Page 59 of Consort's Glory
Margot staredat the roof of the car for approximately fifteen seconds before the reality of the situation — and the weight of a fully grown and currently unconscious elvish man — hit her.
She fought to free her arm from where it was pinned between their chests. Her lungs heaved against the weight of the elf crushing her. Her blood was liquid fire rushing through her veins. Her panic — it was unbearable.
What have I done?
Well, she knew preciselywhat she’d done, but that was the problem.
The car ran over a bump in the usually impeccably maintained elvish road, jostling her enough to knock the wind out of her lungs as she grappled with Theodore’s bulk. It didn’t help that having him draped over her, his heavy body pressing down against hers, his scent on her skin and his breath puffing through her hair, made every nerve in her body stand at attention.
Margot’s arms shook as she attempted to maneuver them on the large back seat. She tried her best to be gentle, but at a certain point there was no controlling how Theodore fell off of her. The damn man was just too heavy, and she needed to get out from under him to think through the mess she made.
He landed half on the floor with a car-shaking thunk as she scrambled back against the seat. Margot stared at Theodore, the sovereign, slumped on the floor of his own car, and thought, I’m so fucked.
Not fucked in the way her body craved now that the floodgates were open. Not in any fun way at all. She was fucked in the very real, very dangerous way that got lesser beings turned to pulp.
Margot clenched her hands in her hair and pulled hard, trying to rein in some of her mounting hysteria with the sharp bite of pain in her scalp.
I bonded to the sovereign.
She bonded to him. Tied her fate to his. Tied her magic to his. Tied their souls together. Tied her health to his nearness, his willingness to touch her, his hitherto unexplored tolerance for half-breeds!
Worse, perhaps, than all of that, was the fact that the bonding had apparently hurt him.
Even more galling was that he was right. Just because she couldn’t process them didn’t mean the facts were foggy: Theodore was her bondmate. He was the reason she had to come to San Francisco. He was right, but Margot still couldn’t understand how it could be possible.
Goddess, please tell me I didn’t kill him. I can’t take that on top of everything else.
Heart jammed into her throat, Margot scrambled onto her knees, her body swaying with the movement of the car, to reach for Theodore’s face. His head was propped up on the seat alongside one arm and one thickly muscled thigh. If it wasn’t the single most terrifying situation of her life — including the bombing — she might have laughed at the ridiculous pose.
The sovereign, mushed against the backseat, his long coat nearly stripped from him and tangled around his arms in the struggle to free herself from his weight, with his handsome face squished against the leather of a cushion, was somehow more dangerous to her now than he was before.
Margot’s hand was steady as she cupped his cheek. The slide of his skin against hers, the warmth of him radiating into the fragile bones and spongy marrow of her hands — even that simple contact was exquisite.
Magic coursed through the new, white-hot bond between them; an endless feedback loop of pleasure-pain that would keep her alive for centuries to come. Tears stung the backs of her eyes. Relief mingled with guilt and a dread to close a vice around her lungs.
Theodore Solbourne was now her magical filter, his body acting as a vessel to purify and dilute the unchecked strength of her magic, prolonging her life and giving him an untold boost of power in one hit.
And it almost killed him.
Margot turned her healer’s eye towards Theodore’s inner landscape, painfully aware that she was breaking more boundaries, crossing even more lines by peering into the sovereign’s body without his express permission. But she had to be sure she hadn’t accidentally killed the damn man, and Margot didn’t think he’d truly mind.
It was with immense relief that Margot discovered Theodore was not, in fact, going to die. No, she thought, eyeing his nervous system with awe. He’s just being completely rewired.
No wonder he passed out on her. Her magic hit him like a tidal wave, throwing open channels and pathways that had never before seen a drop of energy. The pathways he did have were mostly linked to his cerebral cortex, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, given his abilities.
Theodore wasn’t a particularly magical being — most elves weren’t, their pathways notoriously narrow and their inherent magic too wild to fit most spellwork — but bonding to her had forced him to be.
As she watched, he was being turned into her own personal magical conduit.
Margot ripped her hand away from his cheek to press herself back against the seat. “Fuck. Fuck! Glory, what the fuck?” She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead and pressed hard, panic making it difficult to think of anything other than how absolutely, completely screwed she was.
I rewired the sovereign’s nervous system. I bonded to him without his consent. I bonded to him without telling him the truth. What have I done?
No matter what Theodore said, he couldn’t be her bondmate. He didn’t have all the facts, didn’t know she was something that his kind shunned,and— and she just didn’t know what the fuck to do with a sovereign as a bondmate!
A shifter she could handle. A were she could work with. Even a dragon would have been better, notorious possessiveness and nesting issues aside. But an elf? Not just any elf, but Sovereign of the entire Elvish Protectorate?
What in Glory’s brilliant name was she supposed to do with that?
