“I’m ready,” she announced, slipping on the two elbow-length white gloves that were sitting on the counter. Gabriel detected a note of resignation in her voice.
“Really? Are you sure you don’t want to organize the cabinets? Alphabetize your soup cans, perhaps? Maybe go through your refrigerator and throw out all the past-date food? It’s okay, I can wait.”
“Very funny.”
Still slumped in the chair, he spread his hands. “I promise I won’t bite you, Aislinn. You don’t have to keep stalling.”
She raised a brow and cocked a hip. “Don’t flatter yourself. Listen, Gabriel, I’m not afraid of much, especially not you. I’m just not looking forward to this party, but not because I’m going with you. If the queen hadn’t entrusted me with the job of introducing you around, I wouldn’t be going at all.”
“What would you be doing?”
“I’d stay at home, make a nice dinner, have a bath, and go to bed early.” She paused. “That might sound boring to you, but to me it’s the perfect evening. I didn’t sleep well last night and I’m really tired. Plus, I woke this morning to find a dear friend of my family had died from Watt syndrome during the night. I’m not feeling festive.”
Yes, he knew all too well she’d woken up pretty early. Knew all about the friend of the family’s death, too.
“Okay, I’ll be honest, Aislinn, I’d rather have a quiet night, too.” Gabriel’s job was Aislinn, not being introduced around at court. “How about we skip the ball and make dinner here. I’m a pretty good cook. You can go take a bath and I’ll prepare a meal. I won’t stay late and you can go to bed early. That way we can get to know each other a little better and I can change this horrible opinion you have of me. What do you say?”
She hesitated, blinked a couple of times, and looked ready to bolt. “I don’t have a horrible opinion of you. It’s just—”
He held up his hands. “Your honor is totally safe with me, Aislinn. Lock the bathroom door if you want. I just want to be friends.”
Lie. He wanted to sleep with her. Seduce her and betray her. Lure her into his bed and then to the Unseelie Court. He wanted to hand her over to the Shadow King, whose purposes were murky.
His conscience flickered.
But this was his job. And he’d known the Shadow King for many years. No matter what the stories were, he was not a bad man. He was not an unjust ruler. Gabriel didn’t know what his king wanted with her, but he felt in his heart it wasn’t to harm her. After all, she was a relative.
The plan was for Gabriel to get under her skin, make her care about him . . . addict her to him sexually, if he could. Then, at the end of his stay here, he would decide the Rose Tower wasn’t for him and return to the Unseelie Court, throwing himself on the mercy of the Shadow King. He planned to convince Aislinn to come with him—tell her that he couldn’t live without her and that the Shadow King would let him live if he saw he’d finally fallen in love.
And now he had the added leverage of knowing the monumental secret she was keeping.
Gods, he was a cold fucking bastard. Sometimes he even surprised himself.
Maybe it was better if they went to the party and surrounded themselves with other people. Maybe it was better if they didn’t get to know each other, better that this stopped now. He could go back to the Unseelie Court and tell the Shadow King—
“All right.” Aislinn stripped her gloves off and kicked away her stilettos. “Sounds good to me, but I don’t know what you’ll find to make for dinner. I don’t have much food in the house. I live mostly on oatmeal and yogurt.”
Gabriel’s stomach sank. Suddenly he wasn’t sure this was such a good idea. But he was in it up to his eyebrows now. “I’ll find something.”
She gave him a shaky smile, hesitated and looked as if she might say something. Instead, she walked into her bedroom.
He stared at the closed door for a long moment, still slumped in his chair. The decision had been made and he needed to get back on task. He couldn’t ask for a better situation than this.
All he needed was his head in the game. He loosened his tie and got up to build a fire in the fireplace. Feeding it with small bits of kindling, he coaxed it into a blaze—just the method he planned to use with Aislinn. That done, he ventured into the kitchen.
She’d been right when she’d said there wasn’t much food in the house. He managed to find some linguine in the cabinet, and some cauliflower that was nearly bad, olives, raisins, a little garlic and onion, nuts, and a small can of tomato paste from the rest of the kitchen. Anyone else looking at that collection wouldn’t believe they could create something delicious with it, but Gabriel knew he could. He’d watched his mother get by on almost nothing when he was a child, watched her creativity with limited resources, and had never forgotten the lesson. She’d always been able to create something wonderful from scraps.
With the odd assortment of ingredients he cooked up a sweet and salty pasta dish along with a salad. Finding a bottle of red wine, he popped it open and poured a couple of glasses. By the time she was out of her bath, he had the table set and dinner ready.
Seduction, phase one, in place.
“Wow.”
He looked up at the sound of her voice and his breath caught. She stood at the entrance of her formal dining room and surveyed the two places he’d set at the end of her polished mahogany table, using the fine china and crystal he’d found in her breakfront. Her gown was gone, replaced by a soft-looking pair of jersey pants and a dark sweater. Her feet were bare and her toenails painted in seashell pink, just like her fingernails. Her face was clean of makeup and her hair was freed from its chignon, falling freshly washed and still damp past her shoulders. She seemed completely at ease dressed this way and a bit younger.
Without the armor she wore around the court, she was even more gorgeous.
He cleared his throat and looked away, clamping down on his impulse to go to her. He knew that if he pulled her against him, kissed her, and stroked her soft skin, she would eventually relent. She might fight him at first, but he knew with the dark and erotic certainty of the incubus blood in his veins that he could push her past that stage, make her give in to him. It would be so sweet. He could draw her back to her bedroom, spread her out on her mattress, and strip those clothes off her. He could draw his lips and hands over her body, kissing, sucking, and petting her until she was incoherent with want—until the only sounds she could make were moans and entreaties for more.
His body clenched at the fantasy unfurling in his mind.
“It smells great and I’m famished.”
Gabriel had to force his vocal cords into action. “Bath all right?” He wasn’t going to think about her bare body slick with water and droplets of moisture. He was already having trouble controlling his erection—a thing that rarely happened.
“Wonderful.” She settled herself at her plate and he served her some of the pasta from a pretty blue and yellow ceramic bowl. Aislinn was one of the highest born of the Seelie fae and she had the best of everything. When he took her to the Unseelie Court with him, she’d be giving all that up, though considering her blood ties and previous social rank, Gabriel was sure that the Shadow King would clothe and house her appropriately.
Probably. His conscience flickered again.
He sat down beside her and served himself as she tasted his meal. She closed her eyes and sighed. “This is great, Gabriel. I can’t believe you just whipped this up in the twenty minutes I took to take a bath.”
“At three hundred and sixty-five years old, I’ve had lots of practice.”
“The Summer Queen mentioned you were a child during the Great Sweep and that you were only seven when the humans and the Phaendir created Piefferburg.” She took a sip of wine. “She even said that you suffered from Watt syndrome as a boy and still had it when you were first imprisoned here.”
“Yes. My mother had it, too. I was very sick and almost died, but managed to fight through. Now I’m immune. Unfortunately my mother wasn’t. She died from it during the first year of Piefferburg’s creation.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, but it was a long time ago.”
“Still, it’s never easy to lose a parent. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was.”
“True.”
“What was Piefferburg like back then?”
Gabriel took a steadying sip of wine as memory he ordinarily tried to avoid swelled. He remembered hastily constructed wooden shanties that leaked when it rained. Remembered how cold it was at night and how dangerously freezing the winters were. Remembered moldy potatoes and dirty, parasite-ridden water. Remembered his mother lying on a narrow mattress with no one to take care of her but a scrawny seven-year-old boy who was also wasting away from the disease. He remembered his mother dying alone one afternoon while he’d gone out to scavenge for food. When he’d returned empty-handed, her eyes had been open, dull, and sunken into a gray face.
He remembered the years after his mother died, when he’d been left alone with all the other captured fae who were struggling to find a foothold in their new reality. In those early years, after his mother died, he’d been forced to do so many unsavory things to survive. Things in back alleys for fae with bad breath, greasy hair, and grasping hands. He’d been forced to use his magick in ways he didn’t want to think of now, yet the memories dwelt like tiny demons in the corners of his mind, taking small, bloody bites.
He took another long drink of his wine. “It was a living hell for some of us.”
“For all those who weren’t Seelie, you mean?”
He nodded and said nothing more. Bitterness still crept up into the back of his throat remembering the years of the Great Sweep. How the Phaendir had hunted them down, rounded them up, and forcibly transported them from all over the world to Piefferburg. It had been so easy with the sickness on them all and because the fae races had been fragmented as a result of the wars.
The combination of events had spelled doom for all the fae. The wars and the illness had outed them to humankind, who panicked in the face of legend becoming truth. Intimidated by fae magick, they were easily influenced by the Phaendir, who told them to strike while the fae were weak.
So many fae had died on the ships; many more succumbed during their resettlement in the fledging Piefferburg, which had been so starved for resources. No food. No shelter. No medicine. No heat. Not even clean drinking water.
The early days had been very hard for all but the Seelie, who’d been kept like royalty on the backs of all the other fae. The troop believed the Seelie were a shining symbol of the greatness of their kind and supported them, no matter the cost to the rest.
He leveled his gaze at her. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
It was an effort to keep the edge from his voice. It wasn’t Aislinn’s fault that the Seelie had caused the other fae to suffer at the time of Piefferburg’s birth. She hadn’t even been alive back then. It had taken Piefferburg years to get on its feet, build an economy, and suffer through the inferno that had been Watt syndrome, an illness Gabriel believed was Phaendir born.
“Your mother was Seelie, correct? Your father Unseelie?”
“My mother was troop. She had Seelie blood, but it was mixed with wilding fae, not pure enough for the Rose.” His jaw locked for a moment. “My father was an Unseelie noble, one hundred percent incubus.”
“And your father,” she said softly, “did he die of Watt syndrome, too?”
His jaw locked. “No,” he forced out. He hadn’t had to speak of these things in a long time. They were wounds still fresh, even though they were centuries old.
“Is he here in Piefferburg then?” She took another bite of her dinner, unaware she drew blood from him with every question she asked. It was an innocent enough query from a Seelie lady who’d known no hardship in her pampered life filled with people who adored her.
His hand tightened on his fork and he forced himself to relax his grip. “No, he never made it to Piefferburg.” A good thing for his father, since Gabriel would have killed him once he was old enough and strong enough to do it. As a child he’d been powerless against the bastard who’d sired him.
She nearly dropped her fork and looked up at him. “You mean he’s still alive? He evaded the Great Sweep?”
“Yes, but the way he lived his life, he’s probably dead by now.”
She studied him with eyes keener than he was comfortable with. Most likely she was weighing his words and the tone in which he spoke. She was probably wondering why his father had chosen freedom in the world over his family, or at least why he hadn’t tried to stop the Phaendir from taking his wife and child. Those were questions he didn’t want to answer. Fortunately, Aislinn had enough sense not to ask them.
She turned her attention back to her plate. “What did your mother do for a living?”
His lips twitched. “She was a whore.”
Her hand shook.
“It’s okay. I’m not ashamed. My mother did what she had to do to take care of us. She was a strong woman, a good woman, who did the best she could with the bad breaks life gave her.” He paused. “I have more of my mother in me than I do my father. I’m happy to be able to say that.”
She raised her gaze. “I would never judge a woman in a position like hers, in that time of history, alone and with a child to take care of. History has not been easy on us, on any of us.”
“I would debate that the Seelie have had a rough time.”
Her eyes snapped suddenly cold. “Why? We’re the ones who have lost the most, even if eventually we regained it. The Seelie are the ones who ruled the British Isles after wresting control from the Firbolg and the Formorians, and then lost control to the Milesians when the Phaendir allied with them. It was the
Seelie
who had to negotiate for all the other fae races when that happened. If not for the hard choices we had to make, the fae might have been wiped from the planet. So don’t tell me the Seelie haven’t sacrificed just like all the rest of the fae.”