She was going to kill him.
Wrapped in a robe and staring at her steaming tea, Zarrah did her best to focus on the wrinkled matrons conversing next to her, but her mind kept going to Keris.
This had been his idea. His stupid bloody plan to sit in the bath and listen to gossip, but while she’d spent the past hour soaking in a tub, listening to women complain about her aunt’s soldiers while their husbands pretended not to stare at her breasts, Keris was nowhere to be seen.
What if something happened to him? fear whispered, but she just made a face and swallowed the rest of her tea. The only thing that had happened was that, as usual, he’d changed the plan with no mind to keeping her informed. He was probably in a bar somewhere, plying customers with drinks to gain information, which he’d subsequently deliver to her as though questioning drunks had been his idea, not hers.
“I’m going to kill him,” she said, aloud this time, garnering a few startled glances from other patrons. A heartbeat later, there was a commotion at the entrance to the bathhouse.
Keris, naked as the day he was born and gripping a towel in one hand, sprinted around the corner.
Sliding to a stop, he scanned the steam-filled room until his eyes latched on hers. “Run!” he shouted; then angry bellows shattered the silence.
Zarrah had barely made it to her feet when Keris had her by the hand and was dragging her to the rear of the building. “Another way out?” he shouted at one of the girls who worked there. With wide eyes, she pointed to a door.
Then they were running.
“What is going on?” Zarrah demanded, cold biting her skin as they flew out the back door. “Where were you?”
“Later,” he gasped.
Slush splashed her legs, her robe flapping as they ran, the shouts of pursuit loud, but she didn’t turn back. Weaponless, their only option was flight, and given Keris was naked and she was nearly so, they needed to get out of sight.
People gaped at them as they raced past, the clatter of horses’ hooves deafening as soldiers converged. “What did you do?” she demanded. “What the hell did you do, Keris?”
He didn’t answer, only tightened his grip on her hand. “We need to climb. Get to the rooftops.”
“You can’t!” She risked a sideways glance at him. His unbandaged wound was starting to seep blood. He might be able to get onto a rooftop, but not cross them with the speed it would take to evade capture.
“I’ll have to.”
A door swung open ahead of them, and a woman dressed in a black leather gown appeared. “In here! Hurry!”
Zarrah hesitated, distrustful of any offer of help, but what choice did they have? Hauling on Keris’s hand, she dragged him into the darkness of the building, the latch on the door shutting firmly behind them.
The interior smelled strongly of scented oils, and from somewhere, a drummer pounded a rhythmic beat. What was this place?
“Up the stairs, hurry!”
“Who are you?” Keris demanded.
“We’ve mutual friends,” the woman answered, even as a man called out, “Miri, the soldiers are searching every house on the street. Something about a Maridrinian assaulting Welran?”
“Don’t impede them,” the woman answered. “They need no justification for destruction.”
Red glass sconces on the walls provided only minimal light, and Zarrah stumbled twice as they climbed before her eyes adjusted. “What is this place?”
“Brothel,” Keris muttered.
Simultaneously, the woman announced, “A pleasure house.”
Reaching the second level, she led them down a carpeted hallway lined with doors. Hedonistic whispers filtered through the walls, but they were dominated by the pounding drum, the rhythm making it seem as though the building had a heart throbbing at its core. They passed an open door, and Zarrah glanced inside, her eyes widening at the sight of a masked woman with three men before Keris pulled her onward.
“In here,” the woman—Miri—said, opening the door at the end. The room was nearly filled by a silk-covered bed, cords fastened to the posters, the table across from it covered with things Zarrah had heard of but never seen with her own eyes. Climbing on the bed, the woman opened the window on the wall above it. “Climb across the roofs,” she said. “Seek an inn tonight called the Wounded Lioness, and you will find those you are searching for.”
Scrambling up next to her, Zarrah looked at the climb that would be required and then back to Keris, who had wrapped the towel around his waist. “Not happening. He’s injured.”
“I’ll manage,” he said, but she didn’t miss how his jaw tightened as he looked out.
“You’ll end up broken on the cobbles.” Zarrah pulled the window shut. “We’ll hide.”
A knock sounded, and a man dressed in silk trousers that left nothing to the imagination appeared. “Miri, they are here to search. General Welran is in the streets, covered with blood. They say he was stabbed by a Maridrinian.”
Zarrah felt her eyes bulge. “What?”
“That’s a lie.” Keris tried to cross his arms, only his towel slipped. “The blood is from the man he beat to death.”
“God have mercy on us all.” Miri waved her hand at the man. “Slow them down, but don’t be obvious about it.”
“I’ll climb,” Keris said. “There’s no other choice. There’s nowhere in here to hide.”
“No.” Zarrah scanned the room, but it offered no solutions. “We need to backtrack. Get to the streets.”
The moment the words left her lips, the thud of boots on stairs filled the air.
“If you won’t climb, you’ll need to hide in plain sight.” Miri gestured at Keris. “In this house, women are served, not men. She is the patron.”
Zarrah’s stomach flipped, and Keris gave a sharp shake of his head. “I’ll climb.”
He moved onto the bed, reaching to unlatch the window, but Zarrah caught his wrist. “Now is not the time to cling to morality. Too much is at stake.”
“It won’t work,” he said. “They saw my face.”
“Then I suggest you keep it well hidden,” Miri snapped. Going to a closet, she dug through the contents and threw a mask at Zarrah. “Most of the highborn women wear them to hide their identity.” Then she went to the hearth, picking up a handful of ash, which she rubbed into Keris’s hair, turning it from blond to grey before knotting it behind his head. With a bit of soot, she swiftly rimmed both his eyes. “I could use a pretty face like yours, if you’re ever in search of work. We would have you trained, and you’d fetch a fortune.”
Zarrah’s face burned, but Keris said, “It’s always nice to have options.” His smirk vanished as Miri ripped away the towel, using it to wipe clean the mud splattered on his legs before tossing it into the fire.
She handed a lace robe to Zarrah, the one from the bathhouse joining Keris’s towel. “On the bed, girl. Against the pillows.” Heart pounding, Zarrah obliged, allowing the woman to arrange the robe artfully so that it covered her breasts, though her whole body burned as Miri parted her knees.
The tread of heavy boots drew closer, orders to search every room clearly audible, but Keris remained where he stood, eyes on the opposite wall. “Your prudishness will get you killed,” Miri snapped at him. “Face between her legs, now!”
A soft growl escaped his lips, but as Keris shook his head, Zarrah said, “We are out of options.”
“Fine.” He knelt before her. Lowering his head, he rested his cheek against the inside of her thigh. Miri lifted one of Zarrah’s legs to wrap it around his neck, murmuring, “To hide the injury.”
Stepping back, she straightened her leather skirts as she eyed the scene. “They’ll have seen similar in the other rooms. Make it convincing.” Then she turned on her heel, the door clicking shut behind her.
Zarrah tried to relax, but her whole body felt stiff as a board, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Where did you go?” she whispered, because the thought of remaining in this position in silence was more than she could bear. “What happened? Why did you attack Welran?”
More importantly, why was her aunt’s most trusted soldier and bodyguard here?
“I saw some officers going into the bathhouse with the glass tigers.” His breath was warm against her naked skin, each exhale sending a quiver through her. “I followed them in and was listening to their conversation, their plans, when a messenger arrived with news about what transpired on Devil’s Island, including Bermin’s fate.”
“Oh, God,” she breathed, understanding filling her.
“The big one, Welran, lost his head. Beat the messenger to pulp while he cursed the rebels and their Maridrinian master. I was attempting to extricate myself when the barber kindly pointed out my nationality to save his own skin. Welran went after me, and I fled. You know the rest.”
Zarrah squeezed her eyes shut, horror filling her. “There will be a reckoning.”
“You know him?”
“All my life,” she whispered. “He’s my aunt’s bodyguard, and for as long as memory, the rumor has been that it was Welran who sired Bermin.”
“Fuck.”
“An apt assessment.” The boots were coming closer, the drums now silent, and Zarrah stared at the door as she listened to the shouts of protest as trysts were interrupted. The search progressed down the hall, her heart throbbing faster and faster.
“If it doesn’t work,” Keris said, a loose strand of his hair brushing her thigh, “you get out that window. I’ll hold them off.”
“We are allies,” she answered. “That means we stand together. And if it comes to it, we die together. Now make this convincing.”
Threading her fingers through his hair, she pulled him against her right as the door exploded inward.
Zarrah screamed with outrage as two soldiers strode inside. “What is the meaning of this?”
“A would-be assassin attacked General Welran,” one of them answered. “A Maridrinian. We are searching the quarter for him.”
“Well, he’s not in here,” she spat. “Get out!”
“We need to search the room.”
“Then be quick about it. And you”—her fingers tightened in Keris’s hair—“finish what you started. I didn’t pay a fortune for your tongue to watch you gape at soldiers.”
Said soldiers were staring, obviously considering his fair skin as reason for further investigation, and Keris was not helping the situation. His lips were pressed against her sex, his breath ragged and hot, but he remained unmoving. Unconvincing.
Tightening her grip to the point it probably hurt, she said, “Did you hear me?”
He lifted his head ever so slightly, soot-rimmed eyes meeting hers. Despite their lives being on the line, there was no fear in his blue gaze, only pure masculine lust. Lust that Zarrah knew was only held at bay by the promise that he’d made to her. “Finish me,” she ordered, hearing the breathiness in her voice.
His gaze darkened, but for a heartbeat, Keris didn’t move. Then he lowered his head between her legs, a gasp tearing from her throat as his lips pressed against her in a kiss that turned the embers in her core to an inferno.
“Your officers will hear of this outrage,” she hissed at the soldiers, but they only smirked, one of them leaning forward to catch at the edge of her mask even as Keris parted her with his tongue. “I doubt it,” he said. “Will mean you admitting you had a whore between your legs rather than your husband.”
Zarrah pushed the soldier’s hand away, her other still locked in Keris’s hair.
The soldiers laughed, and Zarrah’s pulse roared, partially with rising panic that they weren’t leaving and partially because of the effect Keris’s tongue was having on her body.
He knew her. Knew her body and everything she liked, and on her order, he was making use of that knowledge. Sweat beaded on her brow, tension building as he sucked and teased her, fingers trailing lines of fire along her naked thighs.
The soldiers made a show of slowly searching the room, but their eyes never left her naked body. Keris’s naked body. She needed them to leave. Needed them to shut the door, or else…or else…
“If you wish to watch, you must pay,” Miri said from the doorway. “Else it is theft, and I’ll report you to the guild.”
“Consider it a bit of goodwill toward us, Miri,” one of them said, but the house’s matron crossed her arms, dark eyes narrowed, and they grudgingly backed out of the room. “Apologies,” she murmured, then shut the door.
Keris lifted his face, and a scream of frustration threatened to rise from Zarrah’s throat. Like an addict deprived of her drug of choice, her body needed him. Needed this fix, and though her mind shouted at her that it was folly, her lips whispered, “Don’t stop.”
“Zarrah…” His voice was strained, as though he battled his own inner war, and she held her breath, eyes squeezed shut, waiting to see what part of him won. Waiting to see if they’d both succumb, proving that what lay between them burned as hot as it ever had. A desire that had always been wrong, always been forbidden, yet left every barrier in ash.
Even those they built themselves.
Her soul felt his will bend to lust a heartbeat before his tongue flicked over her, Zarrah’s back bowing as a sob of pleasure tore from her lips. All the world fell away as his fingers pressed inside her, curving to stroke her core even as he sucked her clit. As he pulled her to the edge of climax, every plot and plan and strategy falling victim to her undying need for his presence, his touch, his—
Love.
The word, and all the truths that came with it, pulled her over the edge, only some hidden reserve of self-preservation keeping her from screaming his name as pleasure broke her apart, reforming her heart and soul, only to shatter them again because she had to give him up.
Keris shifted, resting his cheek against her hip, and she moved her hand from his hair to trace a finger down the side of his face. Say something, she silently whispered, not knowing whether she was speaking to Keris or herself. “I’m sorry.”
The only response was the renewed drumming at the center of the house.
“For what?” he answered. “I’m the one who got us into this mess by following Welran. It’s my fault.”
“Yes, but I didn’t need to… I shouldn’t have asked…” God help her, she couldn’t even get the words out. Was proving her aunt right with everything she did. Everything she said. Everything she didn’t say.
“You think it would have been any different if our roles had been reversed?” His blue eyes flared as he sat upright, revealing that he’d been no less caught up in the moment than she had been. Unbidden, a vision of herself on her knees before him filled her mind’s eye, a mixture of memory and imagination that was so vivid her breath caught.
“I hate how right she was.” Zarrah squeezed her eyes shut. “She said that the moment I was back in your presence, I’d fall back in your bed. That my loyalty to Valcotta would always come second to my desire for you.”
“Petra’s a master manipulator,” he answered. “She’s also a fucking madwoman.”
“Yet she saw the truth. As did Bermin.” In a surge of motion, Zarrah leaned across the small space, her hands pressed to either side of him. Cheek brushing his as she whispered into his ear, “How can I be the empress Valcotta needs when all I want is to do is fall to my knees and suck the King of Maridrina’s cock?”
The muscles of his jaw tightened. “That’s not what I want from you.”
“Because it’s all about what you want.” She moved her head, lips grazing his. “It’s all about having things your way, on your terms. I know that better than anyone. Have watched you do it time and again. Watched you do it today. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter when I’m in your presence, because all I want is you.”
Keris pulled away from her. “There was a time I thought I’d die to hear you say that again, Valcotta, but not like this.”
She was furious with herself, but Zarrah found herself turning her venom on him. “So sorry to disappoint.”
“Don’t.” He gave her a warning glare. “There is a limit to the abuse I’ll take just because you drank that bitch’s poison. It’s Petra who deserves your hate, yet you treat her words as though they were delivered by God. Like a fucking mantra.”
“I do hate her.” Her hands clenched into fists. “I don’t want to listen to her. Except to ignore the truth because it came from the mouth of my enemy is just as foolish as believing lies.”
“Petra has taken the truth about us and twisted it to the point it barely resembles reality, yet somehow you now hold it as memory. She’s undermined your judgement by making you believe that everything you did was motivated by lust.”
Nausea swam in Zarrah’s gut, her head a mess, no part of her able to focus on a thought. “I’m losing my mind.” She stared at her palms, which were marked with bleeding crescents. “I feel like I’m going mad.”
“You’re not going mad.” He gripped her hands. “Petra knows we are stronger united, so it is in her interest to turn you against me even as she turns you against yourself. But ask yourself this: If I manipulated you and used you as part of my scheme to further myself, why am I here now? If all I cared about was gaining the crown, why did I leave it in my half sister’s hands to race south to risk my life freeing you from prison? Why am I with you in Arakis, searching for the rebels, if all I care about is a plush life in a palace surrounded by women? Because to be very clear, if that was what I wanted, I could have it in a heartbeat.” His eyes searched hers. “Deep down, you must know that what she claims doesn’t make sense.”
Zarrah didn’t know what was real. Couldn’t remember. Couldn’t think, because it felt as though her mind were unraveling like a spool of thread.
The room spun in a darkening blur of colors as she sucked in breath after breath that didn’t reach her lungs. “I feel sick,” she gasped, and then everything went dark.