Page 40 of Queen Takes Triune
:Always, my queen.:
12
Ezra
Fucking guard duty. Paired with the motherfucking dragon yet again. Rik had to be laughing his ass off every time he sent me out with Mehen. At least this time, he’d also sent Guillaume with us. The horse had no patience for the dragon either.
Luckily, Mehen was fairly sated and satisfied. His belly wasn’t stuffed full of the meat of our queen’s enemies, but he’d had his fill of her blood, sex, and reading for days. I honestly couldn’t say which he’d relished more.
Fat and sassy, he’d shifted to his dragon and made a slow circle above us. He was too lazy to walk with us. Thank goddess the knight was content to just walk and look. It was a fucking waste of time anyway. Our queen had killed a fucking god. I couldn’t see how much of anything would ever intimidate or scare her now.
I drifted off a bit from the other Blood. My skin felt itchy, and yeah, I was grumpy. Even more than usual.
I stopped beneath one of the giant trees and leaned back against the bark. I breathed in the silence and the sense of reverence. Walking the grove was like visiting an ancient cathedral or standing inside Stonehenge, not that I’d ever been. I could feel the breath of the goddess on the wind and almost hear Her voice.
My grizzly growled mournfully. The woods had always called to me, stirring a deep yearning that had made me a loner most of my life.
The crisp winter air, the soft snow underfoot, the trees so still and silent that I could almost hear the gentle plop of each snowflake. Once upon a time, drinking in this stillness would have soothed me like nothing else in this world.
Now…
I couldn’t stand the quiet. I didn’t want to be alone.
No. Fuck me. I was fucking terrified.
I tried to remember what my life had been like before.
The solitude of the forest. No guard duty. No bitching dragon. No alpha.
Oh, Rik was a fine enough alpha. I’d seen plenty worse for sure.
But it still galled. Not that he told mewhatto do, but that I did it without question. Even dumb shit like guard duty on a nest full of watchful birds and sentient trees, powered by a queen strong enough she might as well be her goddess. That irritation was there, and sometimes it gnawed at me like a burr under Guillaume’s saddle. I wasn’t the kind of Blood who bent my head to anyone but our queen. Rik knew that and he didn’t take advantage of his position.
But still. It galled.
Or, at least, it’d used to. Before.
But I didn’t want to think about that.
I found myself staring out at the snowy woods and wishing to goddess I could forget the past few months. Back then, I’d been alone, and I hadn’t fucking cared. I could find a nice cozy hole somewhere alone and sleep the winter away. Maybe even the whole fucking year.
Guillaume joined me beneath the branches, and the griz thought really hard about biting his head off. He’d grow it back. No fucking loss.
“You would leave our queen?”
“Nobody said anything about leaving. I know my duty.”
“I don’t stay here for duty, my friend.”
I didn’t look at him, but I felt my lip curl up with disdain. “I’m not yourfriend,knight.”
Unperturbed, Guillaume squatted down and dug around in the leaves and debris from the tree with one of his knives. I hadn’t even seen him pull it out. “Warriors-at-arms, then. We’ve certainly seen some shit in the last few months. More than I’ve seen in the last two hundred years combined.”
I grunted in agreement. We’d barely spent a month in Shara’s nest together, and even that was broken up by trips to New York and Egypt. She was definitely in high demand, and if he was right…
And de Payne was always fucking right.
Then Shara was about to get a million times busier with Triune business.
