Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
“I can’t stay here anymore,” he announced.
He’d never been particularly connected to the house or the things in it, but now he just saw in every room the faces of the males who had died with such courage.
Shuli checked his phone for the millionth time. Still no reports of any attacks, anywhere. So they hadn’t just protected their immediate friends and families. They had protected… everyone.
“They bring honor upon their bloodlines,” L.W. said in the Old Language.
“They do.” Shuli nodded, and then did what he could to snap out of the grief and sorrow. “I have a safe house. Let’s pack all this up and move there.”
He braced for a fight with L.W. because… reasons. The fucker could argue with Lassiter Himself over the color of the night sky—
“Yeah,” the heir to the throne announced. “If slayers were going to show up here, they would have by now. I got some duffle bags in my room.”
As L.W. strode down the hallway to his suite, Shuli glanced at Rhamp, who just shrugged.
“Maybe he had a personality transplant sometime during the day.”
“We would have noticed that,” Shuli muttered dryly.
At least Willhis, his butler, was going to be excited to coordinate the move-in once they got to the safe house. The doggen was no doubt re-alphabetizing the spice racks as he cooled his jets out there. But there had been absolutely no question whatsoever that the loyal servant had had to relocate.
There had been too many people lost already.
* * *
God, he really wished these humans and their bright ideas would just get lost.
As iAm sat in a palace conference room that was built out to look like… well, a conference room, he had a stack of papers in front of him, a laptop at his elbow, and a tension headache that felt like a tumor. He’d been reading legal filings and documentation for the last four hours straight, and nothing he had learned gave him any peace of mind.
Then again, short of somehow blacking out from hypoxia, he didn’t think he was going to be finding anything calm, anytime soon.
“It’s not about a housing development,” he muttered to himself. “They want our land for more data farming.”
Sitting back in the office chair, he rubbed his temples and looked through the smoky glass of one of the windows. He could still smell the cologne and perfume of the men and women who had come here once again during the day, and had sat with him and t’On and a courtier who had half a brain and could keep her mouth shut.
Catra had wanted to attend in person, too, but everybody had vetoed that. The Queen was more important than all of them—so if there was a bomb planted in any of those briefcases?
At least she had watched on closed-circuit TV.
He idly glanced at the notes he’d made in the margins of the latest court order calling for eminent domain. Those rats without tails had thought they were making an offer that could not be refused.
Because they were prepared to take the land they were offering to buy.
“What a fucking mess.”
Excited voices drew his eyes away from his scribbles. Out in the hall, three courtiers floated by dressed in purple, and their excitement was pronounced, their hands flying around as they talked, their usual decorum shed like a second skin to reveal vital emotion. The buzz about an impending mating between the heir to the throne and the Queen’s Tretary had spread throughout the s’Hisbe, and holy hell, he wished they’d fucking tone it down.
Nothing like seeing happiness in the faces of others to shine a bright light on your inner torment. He was also tired of faking enthusiasm when he was approached with all kinds of congratulations.
And there was no walking-it-off, getting-some-air, either. Throughout the Territory, lanterns with purple shades had been hung outside every door to every abode. As well, purple streamers were being strung between the barren branches along the walkways even though no one was strolling on the grounds in this weather.
If it had been spring, they’d probably be spray-painting the grass purple.
The news had spread so fast, but he shouldn’t have been surprised. No doubt a couple of the courtiers had seen that t’On had switched his robing to purple with sterling silver embroidery. That had been enough—especially when no other female was tied to him, no other family celebrating, no gossip about the where and when of some other family’s young.
So it could only be Her Sublime Highness the Princess Dennesha.
And eventually, somebody with a lofty ranking at court would have had the temerity to ask t’On, and he would have confirmed his intended female. Because there was no reason to hide the other half of the intended’ness.
So the purple wildfire had spread—
As his phone started to ring, he slapped his hand over it and prayed to hell the call wasn’t the human female who had been leading the objection to the s’Hisbe’s religious sanctuary designation argument, and its tax-exempt-status paperwork.