Page 57 of Consort's Glory
Everyone knew elves didn’t date outside of their race. They didn’t get married to outsiders. They didn’t have hybrid children. They just didn’t.
Because when they did cross those lines, they left wreckage in their wake. They broke families apart. They abandoned children to live in cages of their own biting fear, with no resources, no one to ask when things weren’t right, no one to explain what was happening or why.
Margot’s chest seized, panic and anger and bitter loss wrapping like barbed wire around her lungs. In the back of her mind, she knew that the reason burn out came so early was because of her mixed blood. Another fun side effect that no one could explain to her because her elvish mother stepped out of her life as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, abandoning her to figure everything out on her own in a world that couldn’t even know she existed.
Understanding why her unnamed mother did it didn’t make the abandonment any easier to deal with. It didn’t take the pain away. If anything, it made it worse. Better to be abandoned for selfish reasons, Margot figured. At least then she could hate the woman who brought her into the world. Knowing that Margot’s very existence was unacceptable and could put the elvish part of her family at risk was a jagged shard of pain in her heart every day.
To have Theodore just… just say something like that to her, to so blithely suggest he would enter into a union of the very soul with a woman who had spent her life smothered by her own blighted identity was enough to make her want to claw his eyes out.
“Forget I said anything,” she gasped, scrubbing furiously at her swollen eyes with tingling palms. “I don’t want your pity and I don’t want your fucked up version of a joke, either. I’m not going to be a battery and I’m not going to be mocked and I’m not—”
The click of her seatbelt releasing took her by surprise.
Margot dropped her hands to ask what the world he was doing, but the words never made it out of her mouth. In an instant, she was tipped sideways and rearranged along the length of the seat, Theodore’s considerably heavier body pinning her in place.
Without preamble, he braced his forearms on either side of her head and dug his claws into her hair. “Twenty-five years,” Theodore breathed against her ear, the words strung together in one grating exhalation. His hair, silky and smelling of cedar and cinnamon, slid against her cheek.
“Twenty-five years I’ve waited and planned and worked my way into a position where no one could take the people I love from me again. Twenty-five years I’ve been challenged by every fucking elf in this territory and I’ve fought and I’ve clawed my way into being the youngest sovereign in history so I could have you. I am not about to let you slip away from me now, Margot. Just fucking try it. See what happens.”
Margot squirmed underneath him, the motion of the car pressing them both further into the cushions. Desire hummed in her veins like a low-burning fire, a furious heat beneath her anger and her grief. Her heart stuttered an erratic beat in her chest as a flush spread from her neck to her ears.
She didn’t want to desire him, but it was a roar in her blood, that howling thing in her lunging against the surface of her mind to reach for him with the desperation of the dying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she gritted out, trying to quell the shiver that ran down her spine when his clawtips scraped against her scalp. His weight was almost too much, but not enough, either. Margot wanted more at the same time that instinct compelled her to swipe her blunted claws down his chest for daring to pin her in the first place.
Theodore’s lashes fluttered against the skin of her cheek. His breath was a hot slide against her throat, but he didn’t touch her skin with his, withholding the skin contact she craved so much. Margot was caught between the overwhelming desire to just feel it, to break this terrible tension in her, and wanting to duck and roll out of the car altogether.
In no hurry, Theodore continued to lift his head, dragging his lashes across her cheek in a ticklish caress, before he finally looked her in the eye. Their noses were less than an inch apart when he told her, “One night when I was ten, I woke up from a dead sleep at three AM. I was sweaty and excited and my brain felt like it had been stretched like taffy.”
His voice was low, a sweet crooning that curled her toes as he cupped the top of her head and settled more of his weight on her, joining them from hip to ankle. “I was an angry kid and mad at the world. I fought all the time, and I was a prick to my family because I blamed them for not having my mother or father around. I had a lot of psychic ability but thin barriers, so control was a problem. It made it so I picked up on things I shouldn’t have.” His lips twisted. “Seeing things in my sister’s head, in Sam’s, in Valen’s… I grew up thinking that it would be better if they were still around, or maybe if I’d never been born.”
He let out a shuddering breath against her ear. “The psychic strain was too much, and then picking up their worries that I was showing signs of my father’s instability… Gods, it was like I was being crushed to death under it all.”
Theodore shook his head as the car swayed around a corner, rocking them against one another in a way that made Margot jerk with surprise. His hands clenched in her hair as his eyelids lowered to half-mast. “That part doesn’t matter as much as what happened that night when I was ten.” His eyes fluttered closed, a look of something close to relief, to reverence, bunching his brows together. “Goddess, it was like a fucking lifeline. All my anger, all that loneliness, all that psychic instability eating away at my brain, it was just sucked out of me. Like you cut through it all with a blade and said, Stop. I’m here now. You’re not alone.”
He bit his lip, sharp fangs pressing into soft blue flesh, before he finished in a breathless whisper, “When our minds touched, itlanced a wound that had been festering for a decade.”
Margot’s breath left her in small pants. Her hands curled into fists by her sides. Why wasn’t she using them to push him away, to get space? He was so very close. Too close. Surely he could smell the difference in her now, the base note in her scent that marked her as a hybrid, a half-breed, with his nose an inch away from her skin. So why am I just laying here?
She didn’t have the answer. All she could do was listen and rasp, “What? What are you talking about? We only just met. I’ve never had a psychic link with anyone.”
No, to the despair of her tutors, she was more or less psychically blind. Margot couldn’t find a telepathic link even if it smacked her in the face.
Theodore opened his eyes. The light slanting through the tinted windows was just enough to make out the difference between his dark irises and his slitted pupils, hugely expanded though they were.
In a very matter-of-fact voice, he replied, “No, I’ve known you for twenty-five very long years, Margot Goode. I’ve known you since three AM, March thirtieth, and you’ve been with me every single day since.” His expression softened into pure earnestness. “We’ve shared a psychic link — weak, almost inaccessible, but real — since the day you were born. I’ve looked for you every day, but it wasn’t until you came into my telepathic range that I was finally able to get a lock on you.”
Theodore swallowed. A gleam of something that looked suspiciously like vulnerability entered those dark eyes. “When I say that I’m your bondmate, Margot, it’s not a joke. It’s not manipulation. It’s not politics or blackmail or anything else you might suspect. It’s the truth. I am your bondmate because you are my consort. Do you understand?”
No,she thought, not even a little bit.
None of that could be true. Margot could not be the sovereign’s consort, whatever that meant. She was nothing. She was less than that. She was a half-breed abandoned by the two people who dared to bring her into a world that would not accept her on principle. Bonding to Theodore Solbourne, being his consort, was so far outside of the realm of possibility, it barely sounded like English.
It didn’t matter that just being near him made her heart race. It didn’t matter that the beast in her wanted to bite him and lick him in turn, a reaction it never had to anyone else. It didn’t matter that she was so desperate to live that she’d take any bondmate, even Theodore Solbourne.
It was impossible.
“You’re wrong,” she said, sounding dazed even to her own ears. “You’re so wrong. I don’t know why you think it’s me, but it can’t be. I didn’t even know what a consort was until this morning.” She still didn’t really know, actually.
