones than suffer Triune politics and queen commands.”
I gripped his nape and squeezed hard enough that his upper lip curled in a snarl. “Yes, I did.”
“You tookme.”
“Yeah.”
“Shara fucking Isador doesn’t lie, and shetakeswhat she wants. She takes what she wants because she wants to fuck it, claim it as hers, and bend it to her will for all time. Even Leviathan, king of the depths.”
“Even the headless knight,” Guillaume whispered. “Long-time hated and feared executioner for Desideria Modron, with the blood of a thousand Aima on his hands.”
“Even Morrigan’s broken Shadow, the son whose family lost the grove and was rejected by his own queen for that failure,” Nevarre whispered. “Who died, helpless to save even a minor druid witch who’d taken him in when no one else would.”
Ezra crashed through the underbrush in his grizzly form.:Even a grumpy bear that everyone hates because he can’t be fucking bothered to mind his tongue for anybody or anything. Except you, my queen.:
Xin and the twins were right behind him. My silent wolf—who was an invisible killer. Tlacel, my beautiful, graceful feathered serpent who’d given himself massive internal injuries to save me and Xochitl.
My tortured black dog, Itztli. Though I’d healed him after sacrificing him on Zaniyah’s new heart tree, he still bore a long brutal scar on his chest to remind us both of what I’d done to him. He didn’t have to say anything. All he had to do was stand there with his fingers lightly touching the obsidian blade on his hip, with a brutal scar over his heart.
“Okay,” I whispered, nodding. “I get what you’re saying. I take what I want. Even Blood other queens would use as weapons, or Blood other queens would kill outright, or simply reject because they’re too dangerous.”
“If you use that as your angle…” Daire gave an artful toss of his head that drew my attention to his hair sliding over his shoulders and down to his waist. “What’s your perceived weakness?”
I looked back at Mehen and grinned. “I take Blood because I want to fuck them. So I probably fuck. A lot. And it gets messy, bloody, and yeah, dangerous.”
He leaned in and inhaled deeply, his mouth on my throat. “You’re obsessed with fucking monsters, aren’t you, my queen?”
I laughed and looped one arm around his neck and the other around Rik, who was never far from my side. “That’ll be an easy thing to sell to Marne Ceresa. Because it’s true.”
Mehen sank his fangs in my throat, making me arch against him.:Because Shara fucking Isador never lies.:
17
Shara
Daire was right. Once I knew how I wanted Marne to perceive me, setting up for our first face-to-face via mirror magic was easy.
I let Rik pick out a sexy negligee and a long, elegant black silk robe. I deliberately tied the belt loosely, letting the robe gape open and flow with my movements. The hint of lace beneath the robe was provocative without revealing anything. We left the bed rumpled with blood-stained sheets and all.
