Chapter Text
I wake up to the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my chambers.
I’m in bed trying to gather my thoughts—unsure of how I had gotten to Aretia in the first place—when she stands in the doorway, her long hair dripping water on the floor and a small towel wrapped tightly around her.
My confusion echoes down the bond to Sgaeyl, and her own reflects back to me.
Because we don’t just let anyone into Aretia—into my house—right now, and I most certainly would’ve remembered this woman being brought into it.
Everything about her is enticing, like an art piece of my every desire come to life, and she’s in my room. Smiling at me, so stunning I almost wonder if I’m still asleep.
“Sgaeyl?”
“I do not understand.”
“Yeah, me either.”
The strange woman is way too fucking comfortable, even as stunning as she is, asking how I’m feeling and digging for more when a lie slips past my lips without thought. Her shields are good, but not totally walled off; they’re easy to slip past.
I can only catch a sliver of genuine concern for my well-being before her shields slam shut.
“Don’t you dare.” Hurt and anger flash in those eyes, shifting pools of color that are now sinking into endless depths of blue.
“It’s alright,” Sgaeyl says, sensing the cold panic that runs through my veins.
How the fuck does she know about my signet? No one knows. Not Garrick, not Bodhi—no one.
“Who the fuck is this?”
Sgaeyl hesitates, which only heightens my confusion. She’s never been one to show uncertainty.
“How did I get here?” I demand, not for the first time.
She ignores my second question, finally answering my first. “She is…she is Tairn’s.”
“You’re Tairn’s rider?” I say aloud, unable to keep my shock hidden.
Tairn didn’t bond this year. Right? I would have noticed that—everyone would’ve noticed his return after losing Naolin.
That question seems to break her.
“Xaden,” she says, so much emotion wrapped into the way she says my name, a stunning amount unlike I’ve ever heard. And she crawls to me, grips my ankle, kneeling in my bed like some type of siren; this close I can see exactly where her brown hair turns to silver as it falls around her face, and watch a droplet of water drip down the perfect curve of her neck, following a path over her collarbone and down to her breasts where the towel is knotted.
“Do you know who I am?”
Gods, I really wish I did.
But the way she’s watching me is also too fucking much—too much confusion, too much fear, too much affection, maybe even love.
I would never know what to do with that much love. That should go to somebody else.
I shake my head.
And she—this strange, beautiful, unstable woman—lets out a giggle, staring down at the floor.
I really don’t fucking understand why this stranger is about to have a breakdown in my room. I have half a mind to call for help and get her to someone else, someone she knows.
But this is my room, and it’s starting to feel suffocating with her presence, her touch still on my ankle. Even if I haven’t just met her, she is way too comfortable. A headache starts to form behind my eyes in a light throb.
“Maybe you should go.”
Her head snaps up, and all that vulnerability sharpens, her watery eyes filled with venom alongside the tears.
“Go?” she asks. “Go where?”
Her audacity makes me scoff. “I don’t know. Out of my room would be a great start, if you don’t mind.”
“What the fuck is her problem?” I hiss.
“You’re misremembering more than you realize,” Sgaeyl adds. “She is nowhere near a stranger.”
The woman finally sits back, putting more space between us. She blinks, like she can’t believe I’m serious, and then she juts her chin up, meeting my glare where most would cower away.
“Why would I leave my own room in nothing but a towel?”
“Sgaeyl,” I mutter.
“She has not said a lie.”
My mind whirls, thinking back to the past year so far in the Quadrant, all the new cadets that crossed the Parapet, those that survived until Threshing. Hell, even the Infantry cadets we’ve come across in those gods-awful RSC sessions.
I would remember her, if I’d seen her. I would never forget a woman that looks like this—who’s bonded to Tairn, and who is probably less than half my size but with double the audacity.
Violet, she says her name is, right before she decides to change in the middle of my damn room.
I curse, looking away on instinct—even though she obviously didn’t care, and I wouldn’t have minded seeing what’s under her towel.
Violet, Violet, Violet.
“I don’t know a Violet,” I complain. The name does sound familiar, tugging at something in my mind, but I chase it around and around into emptiness.
“She is a worthy rider of Tairn,” Sgaeyl says, as if I would’ve ever thought anything else. I’m not stupid enough to ever even think the second-largest dragon on the Continent would choose someone that wasn’t worthy.
“And she is the reason you still breathe, that your heart beats,” she adds, her words stilted.
My brows furrow, and I catch a few shadows falling out of place, curling towards her on the floor, and yank them back. She doesn’t seem to notice, too busy trying to do a corset up by herself.
I watch her for another moment, my gaze tracing the muscles under her pale, creamy skin and the scar along her upper arm. Her hair is wild, still soaked and leaving damp patches on her undershirt.
If she is Tairn’s rider, and she’s here in Aretia, and she somehow knows about my second signet, all of which I still don’t understand—she must be loyal. And powerful. Right?
Sgaeyl doesn’t dispute a single thing.
Whatever reason I don’t remember meeting her, I have to know her. She’s an important part of the Rebellion.
Well, fuck it. I swing my legs over the side of the bed, holding back a wince at how my entire body aches like I fell from dragon-back onto a mountain side.
I clear my throat. “Need some assistance?”
She turns, holding the corset up at the front, and when it glints in the light, I realize it's armored. Smart.
She nods wordlessly, and then quickly turns away when I stand to cross the room to her. When I start up the laces, I half-heatedly think that getting close to her again was a mistake. Her skin is still damp and chilly, but the smell of her citrus soap has me wanting to bury my face in her neck with an unreasonable intensity.
I feel too restless, this close to her. Like something’s crawling under my skin, and yet I can’t bring myself to step away.
“Sgaeyl says you’re trustworthy,” I mutter, trying to gauge more of this woman. “That I…owe you my life.”
She wraps her arms around herself, her back still to me.
“That’s probably the kindest thing she’s ever said about me,” she says.
The admittance makes me huff out a laugh before I can think better of it.
“She does not need to get used to it,” Sgaeyl chides.
Violet finally turns to me, smiling hesitantly. Gods, her lips are gorgeous. My first instinct is to reach for her face, and I have to cross my arms to physically restrain myself from following through.
Her face changes, her smile slipping a bit. How did I upset her? I don’t even know what I could’ve done. I know I’m an asshole, but fuck, I’m just standing here.
She doesn’t mention anything, so maybe I’m reading too much into it.
“I asked Tairn to get Brennan and Garrick,” she starts, “so you can—”
There’s an obnoxiously loud knock at the door that I recognize as my best friend before he even yells a greeting.
“Sorrengail,” he snaps. “Come get your fucking dog before I—”
Sorrengail?
Violet darts around me and throws open the door, starting up a greeting that I don’t hear past the roaring in my ears.
Violet fucking Sorrengail.
That’s why her name was familiar—that’s Brennan’s little sister, and General Sorrengail’s youngest.
I shift in place, and can almost feel the sharp tug of every damn scar on my back like when they were first carved there—left as the physical reminder of a favor I owe that will eventually be called upon.
“Sgaeyl—”
She sighs in answer. And Violet is very steadily ignoring my glare, her spine ramrod straight with tension. She knows I’m pissed, she only told me her first name for a reason.
Gods, you’ve got to be fucking kidding.
Violet Sorrengail is dangerous.
Garrick and Brennan and Sgaeyl—everyone really—can say otherwise to me, but I cannot fathom how I could let her get so close to me. If we even are close. Were. Whatever.
Of fucking course she’s a lightning wielder. Of course Tairn chose her. Of course she’s painfully gorgeous and smart.
Just my luck.
Maybe it would all be more believable if anyone could tell me shit. But I’m not supposed to be distressed, especially after the episode in my room.
Violet, my wife, had left the room in a fury—the tears running down her cheeks and lightning at her fingertips making her look like a wrathful goddess, and I had just gotten on her shit-list.
Brennan and Garrick were both pissed at me for upsetting her—which, fine, it wasn’t fun seeing her cry—but I was pissed at them for trying to treat any of this as normal. So we all just sat there being pissy at each other until the Healers got there, and then my room was suddenly way too fucking crowded and people were touching me and asking way too many fucking questions.
I thought I was dying, when Sgaeyl tried to show me a memory. I don’t even remember what she said it was supposed to be. Something light, simple. Whatever it was, it felt like my skull had been split open and my brain was being carved out. I collapsed; I couldn’t stop shaking. Garrick tried to help me, but my signet control is also shit. The shadows lashed out on my behalf, frantic and scared and betraying my control entirely—and a dagger flew off the table and nearly sliced Brennan in the neck.
I could’ve killed someone.
And now Violet Sorrengail is just in my dad’s office with all her friends. Which somehow includes Dain fucking Aetos and Cat.
Keeping myself grounded and my emotions in check takes every ounce of my willpower, and hardly leaves anything to respond to whatever questions or quips are being thrown at me in my own fucking house. No matter what is repeated to me about the years I’ve apparently lost, I cannot lower my hackles that rise at the sight of them all here. The thought of all these intruders being in the city we’ve kept under wraps since it burned—it’s insanity.
Even still, my shadows are wrapped in my emotions, bleeding all over the office, even curling towards Sorrengail—the feeling of her soft ankle tickles my palm when my shadows reach her. I don’t know if they were trying to suss her out, or harm her, but I force them to slither back as she dismisses everyone from the room like she owns the place.
If anything, it was good to see Sloane alive and well after the shit-hole of a home Liam said she found herself in.
I did not expect the first time I saw her in years she would be wrapped up in Aetos’s lap. I can’t imagine what Liam thinks of that.
He’s always been better than me when it came to accepting people, though. Maybe he likes him. I don’t know shit anymore, apparently.
A lot can change in three years, as I learn when Sorrengail invites me onto the roof and tries to update me about the city. So much has moved along without me. And a Sorrengail has been running it all, while I’ve been—I don’t fucking know. No one will tell me.
She’s all wrapped up in a blanket, next to me on the roof, her cheeks pink from the cold as she speaks, reciting updates like she’s putting on a show.
It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
I try to remember anything, reach for memories as they disappear like a dream upon first waking. When my head starts to throb, I get up and leave without a word so I don’t lose it with my signet again. I don’t even want to think of what the consequences would be if my shadows went haywire and pushed her off the damn roof.
My room is the worst place to be of anywhere in the House. It’s so clearly not my room anymore. Our weapons and clothes and books are all so intertwined it’s like they were embroidered into one another as the perfect picture of domesticity.
It makes me…probably unreasonably pissed off. I chalk it up to the long day, or my amnesia, because even I know that being this angry at her existence is too much, and try desperately to put a lid on it. I’ve spent too long mastering my control for it to all unravel in one shitty day.
I need something.
Violet is sitting cross-legged in my bed, brushing out her long hair while her wedding ring twinkles on her finger. Even if I never expected to marry for love, not being able to remember the actual wedding sets me off.
“Is there nowhere else you can be?”
She sighs like she’s been waiting for me to say something, and flips her hair over her shoulder. It’s so damn long. I start to wonder how she puts it up when she’s flying, or fighting, or what it feels like to dig my fingers into it—
“This is my room, Xaden. I’ve never stayed anywhere else here.”
I scoff, crossing my arms. Unlikely. “You don’t have another room, or you’ve just never gone to it?”
“I don’t have another room.”
I can’t fathom sharing so much of myself, every bit of my time and space, with anyone else. I always had a separate room when I visited Cat in Poromiel. Sharing a room with her was never an option in my mind. Apparently everything is different with Violet Sorrengail.
My lack of response spurs her on to begin her next speech.
“You brought me here to Aretia, took a dagger to the chest when making my case to the Assembly, and this became our room.”
“I have two scars on my chest.”
She flinches, and I narrow my eyes at her.
When I showered earlier today, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time.
My scars on my back are the same, Sgaeyl’s relic covering them in her own protection, but I look like a fucking ghost—thin and sickly. A shell of who I’ve striven to be, with scars that tell stories that I don’t know. It’s like I’ve woken up wearing someone else’s skin.
The most noticeable were the two over my heart, one much, much fresher than the other. And Violet knows them both.
But she won’t tell me.
“Sgaeyl,” I hiss.
“I am sorry, my boy,” she says. This day is just a shitload of new experiences, because Sgaeyl has never been so secretive, or regretful. “I cannot, unless we want a repeat of this morning. Perhaps worse.”
For fuck’s sake. My dragon—my reason for breathing—can’t even be honest with me right now.
When I meet Violet’s gaze again, she once more has such an open expression that it’s overwhelming.
It has to be an act. She must be putting up a front, or exaggerating. Or maybe just really, really clueless. The last option is probably the least likely, from what I’ve gathered of her today.
“When you wake up tomorrow with your memories, I will remind you of all of these thoughts,” Sgaeyl mutters.
Whatever.
Violet continues to be earnest through all of my goading, even looking hurt—which makes my own chest ache more than it should.
But everything is still just too fucking much. So I switch tactics.
I don’t expect it to be so hard to get her to kiss me.
I move to her before I can think better of it, once I get the idea in my head. She wants something from me, that much is clear, so fine—I’ll give her something.
I don’t actually know our physical boundaries, but I do know I can be intimidating; I move slow when I get closer, so it’s easier for her to lean into my touch. Her skin is so fucking soft under my hands.
This was a mistake. I could get lost in her eyes, all those pretty colors as they regard me warily.
“And what about a goodnight kiss?” I murmur, my voice low.
I watch the line of her throat as she swallows. “What about it?”
“I’m supposed to follow routines, right? If we’re so in love, wouldn’t I at least get a kiss goodnight?”
“You would,” she responds.
I wait for her to drop her facade, show any cracks in this show of love she’s putting on. I’d probably let her kiss me, even after. She can take whatever she wants.
So I wait. And she stares. Finally, she raises an eyebrow at me. “Well?”
She sits like she’s waiting for me to fall to my knees for her, like it’s the obvious next step. When the anger I’d pushed down seeps back into my expression, through my flirting, pain flashes across her face in response. She pulls away from me, and I don’t think.
I pull her back in with my fingers tangled in that distractingly beautiful hair and crush my lips to hers. I swallow her gasp, moving my mouth against her perfect one with every intention of drawing more of those pretty sounds from her. The taste of her is addicting, and I’m wrapped up in her citrus scent until I can’t imagine breathing in anything else. Gods, this was a mistake.
If we’re supposed to be in love, fine. I guess it can’t be that hard to pretend when all I can think about is all the other places I want my hands and lips on her.
She pushes me away all too soon, and I realize my hands that cup her cheeks are damp with silent tears.
I blink down at her. Fuck, how did I not notice she was so upset? Why?
I don’t know what to do with this woman.
“That bad?”
Her bottom lip trembles.
“When you’re kissing me while thinking about how much you hate me? A little.”
Well, shit. The way she sees through me is unnerving.
“Perceptive, aren’t you, Sorrengail?”
Anger alights her eyes, and she shoves my hands away. “Let’s not do that again.”
My own anger rises in response, bubbling over the lid I’ve been desperately trying to keep secured.
“If you know I hate you so much, you’re not afraid I’ll decide to kill you? In your sleep, just like that?”
Sgaeyl near-hisses in the back of my mind.
I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t kill her just because of her last name, even if the thought is tempting—it’d be a point of no return for what kind of person I am, I think. So I don’t know why the fuck I said that, but I did.
I haven’t moved an inch, still kneeling on the side of the bed and arched towards her small frame, so when she whirls back, she’s right in my face again. I expect her to slap me, or shove me again. I would take it. I would welcome anything that might cure this relentless uneasiness, this itching under my skin.
She takes a steadying breath, and when she reaches for me, her touch is gentle. I don’t move—I don’t know what to do. Her hands cup my face, and I shove down the urge to lean into her touch.
“If there’s one thing you need to remember, and quickly, Xaden Riorson,” she says, softly. “It’s that I am not afraid of you.”
A spark from her fingertip hits my lips, just small enough to sting. I should be frightened, maybe, all that power in her tiny body, and how much control she has at her fingertips. Instead, I suck in a breath, my cock twitching at the thrill.
“Goodnight, husband.”
When she turns away this time, I don’t stop her. I watch her as she burrows under the covers, her hair spilling out across the pillow.
I want to touch her so badly it hurts. I straighten, watching her breathe for who knows how long, letting my own breathing settle down into a slow rhythm that matches hers as she falls asleep in my bed.
Yes, Violet Sorrengail is very fucking dangerous.