Xeon:The Drakenfell prince is speaking. I would like to bite him.
Fin:This is his house. We play by his rules.
Xeon:He is looking at her. I would like to bite him for that as well.
Fin:Xeon. Enough.
Serena was speaking with Elara and Hale, acting completely fine. But she was absolutely, catastrophically, the opposite of fine.
The last time the three of them shared a room, it ended badly. She remembered. Her body remembered. And her matebond was broadcasting it to both of them.
Fin leaned against a stone column across the room next to Aeron, face giving nothing away. For one terrible second, he was certain she was crying. He looked at her.
She held her composure so convincingly that anyone without a matebond would have believed it entirely.
Fifteen feet away, Dex's attention forked, half on Tiberon's mouth forming sentences, half on the woman thirty feet away whose distress was flooding him like cold water through a cracked hull.
