THE HAND ON my neck squeezed tighter and Ethan’s voice was in my ear. “Anita, stop, people are watching.”
I tried to pull away from the kiss and the spicy sweetness of Rodina’s mouth, all shared lipstick and the spice of her rage, but she wrapped her arms around me, not willing to give up the kiss. I’d never had anyone that I fed rage from want to continue. It usually scared them, made them try to fight to get away, but Rodina wanted closer, and somewhere in the eagerness of her hands and mouth on mine I fell further into her mind and heart than ever before. Loneliness, she was so lonely, and lost, more lost than she’d ever been in her life, and grief, such horrible grief—her brother, her queen, the only life she’d ever known all gone. She needed something to put in its place and I hadn’t given it to her. Unlike Nicky, who’d I’d accepted into my life and my heart. I’d had enough control to keep her and Ru out of my emotions. I didn’t even let them be part of my main security. I didn’t feed on them for energy. I was their queen now, the being that was supposed to fill a hole inside them that the Mother of All Darkness had created inside all her Harlequin. A place where they drew power from, a place that made them belong to something larger than themselves. The Harlequin were like military vets trying to adjust to civilian life, except instead of a human lifetime of service they’d had thousands of years. How do you recover from a loss that large?
I drew back and this time she let me. Her eyes were black again, my power did not fill her eyes now. Our shared lipstick was smeared across her pale face; the light gold sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks stood out like they were decoration, as if she’d put glitter across her face, but it forgot to sparkle. For that moment her face showed all the grief, the loss, everything that the magic had shown me. She was stripped bare of the toughness, the rage, the cruelty, the flirting; everything she used to shield herself and hide behind was gone. It was worse than stripping the clothes away from someone in public, this was baring their soul but only from inches away. The crowd couldn’t see it, but I could, Ethan could, and as Ru stood up to put his hands on his sister’s shoulders our eyes met and I knew that he didn’t need to see his sister’s face to know what she was feeling, because he felt the same damn way. It was there in his eyes not through magic, but just because for that moment he didn’t try and hide it from me.
Rodina looked up at her brother, and then back at me. “My queen, I am not fit for duty.”
I didn’t know whether to hug her, or say No shit, so I managed not to do either. Let’s hear it for maturity and not being a hugger.