Chapter 6: Dangerous Games
The air on the Sidra was thicker than in the mountains, heavy with the river’s damp breath and the cloying perfume of wealth trying to disguise decay. The barge, The Gilded Nymph, was a floating monument to bad taste. Every surface was lacquered, gilded, or draped in velvet the color of bruised plums. Cassian leaned against the portside railing, the carved wood groaning under his weight, and watched the courtiers swirl like leaves in a stagnant pond.
“You’re blending beautifully,” a cool voice said at his elbow. “You look like you’re contemplating which one to throw overboard first.”
He didn’t turn. “The one in the peacock feathers is leading the queue.” He finally glanced at her. The breath caught, just for a second, in his chest. She’d obeyed his instruction. Her dark red hair was coiled in an intricate knot at the nape of her neck, exposing the elegant, severe line of her profile. The dress she wore was a deep, smoky blue, simple in cut but somehow making every other garment on the barge look cheap. It was the absence of her usual frosty aura that unsettled him. She looked… mortal. Approachable. It was a far more effective disguise than any glamour.
“Our target is at the aft card table,” Kaitlyn murmured, accepting a glass of fizzing wine from a passing server without taking a sip. “The one with the rings. He smells of lead and rotten violets.”
Cassian followed her subtle gaze. The male, a merchant of some renown in the import of “antique ceramics,” was laughing too loudly at something a companion said. His fingers, bedecked in heavy stones, tapped nervously on the green felt. “Nervous,” Cassian observed.
“Guilty,” Kaitlyn corrected softly. “The question is of what.”
Their plan was simple: get invited to the table, lose a little money, ask the wrong questions as if by accident. Cassian’s persona was a recently-landed mercenary captain with heavy coin. Kaitlyn was his impatient, slightly bored companion. It should have been easy.
It was agony.
Every brush of her shoulder against his arm as they maneuvered through the crowd sent a jolt through him. The low, conspiratorial tone she used to speak to him, her lips close to his ear, was a specialized torture. He could see the swift, calculations behind her eyes as she assessed the room, and all he could think about was the sight of her in her bed, sheets tangled, chasing a memory of him.
They got their invitation. They took their seats. The game was some convoluted Velaris variation of queens and knaves. Cassian played badly on purpose, his attention fractured. Kaitlyn, however, played with a terrifying, quiet precision that had the merchant sweating.
“Your lady has a ruthless streak, Captain,” the merchant—Haros—said, attempting a jovial tone as Kaitlyn collected another small pile of chips.
“You have no idea,” Cassian replied, his smile all teeth.
Kaitlyn shifted in her seat, her leg brushing against Cassian’s under the table. It was an accident. It had to be. But she didn’t move it. The heat of her, even through the layers of fabric, was a brand. He stiffened, his knuckles whitening on his cards.
“Your move,” she said, her voice a cool melody. Her eyes flicked to his, and in their star-flecked depths he saw a challenge, and a reflection of his own ragged control.
He made a reckless bet. She raised him. The table watched, intrigued by the sudden tension between the supposed couple. Haros’s eyes darted between them, sensing an advantage.
A hand later, Cassian deliberately folded a winning hand. Kaitlyn’s foot connected with his shin under the table. Not gently.
“Are you financially incompetent, or just naturally stupid?” she hissed under her breath as the pot went to Haros.
“I’m maintaining cover,” he growled back, leaning close. Her scent, winter frost and now the spice of the barge’s wine, filled his head. “We’re supposed to be losing, remember, princess?”
“There’s losing, and then there’s self-immolation. You’ve just donated enough to buy a small ship to a male who reeks of betrayal.”
“My money, my choice.”
“It’s the Court’s money, you oaf.”
Their whispered argument was a current of pure, undiluted friction. Each hissed word was a substitute for something else, for the things they couldn’t say, for the things they’d done. He could see the pulse fluttering in her throat. A single, stubborn strand of red hair had escaped her knot and curled against her damp temple.
Haros laughed, a wet, unpleasant sound. “A lovers’ quarrel! The night’s best entertainment. Perhaps a change of scene?” He gestured to a server. “The private lounge is available. Finer spirits. Quieter… accommodations.”
It was the opening they needed. It was also a trap of their own making.
The private lounge was a closet of red velvet and shadows. The door clicked shut, muffling the barge’s din. A crystal decanter gleamed on a sideboard. They were alone.
Cassian braced his hands on the sideboard, head bowed. The facade crumbled. “This isn’t working.”
“You’re just realizing that now?” Kaitlyn stood in the center of the room, her composure a visible shell, cracking. “You can’t even play a simple hand without—”
He turned. “It’s not the cards.”
The silence that followed was a physical thing, swollen and heavy. The only sound was the sluggish lap of water against the barge hull. The air was too hot, too still.
“We have a job to do,” she said, but her voice lacked its earlier edge.
“The job is waiting for us to stop lying.” He pushed off the sideboard. “You’ve been looking at me all night like you want to stab me. Or scream. Or both.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Then do it.” He stopped an arm’s length from her. “Give me one of those ice spears you’re so fond of. Right in the gut. It’d hurt less than whatever this is.”
Her mask shattered. The raw, unfiltered glare she leveled at him was pure fire. “You don’t get to name this. You don’t get to stand there in your… your Illyrian smugness and pretend this is some shared problem. It was a mistake. A momentary lapse.”
“Lapses don’t sound like they did through your door last night.” The words were cruel, and he meant them to be. He needed a reaction. Any reaction but this frozen, furious stillness.
He got it.
She moved not with her magic, but with pure, furious speed, her hand flashing up. He caught her wrist an inch from his face. The vibration of her restrained power traveled up his arm. Her breath came in sharp gasps.
“Let go.”
“No.”
He used her momentum, spinning her and pinning her front to the velvet-padded wall. His body molded against her back, his mouth at her ear. “You want to know what I heard? I heard frustration. I heard you trying and failing to get rid of me. You can’t. I’m in your head, Star. Just like you’re in every damn corner of mine.”
She struggled, a genuine, furious twist of limbs. The movement rubbed her against him, and he groaned, his control snapping like a rotten thread. One hand splayed across her stomach, holding her fast. The other went to the fastening of her trousers.
“Don’t you dare—”
The fabric, fine and dark, tore in his hands. The sound was obscenely loud in the tiny room. She stilled, a sharp inhale her only response. He shoved the ruined material down her hips, past her thighs. The scent of her, potent and utterly intoxicating, hit him like a punch.
He didn’t give her a chance to speak, to curse, to freeze him solid. He dropped to his knees.
His mouth on her was a claiming and an apology, a battle and a surrender. He was ravenous. This was nothing like the gentle, teasing exploration he might have envisioned in some hazy dream. This was voracious. He licked into her with a single-minded intensity that made her cry out, her hands slapping back against the wall for purchase. He tasted every bit of her frustration, her fury, her latent, coiled power. He drank her down as if she were the only thing keeping him alive. His hands gripped her hips, holding her still as she tried to writhe away from the unbearable sensation, then back against it.
“Cassian—” His name was a shattered thing on her lips.
He didn’t let up. He worked her with his tongue, his lips, until her legs trembled and her curses turned into ragged, sobbing pleas. He felt the moment her control vaporized, the seismic wave of her release crashing through her. He rode it out with her, gentling only when her shudders began to subside.
Before she could even slip down the wall, he was on his feet. He turned her, her back to the velvet, her face flushed and dazed, trousers still tangled around her knees. Her eyes were wide, pupils blown.
He just looked at her, his chest heaving. Then he gave a single, rough nod toward the floor.
Understanding flashed in her hazy gaze. A challenge returned. A balance to be restored.
She didn’t hesitate. She sank to her knees before him, her movements fluid, deliberate. Her fingers made quick work of the laces of his leathers. He hissed as her cool hands freed him. She looked up at him, that defiant red hair coming undone, and then she took him into her mouth.
It wasn’t submissive. It was an assertion. A reclaiming. She matched his earlier voracity with a devastating, focused skill that unraveled him from the core. Her mouth was a wicked, knowing paradise. One of her hands gripped the base of him, the other anchored on his thigh, her nails biting through the leather. She set a ruthless, perfect rhythm, her eyes holding his, watching every flicker of his obliteration.
His head fell back against the wall with a thud. A prayer, a curse, something filthy and grateful broke from him. The pleasure was a white-hot blade, carving him hollow. He fisted a hand in her hair, not to guide her, but to anchor himself to the world.
“Kaitlyn—” he choked out. It was a warning.
She ignored it. She took him deeper, swallowing around him, and that was it. The world went white and roaring. He came with a force that ripped a gutteral shout from his throat, his knees buckling as she drank every last shuddering pulse from him.
Silence, broken only by their ragged breathing. He slumped against the wall, spent. She sat back on her heels, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The look she gave him was pure, unadulterated victory.
It sparked something else in him. Something beyond satiation.
He hauled her up, her torn trousers falling away completely. He kissed her, tasting himself on her tongue, a deeply primal satisfaction rolling through him. He walked her backwards until her knees hit the edge of a low, plush divan. He pushed her down onto it.
No more preliminaries. No more games.
He drove into her in one smooth, relentless stroke. She cried out, her back arching, her legs wrapping around his hips to pull him deeper. The divan rocked against the wall with the force of his thrusts. This was not lovemaking. This was a fight. A clash of hips and hunger, of hands gripping hard enough to bruise, of mouths clashing in bites and kisses. The velvet beneath her was soaked with sweat. The room echoed with the sound of skin on skin, with their fractured gasps and groans.
He watched her face. He saw the grief, the centuries of loneliness, the shield of ice, all burned away in this furnace heat. He saw the warrior, the survivor, the female who had lost everything and rebuilt herself from frost and willpower. And he saw the raw, open need she hid from the world. It mirrored his own.
Her release took her silently, a vast, inner quake that locked her body around him, her eyes squeezing shut. It pulled his own from him a moment later, a devastating wave that felt less like an end and more like a beginning.
He collapsed atop her, careful to keep his weight on his elbows. Their breath mingled, hot and damp in the stifling air. The barge’s noises filtered back—laughter, music, the splash of oars. The real world, waiting.
Slowly, he pushed himself up. He looked at the wreck of them: her ruined clothes, the marks they’d left on each other’s skin. Her hair was a magnificent disaster. She looked… real.
She opened her eyes. The victory was gone, replaced by a wary, stunned equilibrium.
Cassian reached down, offering a hand. She stared at it, then took it. He pulled her up.
“We still have a job to do,” he said, his voice gravel.
“I know.” She stepped out of the torn fabric, straightening her dress. With a flick of her wrist and a whisper of cold power, a sheen of pristine ice formed over the velvet divan, hiding the evidence of their encounter. She looked at the closed door, then back at him, a new, unsettling understanding in her gaze. “Haros is waiting.”
He re-laced his leathers, ran a hand through his hair. The merchant with the lead and violet scent was the least of his concerns now. The problem was the female smoothing her hair, her expression once again shifting into that of a cool, collected courtier, yet her eyes holding the echo of everything they’d just done.
The problem was, he didn’t want it to be an echo. He wanted it to be a promise.
But for now, he just opened the door, and led her back into the den of snakes.