Chapter 85: Prince Pissed, Mate Kissed

The High Luna was giving her grandson the opportunity to correct his own sentence.

It didn’t bother Nova. She understood this was unconventional. A slave at dinner with the High Luna, the Alpha, and the future Luna was the kind of arrangement that would make the elder council’s tablets spontaneously combust. The High Luna was protecting her table the way she protected everything else, with quiet authority and a question that was really an answer.

But Derek getting upset was upsetting Nova, and that was the part she couldn’t stomach. This man had been so kind to her and she felt protective of him. His suit was lit. His body was rigid. His eyes were turning wolf gold at the edges, the color bleeding in from the periphery the way it did when his control was losing the negotiation with his instincts.

He wasn’t a man short on words, but he was struggling here. Nova had been around him enough over the past few days to know this.

Nova gave his hand a squeeze and turned.

The entire room was watching them. Every ranked wolf. Every mate. Celeste with her clasped hands and her borrowed warmth. The High Luna with her crown and her question mark still hanging in the air like an ornament that hadn’t found its branch.

"He will be there, High Luna," Nova said.

Her voice was steady. Her nod was graceful. The sentence gave the High Luna exactly what she wanted, which was confirmation that the slave understood the table she was not invited to, and it gave Derek exactly what he needed, which was someone pulling him out of the room before his mouth caught fire.

She turned and pulled Derek along with her, heading down the corridor with zero idea where she was going because she had never been in this building before and the tour she had just invented was currently being improvised by a woman whose navigational credentials consisted of twenty miles of sacred forest and a hover yacht she had been carried through.

Derek followed. His boots hit the stone behind hers, the rhythm uneven at first, the stride of a man whose body was still in the entrance hall fighting a war his mate had just ended with six words and a nod.

His hand was still in hers. Still gripping. Still trembling with something that was bigger than anger and older than tonight.

She kept walking until the voices behind them faded and the corridor was just the two of them and the glow from the ivy on the walls and the sound of their breathing finding the same rhythm it always found when the world got too loud and the quiet was just them.

Derek shook his head once, hard, like a man rebooting a system that had crashed mid-update. His eyes cleared. The wolf gold receded. Then he looked down at Nova’s legs, which were doing a convincing impression of a newborn deer on an ice rink, and scooped her up without asking because asking had been retired from their relationship approximately seventy-two hours ago.

She didn’t protest. Her legs had been wobbling since the dock confrontation and the parade had burned through whatever reserves Astra’s medication had built. Vertical was a suggestion her body was reviewing with increasing skepticism.

After three flights of stairs and multiple corridors, Derek shouldered open a set of double doors and carried her through.

The room could have fit a house inside of it.

A massive bed sat in the center. The balcony stretched across the far wall, floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening onto a view of the City of Light that was so aggressively beautiful, Nova’s breath caught.

The fountains were visible from here, steaming in the snow, their blue glow painting the courtyard in shifting light. Beyond them, the capital stretched into the mountain valley, towers and transport pods and glowing streets folding into the distance like a map someone had decorated with stars.

"This is your chambers?" Nova said, her voice bright with an excitement she couldn’t contain and wasn’t going to try. She wanted to clap. She wanted to do a full rotation with her arms out. She wanted to press her face against the balcony glass and stare at the city until her eyes ran out of wonder, which, based on current supply levels, would take approximately the rest of her life.

"Your chambers now too," Derek said.

Her brain didn’t comprehend that sentence. She didn’t know what to expect, truthfully.

Without another word, Derek threw her onto the bed like a ball.

She screamed, the sound bouncing off the vaulted ceiling as she hit the mattress and sank into fabric so soft it should have been classified as a controlled substance. Derek dove on top of her before the bounce finished, his mouth finding her head first, pressing kisses into her hair, then her temple, then her cheek, then her lips, each one landing like a man checking off a list of places he had been wanting to kiss and the bed was the green light he had been waiting for.

He pressed his forehead against hers and stayed there, breathing the same air. She could see that he was trying to not be upset and the trying was costing him more than the upset would have.

"Hey, Derek. Look at me."

He pulled back just enough to meet her eyes.

"I’m sorry that my presence has caused you trouble." Nova meant it. There was no other way she could say it.

Something in his face collapsed for a fraction of a second before he rebuilt it.

"No. Absolutely not. You don’t get to apologize for that." He kissed her forehead, lingering there. "Gran is the kindest person in this keep. She’s had a lot thrown at her. Tav has an Emberclaw princess. I have a mate, which no one predicted, least of all me. Give her time. She’s probably overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to handle it yet."

"She was very kind," Nova said immediately. "The way she greeted everyone was lovely. She clearly cares about this pack and about you. I could see it when she kissed your cheeks." She reached up and ran her thumb along his jaw, the gesture gentle enough that his eyes fluttered shut for a half second. "I am a slave who showed up at her doorstep with no warning. I would be confused too. Give her the same grace you’re asking me to give her, because I already have."

Derek blinked down at her.

"You’re not supposed to be the reasonable one right now," he said. "I had a whole speech planned. It was going to be very dramatic and you were going to cry and I was going to look heroic."

"Save it for the chicken fight."

His forehead dropped back against hers and the laugh that came out of him was small and warm and real, and it loosened something in his chest that she could feel through the places where their bodies were pressed together.