As he waited in the sitting room across from the Queen’s and Consort’s suites, he thought about the change in Surreal since they had taken that walk in the town house’s back garden. Not a change so much as a return of the woman he had known.
“I tried to be something I wasn’t, and it hurt both of us,” she’d said. “I thought I wanted to be a wife, but that night when you invited me to play and offered everything you were, when you showed me what it would be like to be with you without any barriers . . . I can’t be a wife to that man, Sadi. It’s taken me years to realize I felt safe enough to be with you because a part of you was still Jaenelle’s husband. Witch’s husband. Even when we didn’t know she was here in some way, you were always going to be her husband.”
“Is that your way of saying you want to leave?” he’d asked quietly.
“No, that’s my way of saying I want to be a different kind of wife, the kind that suits my nature.” A hesitation. “I’ll be your sword and shield, Sadi. I’m the sword.” She raised her left hand so that he could see her wedding ring. “This is your shield. As long as you have a wife and you wear a wedding ring, you’ll have at least some of the companionship you need—and a reason to refuse any companionship you don’t want.”
“You want to be celibate?”
“Hell’s fire, no.” Another hesitation. “I want to be the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan’s second-in-command. I want to be Daemon Sadi’s lover. But I can’t be lover to the Sadist or . . .”
“Or the High Lord of Hell?” he finished.
“Yes.”
He nodded. Not so different from where they had started.
“And I know Sadi as a lover has a bit of an edge, so you can stop asking permission before you do every damn thing. It’s annoying.”
“How will I know if that edge is too much?”
“You’ll feel my knife against your ribs.”
“You could just tell me to stop.”
“I like my way better.”
He laughed softly and took her hand. “Of course you do.”
“Daemon?” Witch said as she walked into the sitting room.
He turned to look at the Queen who was his life. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For helping Surreal set the boundaries of what she wants to give as a wife and what she expects in return.”
“Can you accept those boundaries?” she asked quietly.
“I can.” He smiled dryly. “Actually, it’s a relief to know where the lines are drawn.” I can accept that from her. It would have destroyed me if you’d needed those lines.
Not something he would say. Not something he needed to say. Not to her.
She stepped closer and studied him. “It doesn’t feel like you need to drain the Black or need my help regaining your balance. And I don’t think Surreal defining the terms of your marriage brought you here at this time of night. So I have to wonder what’s really on your mind, Prince?”
“Tersa asked me to deliver a message. She said the footsteps are getting closer.” Seeing the feral light that came into Witch’s eyes, Daemon smiled a cold smile. “What does it mean?”
“The approach of a potential enemy.”
“Who? Where?”
“I don’t know. The only thing I see in the tangled webs I’ve woven is the need to prepare. Tersa is the one who has felt the approach of an enemy, one who is not yet on the horizon, let alone close enough to be seen and recognized.”
“Have other Black Widows seen anything?”
Witch shook her head. “There have been no whispers, Prince. Nothing. But Tersa has always been more farseeing than most.”
“An enemy that well hidden?” He stepped close and bent his head until his lips were a breath away from touching hers—if he could have felt her lips under his. “Use me,” the Sadist crooned.
She placed a hand on his chest, over his heart, and pushed just enough to have him ease back.
“When the time comes,” Witch said. “One of Saetan’s regrets was that Mephis and Peyton had to live with the truth of what he was while they were still young, that they felt the weight of it before they were old enough to understand. Give your daughter as much time as you can before Kaeleer has to acknowledge the truth of all that you are.”
“What will you do?”
She gave him a smile that held some regret. “I’ll help forge a weapon to stand beside you in this fight.”
NINE
Tersa wandered through rooms and corridors in the Keep, muttering, “Wrong place. Wrong place. Can’t see what must be seen until I find the right place.”
She’d stopped hearing the footsteps approaching when she wove a tangled web. Now she felt something that scratched at her bones and filled her dreams with figures made of shrouded mist and voices that screeched and screamed—and laughed. The laughter was the worst because it almost sounded familiar. But the tangled webs she’d woven lately told her nothing more than her dreams, except that she was in the wrong place because the right place held lethal cold and deadly heat that would ensnare—and then kill.
Tersa pushed open an ornate metal gate, took a few steps into that part of the Keep—and froze as something very male and predatory became aware of her presence.
Lethal cold. Deadly heat. Her boy—but not her boy. This was the predator who knew how to turn pleasure into a kind of fatal pain a person would beg to feel until it was no longer possible to beg for anything except to be allowed to die. And even that wouldn’t free a person from his attention. Not anymore.
As the sexual heat washed over her, wrapped around her, she braced a hand against the wall. She should have been immune to that part of him, but that safety was now erased by the cold rage braided with the heat.
Intruder.
Yes, she was. And she wasn’t the only one. Another male, familiar to her, had already scraped at the predator’s control with his presence.
This threat, this bone-deep fear of someone she loved was the element her tangled webs had been missing. She needed those things, needed to be here to spin the web that would let her see the visions clearly.
Tersa hurried into a sitting room closest to the gate and closed the door.
Tables. Chairs. Sofas. A gathering place for a First Circle.
Yes. It would do.
Choosing a table with an empty surface, she called in a wooden frame and her spools of spider silk and began to weave a tangled web of dreams and visions.
Lethal cold. Deadly heat. Voices that screeched and screamed. And one voice whose laughter was filled with joyful malevolence.
She had barely time to attach the last thread, hadn’t even taken that one mental step to the side when the web revealed the visions the previous webs had kept hidden.
Tersa sucked in a breath. Much was still hidden and wouldn’t be revealed until the enemy’s shape—a shape that would be shrouded by deceit for many years—crossed paths with that lethal cold and deadly heat. And then . . .
*He is coming.*
A whisper of warning spoken in a midnight voice.
She hesitated. He was a Black Widow. He could—and would—read what was revealed in her tangled web.
As her trembling hand reached out to break the strands of spider silk, she felt that Black power moving swiftly toward her. Leaving the web intact, she fled from her son, running out of the room and past the metal gate, knowing he wouldn’t follow her once she was no longer in the Queen’s part of the Keep.