Page 30 of Consort's Glory
The shaking would soon be uncontrollable. Not that she had much control of it now, of course. Even when she wasn’t healing, like she wasn’t just then, Margot suffered waves of tremors.
Next, she would begin losing control of her limbs, their motor function destroyed by the magic frying the connections between cells, alongside rupturing blood vessels to set off crippling spasms. If a brain bleed didn’t kill her, then the building magical storm in her cells would simply cook her brain until it stopped working altogether.
She could already feel the buildup of energy in her body. It was part of the reason she still hadn’t healed the cuts and bruises from the blast. Her internal eye was so focused on repairing the constant damage done by her magic that she couldn’t spare any attention for the little things. Soon, she wouldn’t even be able to do that.
As if hearing her thoughts, Theodore took a sip of his own drink before abruptly asking, “Aren’t you a bit young to be looking for a bondmate?”
“Not necessarily,” she hedged, wary of this man who never did what she expected and who made her hunger for touch more fiercely than she ever had. “I’m a gloriana — I’ll need one eventually, so I figure, why not now? I’d like… I’d like to meet someone and think about starting a family.”
Not soon, really, but her approaching death had a way of putting certain wants into perspective. If Margot was lucky enough to stop the demise coming for her, she damn well would pursue the path she’d always wanted: her own home, her own life, her own family.
Theodore’s sudden stillness caught her eye. Margot glanced up, her breath freezing in her lungs.
He sat there, one forearm braced against the edge of the table, the tips of his claws dripping with blood, and stared at her with eyes so black it was almost impossible to make out their slit pupils as they focused unerringly on her face.
In a measured, pleasant voice, he informed her, “That was your one.”
“Excuse me? My one what?”
“Lie.” Theodore blinked slowly, his dark green tongue snaking out to lick away a drop of blood from the corner of his mouth. Her stomach muscles tightened even as instinct urged her to leap out of her chair and run.
“You get one lie,” he continued, “but no more. Understand that I will always know if you lie to me, Margot. Don’t try it. It’s a talent I have, being a living lie detector, and not one I want to use with my witch.” His expression was hard but earnest, beseeching her not to let him down. “You and I, we must always be honest with one another.”
His witch?
She fisted her hands in her lap. “That wasn’t a lie.”
“It was a half-truth.” He smiled, but it was grim, lacking the wicked charm he previously deployed on her. “Trust me, I know the difference.”
Was this just another thing about elves she didn’t know, a hidden sense they had, or was it something specific to Theodore? It was possible he was simply very good at picking up micro-expressions, body language and inflection, but the gleam in his dark eyes, along with his utter certainty, implied it was something more.
Fuck.
Changing tactics, she straightened her spine and baldly replied, “Maybe, but it’s also none of your business. Sovereign or not, you aren’t entitled to the details of my personal life.”
Theodore blew out a breath, eyebrows raised, and leaned back in his chair. She watched his bloodied right hand scrape against the pristine white table cloth, leaving red tracks in its wake.
“Now that’s where you’re wrong.”
Her eyes darted back up to find him watching her. “Why’s that?”
“Because,” he answered, eyelids falling to sultry half-mast, “you’ve already found him.”
Margot could only stare at him blankly, utterly mystified.
Seeing her lack of comprehension, Theodore grasped the edge of the table with both hands, leaned forward, and announced, “Me, Margot. It’s me.”
A bomb going off in her coffee cup would have seemed less outlandish, less shocking, than Theodore’s utter certainty of something entirely, completely impossible.
Margot leaned backwards slowly, her eyes fixed on his face, and tried to find words in a mind that had simply stopped working. “That is… I’m really not…” She cleared her throat. “That’s not a very funny joke, Sovereign.”
And not simply because it was objectively preposterous. The sovereign of the Protectorate and her? Nonsense.
For one thing, elves did not mate outside of their race. Their population numbers were the lowest of all the races in the UTA. The excuse given to the public for the lack of interbreeding was because they were doing their best to avoid extinction and not “sacrifice their elvish legacy”.
The general consensus of the public was that it was simply to keep a hold of their power and an aversion to diluting bloodlines — a myopic choice that other races made in the distant past with disastrous results. The dragon clans were still recovering from their own enforced isolation, and were the most vocal group decrying the practice because of it. Despite his playboy image, Isand Taevas, lord of the dragon clans, always backed laws in the UTA Congress that promoted intercultural communication and cross-pollination.
But elves apparently hadn’t learned the lesson. They stuck to their own, passed their wealth onto their own, and only bred with their own.
