“I’m certain,” Daemon replied dryly.

Lucivar watched his brother’s gliding walk across the flagstone courtyard in front of the eyrie. Daemon never looked like he was moving fast, but he covered a lot of ground.

“He could have stayed and helped.”

Lucivar looked at his son’s sour expression. “Oh, I expect he has enough shit of his own to deal with. Come on—we need to help your mother.”

A boy had rushed out to make the poop announcement, but it was a young Warlord Prince who was another step closer to adolescence—and the sharper temper that went with maturing—who helped him clean that room so that Marian could deal with the baby.

FIVE

Dillon hunched in his seat on the Rose-Wind Coach, hoping he wouldn’t be recognized by any of the other passengers. Then he sat up and called in a book. Better to look unconcerned. Just a young Warlord traveling for business or pleasure, but certainly not involved in anything sordid.

Not many of the Blood were taking this Coach. Its destination wasn’t one of the places where the aristos played and courted and pressured the rest of the people in Askavi—Blood and landen—into believing they were too important to follow the Blood’s code of honor.

He should have thought it through, should have realized a city where aristos flocked wouldn’t be a safe place for someone like him. Carron must have been furious when she learned her father had paid him to leave town. She must have contacted Blyte and the two of them written their vindictive letters to all the aristo girls of their acquaintance as soon as he’d left town. The bitches here had been looking for him, waiting for him. He’d barely settled into the hotel and walked down the street for a meal before they spotted him and the whispers started.

“That one can’t keep his trousers zipped. He’ll give anyone a ride.”

“Amusing enough, but he’s from some insignificant branch of some minor aristo family tree.”

“Are the knees of your trousers shiny, Lord Dillon? Must be from all the time you spend on them.”

They circled around him like a pack of savage dogs until he had no choice but to pack his trunk and flee to another town. Hopefully the aristos in the next town would be from minor branches of a family, more like his own parents. A place like that wouldn’t be of interest to Blyte’s or Carron’s family. Maybe the aristo bitches would leave him alone for a while.

Dillon turned the pages of the book, but he wasn’t reading the words. He spent the journey thinking about what he’d been told by the one Warlord who had dared to talk to him after the girls began their vicious whispers about who he was and what he’d already done in girls’ beds.

“You think you’re being mistreated—and you are,” the Warlord had said. “But at least you’re still alive. My cousin got caught by Lady Blyte’s ‘if you loved me’ spell and couldn’t get free of her until he didn’t have a copper left to buy her presents. Then she destroyed his reputation and his honor, making him sound like a street whore who went with any woman who snapped her fingers.

“My cousin barely lasted a month after Blyte and her cronies went after him. The young men who had been his friends avoided him, afraid to have their reputations stained by association. His family didn’t know how to counter the verbal attacks. The boy had made a mistake with one girl, the wrong girl, but the girl and her friends kept twisting the story, turning Blyte into the victim of an unscrupulous boy. I offered to report Blyte’s conduct to the Province Queen, but before I was granted an audience, my cousin took a bath in his own blood.

“He didn’t think it through, though. Didn’t drain the power from his Jewels before he opened his veins. He made the transition to demon-dead and most likely is in Hell now, still trying to make sense of why loving a girl had destroyed his life.”

Dillon vanished the book and closed his eyes.

Was that all it had been? A bit of Craft that had made Blyte’s suggestions sound reasonable? A spell that had him believing that he loved her? Was that all?

If you loved me.

A spell like that would be expensive—maybe not for the spell itself, but sometimes discretion was the most expensive part of a transaction. It would probably take most of the payoff he’d received from Carron’s father. And he couldn’t go back to the same witch who had taught the spell to Blyte, even if he found out who she was. The Lady was probably a favored customer who paid very well for deceitful spells and unsavory brews. However, if one witch knew how to make that kind of spell, it stood to reason that there were others who were as well trained in the Craft and would know that spell or something similar—and would be willing to teach the spell to a young Warlord for the right price.

If you loved me . . .

He could play that game as well as Blyte. If the aristo girls were going to plague him because of things she had said, he should get some compensation for the association—without having to get into a bed.

SIX

Standing behind a table in her sitting room, Surreal sorted her notes and reports for the SaDiablo estates and slipped the pages into heavy paper folders, along with the correspondence she carried from District and Province Queens who wanted to convey information to the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan but didn’t want him to think his personal attention—and presence—was required. She didn’t have a study like Sadi or an office like his secretary, Lord Holt. She didn’t want one. She wrote reports whenever she deemed it necessary and handed them to one man or the other, letting them figure out what to do with the requests, the complaints, and the paperwork.

The arrangement suited her, and the men, wisely, had never asked her to make any adjustments that might have accommodated them better and certainly would have annoyed her.

She’d spent a couple of days at each estate and a couple more talking to residents of the neighboring villages, the District Queens who ruled those villages, and even a Province Queen who must have heard she was in the area and made an “informal” visit to that village. That had left the District Queen’s court in a state of controlled panic as her First Circle organized a formal dinner for the Queen who ruled over theirs as well as for the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan’s second-in-command.

After spending days doing the work she’d been doing for decades—and still enjoyed—she admitted to herself that she had missed Sadi’s company, had missed sleeping with him. Missed having sex with him.

Admitting that much allowed her to consider what had happened with Daemon that last night before she’d fled from the family seat.

Truth wasn’t always a comfortable beast to ride.

A Warlord Prince’s bedroom is his private place, and he tends to be more possessive when he’s there.