“Should I feel offended that you are thinking about him so soon after our lovemaking?”

“Is your confidence so lacking?”

I chuckled and then kissed her. After a moment, I answered her question. “I will kill him. When the time is right.”

“When will that be?”

I stared down at her, sensing her anxiety.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” I said quietly.

Her eyes were dark. “Adrian,” she whispered, shaking her head. “He already has.”

***

Isolde’s body cradled against mine, and for a while, I listened to her breathe, but I had one matter to attend to before daylight. I rose from bed, pulled on my clothes, and left her room.

I met Daroc at the bottom of the stairs.

Neither of us spoke; he only lifted my sheathed sword to show he had brought it. Together we headed for the courtyard where my noblesse usually gathered on celebratory evenings, drunk and laughing, amongst them Razan.

“Remember when our king would join us?” one was saying. “Now he fucks his wife and stays in her warm bed.”

“You cannot blame him,” said another. “She is beautiful.”

“Ah, yes, but that mouth,” Razan said, pausing to laugh. “If I had my way, I’d fuck her mouth every night, fill it so full of my come, she could barely breathe. Maybe that would keep her silent.”

I entered the courtyard, my stride slow and calculated.

Razan’s back was to me, and when the other noblesse went silent, he twisted around to look at me.

“King Adrian! Have a drink!”

He rose to his feet to face me, a wooden goblet in hand. When I did not respond, his dark brows lowered over his bloodshot eyes.

“You seem tense,” he said. “What’s wrong? You need me to teach your wife how to suck your dick?”

I reached for my sword, which Daroc had readied. The blade rang in the night like a bell, clear and cold, silenced only when it met Razan’s flesh and bone.

His head hit the ground with a wet thud, rolling until it faced down on the stone ground.

In the dreadful quiet that followed his death, I stared at my blade, slick with his blood, feeling nothing beyond a sense of relief that he was dead.

Then I handed it to Daroc.

“Burn his head. Impale his body,” I said and returned to the castle, to Isolde, where I lay beside her and slept.

Twelve

Isolde

I would have to shift today. The thought made me nervous. The only part I liked about the idea was that I could spend time with Sorin, but before I met him for training, I decided to head to the library, uncertain if I would have the chance to visit later today.