Nesta finished washing away the sweat and other remnants of last night. The sex hadn’t been bad—she’d had better, but also much worse. Even immortality wasn’t enough time for some males to master the art of the bedroom.
So she’d taught herself what she liked. She’d obtained a monthly contraceptive tea from her local apothecary, and then she’d brought that first male here. He had no idea that her maidenhead had been intact until he’d spied the smeared blood on the sheets. His face had tightened with distaste—then a glimmer of fear that she might report an unsatisfactory first bedding to her sister. To her sister’s insufferable mate. Nesta hadn’t bothered to tell him that she avoided both of them at all costs. Especially the latter. These days, Rhysand seemed content to do the same.
After the war with Hybern, Rhysand had offered her jobs. Positions in his court.
She didn’t want them. They were pity offerings, thin attempts to get her to be a part of Feyre’s life, to be gainfully employed. But the High Lord had never liked her. Their conversations were coldly civil at best.
She’d never told him that the reasons he hated her were the same reasons she lived here. Took cold baths some days. Forgot to eat on others. Couldn’t stand the crack and snap of a fireplace. And drowned herself in wine and music and pleasure each night. Every damning thing Rhysand thought about her was true—and she’d known it long before he had ever shadowed her doorstep.
Any offering Rhysand threw her way was made solely out of love for Feyre. Better to spend her time the way she wished. They kept paying for it, after all.
The knock on the door rattled the entire apartment.
She glared toward the front room, debating whether to pretend she’d left, but Cassian could hear her, smell her. And if he broke down the door, which he was likely to do, she’d just have the headache of explaining it to her stingy landlord.
So Nesta donned the dress she’d left on the floor last night, and then again freed all four locks. She’d installed them the first day she’d arrived. Locking them each night was practically a ritual. Even when the nameless male had been here, even out of her mind on wine, she’d remembered to lock them all.
As if that would keep the monsters of this world at bay.
Nesta tugged open the door enough to see Cassian’s cocky grin, and left it ajar as she stormed away to search for her shoes.
He strode in after her, a mug of tea in his hand—the cup probably borrowed from the shop at the corner. Or outright given to him, considering how people tended to worship the ground his muddy boots walked on. He’d already been adored in this city before the Hybern conflict. His heroism and sacrifice—the feats he’d performed on the battlefields—had won him even more awe after its end.
She didn’t blame his admirers. She’d experienced the pleasure and sheer terror of watching him on those battlefields. Still woke with sweat coating her at the memories: how she couldn’t breathe while she’d witnessed him fight, enemies swarming him; how it had felt when the Cauldron’s power had surged and she’d known it was going to strike where their army was strongest—him.
She hadn’t been able to save the one thousand Illyrians who had fallen in the moment after she’d summoned him to safety. She turned away from that memory, too.
Cassian surveyed her apartment and let out a low whistle. “Ever thought of hiring a cleaner?”
Nesta scanned the small living area—a sagging crimson couch, a soot-stained brick hearth, a moth-eaten floral armchair, then the ancient kitchenette, piled with leaning columns of dirty dishes. Where had she thrown her shoes last night? She shifted her search to her bedroom.
“Some fresh air would be a good start,” Cassian added from the other room. The window groaned as he cracked it open.
She found her brown shoes in opposite corners of the bedroom. One reeked of spilled wine.
Nesta perched on the edge of the mattress to slide them on, tugging at the laces. She didn’t bother to look up as Cassian’s steady steps approached, then halted at the threshold.
He sniffed once. Loudly.
“I’d hoped you at least changed the sheets between visitors, but apparently that doesn’t bother you.”
Nesta tied the laces on the first shoe. “What business is it of yours?”
He shrugged, though the tightness on his face didn’t reflect such nonchalance. “If I can smell a few different males in here, then surely your companions can, too.”
“Hasn’t stopped them yet.” She tied the other shoe, Cassian’s hazel eyes tracking the movement.
“Your tea is getting cold.” His teeth flashed.
Nesta ignored him and searched the bedroom again. Her coat …
“Your coat is on the ground by the front door,” he said. “And it’s going to be brisk out, so bring a scarf.”
She ignored that, too, but breezed by him, careful to avoid touching him, and found her dark blue overcoat exactly where he’d claimed it was. She opened the front door, pointing for him to leave first.
Cassian held her gaze as he stalked for her, then reached out an arm—
And plucked the cerulean-and-cream scarf Elain had given her for her birthday this spring off the hook on the wall. He gripped it in his fist, dangling it like a strangled snake as he brushed past her.
Something was eating at him. Usually, Cassian held out a bit longer before yielding to his temper. Perhaps it had to do with whatever Feyre wanted to say up at the house.
Nesta’s gut twisted as she set each lock.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew there had been unrest since the war had ended, both in these lands and on the continent. Knew that without the barrier of the wall, some Fae territories were pushing the limits on what they could get away with in terms of border claims and how they treated humans. And she knew that those four human queens still squatted in their shared palace, their armies unused and intact.
They were monsters, all of them. They’d killed the golden-haired queen who’d betrayed them and sold another—Vassa—to a sorcerer-lord. It seemed only fitting that the youngest of the four remaining queens had been transformed into a crone by the Cauldron. Made into a long-lived Fae, yes, but aged into a withered shell as punishment for the power Nesta had taken from the Cauldron. How she’d ripped it apart while it had torn her mortal body into something new.
That wizened queen blamed her. Had wanted to kill her, if Hybern’s Ravens had been correct before Bryaxis and Rhysand had destroyed them for infiltrating the House of Wind’s library.
There had been no whisper of that queen in the fourteen months since the war.
But if some new threat had arisen …
The four locks seemed to laugh at her before Nesta followed Cassian out of the building and into the bustling city beyond.
The riverfront “house” was actually an estate, and so new and clean and beautiful that Nesta remembered her shoes were covered in stale wine precisely as she strode through the towering marble archway and into the shining front hall, tastefully decorated in shades of ivory and sand.
A mighty staircase bisected the enormous space, a chandelier of handblown glass—made by Velaris artisans—drooping from the carved ceiling above it. The faelights in each nest-shaped orb cast shimmering reflections on the polished pale wood floors, interrupted only by potted ferns, wood furniture also made in Velaris, and an outrageous array of art. She didn’t bother to remark on any of it. Plush blue rugs broke up the pristine floors, a long runner flowing along the cavernous halls on either side, and one ran beneath the arch of the stairs, straight to a wall of windows on its other side, which looked out onto the sloping lawn and gleaming river at its feet.