“Any more traps I should know about before we go tomorrow?” I said to his back.
Rhys looked over a shoulder, pausing atop the stair landing. “Here I was, thinking your notes the other night indicated you’d forgiven me.”
I took in that half grin, the chest I might have suggested I’d lick and had avoided looking at for the past four days, and halted a healthy distance away. “One would think a High Lord would have more important things to do than pass notes back and forth at night.”
“I do have more important things to do,” he purred. “But I find myself unable to resist the temptation. The same way you can’t resist watching me whenever we’re out. So territorial.”
My mouth went a bit dry. But—flirting with him, fighting with him … It was easy. Fun.
Maybe I deserved both of those things.
So I closed the distance between us, smoothly stepped past him, and said, “You haven’t been able to keep away from me since Calanmai, it seems.”
Something rippled in his eyes that I couldn’t place, but he flicked my nose—hard enough that I hissed and batted his hand away.
“I can’t wait to see what that sharp tongue of yours can do at the Summer Court,” he said, gaze fixed on my mouth, and vanished into shadow.
CHAPTER
32
In the end, only Amren and I joined Rhys, Cassian having failed to sway his High Lord, Azriel still off overseeing his network of spies and investigating the human realm, and Mor tasked with guarding Velaris. Rhys would winnow us directly into Adriata, the castle-city of the Summer Court—and there we would stay, for however long it took me to detect and then steal the first half of the Book.
As Rhys’s newest pet, I would be granted tours of the city and the High Lord’s personal residence. If we were lucky, none of them would realize that Rhys’s lapdog was actually a bloodhound.
And it was a very, very good disguise.
Rhys and Amren stood in the town house foyer the next day, the rich morning sunlight streaming through the windows and pooling on the ornate carpet. Amren wore her usual shades of gray—her loose pants cut to just beneath her navel, the billowing top cropped to show the barest slice of skin along her midriff. Alluring as a calm sea under a cloudy sky.
Rhys was in head-to-toe black accented with silver thread—no wings. The cool, cultured male I’d first met. His favorite mask.
For my own, I’d selected a flowing lilac dress, its skirts floating on a phantom wind beneath the silver-and-pearl-crusted belt at my waist. Matching night-blooming silver flowers had been embroidered to climb from the hem to brush my thighs, and a few more twined down the folds at my shoulders. The perfect gown to combat the warmth of the Summer Court.
It swished and sighed as I descended the last two stairs into the foyer. Rhys surveyed me with a long, unreadable sweep from my silver-slippered feet to my half-up hair. Nuala had curled the strands that had been left down—soft, supple curls that brought out the gold in my hair.
Rhys simply said, “Good. Let’s go.”
My mouth popped open, but Amren explained with a broad, feline smile, “He’s pissy this morning.”
“Why?” I asked, watching Amren take Rhys’s hand, her delicate fingers dwarfed by his. He held out the other to me.
“Because,” Rhys answered for her, “I stayed out late with Cassian and Azriel, and they took me for all I was worth in cards.”
“Sore loser?” I gripped his hand. His calluses scraped against my own—the only reminder of the trained warrior beneath the clothes and veneer.
“I am when my brothers tag-team me,” he grumbled. He offered no warning before we vanished on a midnight wind, and then—
Then I was squinting at the glaring sun off a turquoise sea, just as I was trying to reorder my body around the dry, suffocating heat, even with the cooling breeze off the water.
I blinked a few times—and that was as much reaction as I let myself show as I yanked my hand from Rhys’s grip.
We seemed to be standing on a landing platform at the base of a tan stone palace, the building itself perched atop a mountain-island in the heart of a half-moon bay. The city spread around and below us, toward that sparkling sea—the buildings all from that stone, or glimmering white material that might have been coral or pearl. Gulls flapped over the many turrets and spires, no clouds above them, nothing on the breeze with them but salty air and the clatter of the city below.
Various bridges connected the bustling island to the larger landmass that circled it on three sides, one of them currently raising itself so a many-masted ship could cruise through. Indeed, there were more ships than I could count—some merchant vessels, some fishing ones, and some, it seemed, ferrying people from the island-city to the mainland, whose sloping shores were crammed full of more buildings, more people.
More people like the half dozen before us, framed by a pair of sea glass doors that opened into the palace itself. On our little balcony, there was no option to escape—no path out but winnowing away … or going through those doors. Or, I supposed, the plunge awaiting us to the red roofs of the fine houses a hundred feet below.
“Welcome to Adriata,” said the tall male in the center of the group.
And I knew him—remembered him.
Not from memory. I’d already remembered that the handsome High Lord of Summer had rich brown skin, white hair, and eyes of crushing, turquoise blue. I’d already remembered he’d been forced to watch as his courtier’s mind was invaded and then his life snuffed out by Rhysand. As Rhysand lied to Amarantha about what he’d learned, and spared the male from a fate perhaps worth than death.