Bard ignored the cat and leaned her elbows on the rail, looking down at the reddening water.
“Don’t worry, Captain,” she said, misreading his concern. “I’m sure you’ll hold your own.”
She was talking about the tournament. Their reason for returning, or at least their excuse. The Essen Tasch—the greatest competition in the three empires.
He held out a hand, as if to cup the misty air. His lips moved: the soft, almost soundless ushering of magic. A tendril of water drew up, gathered in his palm. His fingers twitched, and the water hardened into ice.
The Essen Tasch—a place where power mattered more than title, more than name, more than anything. A place where futures were made, and pasts erased.
Even now, his heart beat too hard in protest, a warning to turn the ship, to go back out to sea, where the deck felt steadier than any land beneath his feet.
Perhaps he was making a mistake.
Perhaps three years was too long, and not long enough.
Perhaps—
Bard cleared her throat.
She turned, putting her back to the river as she folded her arms. “It’s funny, though,” she said, almost absently. “I’ve never seen you flinch in the face of a fight. Four months on this ship, and I’ve never seen you so much as nervous. Makes me wonder what else we might be sailing toward.”
Delilah Bard had always been too sharp.
Alucard let the ice melt between his fingers. “London and I did not part on good terms.”
Bard’s smile flashed. “I didn’t know a city could fall out with a man.”
“It can,” he said, “when a man falls out with its prince.”
Three years ago.
They stumbled down the narrow hall, fingers tangled in each other’s clothes.
The prince pressed Alucard back into the nearest wall, and he winced as the unhewn stone dug between his shoulders. The secret passage was rough, unfinished, so unlike the polished marble that lined the rest of the palace, the parts always on display.
Alucard pushed off the wall, drawing the prince farther down the corridor. A few small lanterns lined the passageway, each burning with a low, enchanted light that was just enough to see by.
And he could see.
He could see the shape of the corridor, and the place it split, each branch leading to a different room. And he could see the door at the end of one passage, embossed with the royal seal, and the letter R inside. And he could see Prince Rhy Maresh, his edges laced with gold. It ringed his fingers and trimmed his cuffs; it dusted his lips, and rested in a narrow band against his temples, and shone, like molten metal, around the pupils of his eyes.
He had watched Rhy grow from boy to youth, and youth to royal, had always felt a certain warmth toward the prince, but four years was a chasm between children. And yet, in the last year or two, it had begun to close. And this past spring, at a saint’s day feast, when the prince’s eyes met his across the room, the gold in them had spread like blush on summer fruit. And when the prince came toward him, full of pleasantries, his voice was deeper, lush and smooth. And when the prince’s hand had come to rest on his arm under the pretense of a laugh, a sudden need for steadying, his grip was firm, an unspoken question—almost an order—in the touch.
And when the prince kissed him in a shadowed corner of the hall that night, there was such hunger in his lips, his racing heart, but Alucard was the one left out of breath. Where was the boy he’d teased growing up, the powerless prince? Rhy, seventeen, and Alucard, almost twenty-one, and yet he was the one who felt unsteady, thrown by the passion in the other boy’s kiss.
“Are you sure?” he asked when he could speak again.
“Are you certain?” he asked with every stolen breath.
“Do you want this?” he asked, again and again, until Rhy broke away, exasperated.
“Am I not making that clear?”
“You’re young,” he said, as if it were an answer.
“Nokil Maresh took the throne when he was my age,” Rhy shot back. “I am old enough to rule the empire, and old enough to wed.”
“Are you proposing, then?” asked Alucard, but the prince only laughed, and dragged him down into the bed.
And so began a courtship in dark corners.
An affair of stolen looks and knowing smiles, of fingers tangled out of sight, of kisses along collars, and hands pressed over mouths to stifle sounds of pleasure.
They found the door, their progress halted only by Alucard’s teeth along the prince’s shoulder, and Rhy’s hands questing beneath his shirt.
Alucard felt blindly behind him for the handle, and it gave, just as Rhy pressed flush against him. They gasped, crashing backward into the prince’s room. Alucard laughed, too loud, and Rhy pressed a hand over his mouth. He smiled into the touch, gold rings grazing his lips.
Around them, the royal chamber was a thing of beauty. Dark wood furnishings, threaded with gold, and gossamer gathered into a sunset on the ceiling, and silk curtains, spilling down the wall around his massive bed.
Like the prince, it was immaculately groomed.
And like the prince, he could not wait to cast it into disarray. To knock the furniture askew and sweep the pillows from the bed.
He hooked his finger in the prince’s crown.
“Your Highness,” he said, casting the band of gold onto the nearest divan.
“How impertinent,” said Rhy, kissing his way down Alucard’s jaw, leaving a trail of gold dust in his wake.
They stumbled toward the bed, wrestling with the clothes between them.
“Too many buttons,” growled Alucard, tearing one off with his teeth.
Rhy let out a gasp of mock horror. “Those are very expensive,” he said as Alucard spat it like a seed into the dark.
They reached the bed, and Rhy leaned back, fingers sliding over the sheets. His shirt hung open, exposing a stretch of smooth, dark skin from collar to waist.
Alucard marveled at the prince.
He could see the threads in everything. The filaments of magic that wound through the room, enchanting the lanterns, protecting the windows and doors—spells laced into the palace after the prince’s abduction years before. He could see his own magic, lines of light that wove over his skin. But around Rhy Maresh, there were none.