Forbidden Embers (29 page)

But he isn’t,
Logan realized, doing a quick scan of his thoughts. Julian was the kind of man who wanted all the accolades, all the praise. Nothing short of being king would satisfy him.

The thought of Julian married to Cecily enraged him, even more than the casually vicious way he spoke about her. As if she was nothing more than a means to an end. There was no way this guy was going to get that close to Cecily, no way he was going to be the next one in her bed after Logan vacated it. He’d kill the bastard first. Slowly and painfully.

Julian was skating on the very thin edge of his control and Logan knew it, but that didn’t make him pull back as it normally would have. He pushed a few thoughts into Julian’s head, and if he pushed a little too hard, then who was around to know? He did the same to Eriq, until the two partners were at each other’s throats, accusations and curses flying between them, until he began to wonder if one of them was actually going to take a swing at the other.

He hoped so, and regretted that he wouldn’t be around to see it. But he couldn’t afford to be caught near them, not after what he’d just done to Remy. Besides, Cecily was at home, waiting for him, and he was in the position to know just how wrong Julian had been when he’d called her frigid.

Furious, guilty, besieged by the need to mark Cecily as his even as he worked to destroy her, he walked the last few blocks to Cecily’s house in an agony of need. His dragon was right below the surface, ripping and tearing at him from the inside in an effort to get out. To get to her. The man might be confused, his loyalties torn, but the beast had no such compunction. It wanted nothing more than to lose itself in Cecily forever.

He slammed into the house with one thought on his mind: to get inside her as quickly as he possibly could. To fuck her as hard as he could, until he could no longer feel the different sides of his loyalty pressing in on him. He wanted to lose himself in her arms, in the pleasurable oblivion she brought him to so easily.

But he was barely in the door before he realized Cecily wasn’t alone. She was sitting in the small, fussy room to the right of the foyer, her head bent low and her hands on the lap of a man who was sitting across from her.

The beast went insane and he didn’t even try to hold it back. He couldn’t. He was right behind it, ready to rip the intruder limb from limb for having the nerve to touch what was his. If this was another
factionnaire
trying to convince her to marry him, he was going to leave here in a body bag.

He’d only been in the compound for a little more than twelve hours and already he’d had more than enough of the sneaky bastards. The next one who so much as looked at Cecily cross-eyed—
and this one is definitely doing more than looking
, his dragon seethed, as the man brought her hand to his lips—was going down.

He leaped across the foyer in one bound, and landed at the doorway to the parlor with a solid thump. Cecily glanced up, startled, and he froze as he realized there were tears in her beautiful violet eyes. His dragon saw red, and so did he. He reached for the man, prepared to kill now and ask questions later, when a look of alarm flitted across Cecily’s face.

She slipped between him and his prey, and the dragon snarled. Or maybe it was him; he didn’t know. They’d become one—a red-hot, seething creature full of jealousy and animosity. He wanted the man across from him dead, and it only stoked his rage that Cecily had put herself between them to save the bastard.

“Logan.” Her voice was low and urgent, but the hand she put on his chest was both cool and steady. “This is Sebastian. He’s a waiter at the Dracon Club, where I took you earlier.”

He didn’t care if the guy was the winner of the year’s Nobel Peace Prize. He had touched Cecily,
kissed
her, and he was going to pay for it.

He reached for Sebastian again, but the look in Cecily’s eyes was so trusting, so much about him, that he calmed down a little. Or maybe it was the way her thumb moved in feather-light strokes up and down on his chest. Either way, her focus on him calmed him down enough that he could think. Rationalize. And smell the despair that was literally rolling off the other man.

Something was going on here, all right, but it wasn’t what he’d first imagined. Putting a choke chain on his anger—and his beast—he wrapped an arm around Cecily’s shoulders and pulled her tightly to his side. He was calm enough now to listen, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to make sure that Sebastian knew exactly who Cecily belonged to.

“He came to ask me a favor. I need to take care of it.” She slipped out from under his arm and crossed the room. The dragon watched her intently, but she didn’t touch the other man, didn’t even come within two feet of him.

For the first time, he realized she held a small prescription bottle in her hand. As she dialed the number on the label, he finally trusted himself enough to relax the agonizing stranglehold he had on his beast—and his own emotions.

He relaxed even more as he heard her speaking quietly into the phone.

“Jacques? This is Cecily Fournier. How are you?”

She paused. “Good. I’m calling about Sebastian LeCroix’s account. Do you know what I’m referring to?”

Another pause, longer than the first. “Good. I need you to help him for me. Whatever he needs. You know I’m good for it. Yes, for everything. I’ll take care of it.”

A short pause. “Thank you, Jacques. I appreciate all your help. Yes, you have a good night, too.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Sebastian, who had tears running silently down his face. He grabbed her hands, kissed them again, and this time Logan realized he wasn’t actually kissing Cecily. He was kissing the ring on her finger. He’d noticed it earlier, but hadn’t made the connection, as Dylan didn’t wear one and it had been centuries since he’d seen a ruler who did. Sebastian was kissing the royal ring, as subjects had in days of old.

“That’s enough, Sebastian.” Cecily brought her hand up to his hair, tenderly stroked the strands back from his forehead. But there was nothing sexual in her touch. It was more maternal, though the dragon standing in front of her looked like he was probably about fifty years older than she was. Still young, but nowhere near as young as she was.

“Go pick up the prescription,” she continued, pulling her hand away from him when he seemed unable to let her go. “Then go home. Your family needs you.”

The man nodded, mumbled his thanks again and again as he backed out of the room. At the front door, he bowed low before slipping out into the night.

Cecily turned to him as the door closed behind her visitor. “His daughter—” Her voice broke, and the tears from earlier were back. “His daughter is sick with the same genetic disorder his wife has, and the pharmacy wouldn’t give him the medicine that helps keep her out of pain. He’s in debt because of how much his wife’s medicine has cost him through the years. His daughter is suffering, has been suffering for weeks, because he can’t afford to take care of her.”

She turned to him, buried her face against his chest even as she wrapped her arms around his waist. “How has it come to this?” she demanded. “How the hell did my father let our clan get into such bad shape that our people can’t afford the most basic necessities? I can’t believe all this has happened in just the five months since he died. He must have known about it, must have let it happen long before his murder. But why? What could possibly be more important than the people who depended on him?”

Her shoulders started to shake and he could feel her tears, warm and wet, through the front of his shirt. As she cried—not for herself or her father, but for her suffering people—the last ounce of resistance he had melted into nothingness. His arms came around her and he rocked her slowly, soothingly, as he tried to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do now. How the fuck was he supposed to betray a woman he not only liked and desired, but whom he also respected?

But how could he not, when doing nothing meant he would be betraying the king and the clan, who had given him refuge for nearly a century, made him one of their own?

Not sure what he was doing or why he was doing it, Logan pulled away slowly. Settled himself on the couch and then pulled Cecily down next to him. He turned so that he was looking straight in her eyes and then told her, “That’s not the only problem you’ve got.”

As he spoke, he felt his entire world—everything he’d always believed or stood for—come tumbling down around him. He was in uncharted territory, and it promised to be a very bumpy ride.

C
ecily stared at Logan, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Your defenses are shit. A child could find his way onto this compound without so much as raising an alarm.”

“But that’s impossible. My father’s always had the best defense. Our safeguards are impeccable, and the
factionnaires
—”

“The
factionnaires
are too busy fighting over you and the throne to pay any attention to whatever duties they might once have had.”

She shook her head. “That can’t be. They couldn’t be that stupid.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I don’t think you have a clue just how stupid those men are.”

She flinched inwardly at his tone, and at the sarcastic way he’d called her
sweetheart
. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this version of Logan. He’d come back from his walk annoyed—she’d seen it the second he’d walked into house. And then he’d caught sight of Sebastian and she’d really thought there was going to be bloodshed. He’d calmed down, but even as he’d comforted her, there’d been something different. Something missing from the fun, tender lover she’d had up in the Black Hills earlier that morning.

But that didn’t mean she was going to let him see how disconcerted she felt, especially as he was ripping away the last bastion of security she had. If the
factionnaires
had really stopped guarding the compound, if they were really leaving all of her people unguarded, that meant she was way worse off than she had ever imagined. It meant that every single one of them—Gage, Dash, Wyatt, Dax—were all guilty of treason. And maybe even worse. She wouldn’t know until she investigated.

Clearing her throat, she pushed away from Logan. She might be young and she might be naive, but she wasn’t a little girl who needed to be comforted from bad news. If she ever had any hope of being queen, she was going to have to show everyone that she could stand on her own two feet.

“Tell me.”

Logan raised an eyebrow at her harsh tone, but didn’t comment. Instead, he launched right into a laundry list of security problems. “The safeguards were once excellent. I agree with you there. But times have changed. Areas have been breached, unraveled from within, maybe; I can’t be sure. But they’ve never been reinstated, so there are huge gaps in the main protection surrounding the compound. Plus, there’s no evidence of any patrol going on.”

“Should there be? If they thought the safeguards were enough—”

“Safeguards are never enough,” he said so firmly that she regretted speaking up and showing her ignorance. “For the simple reason that they aren’t foolproof. What happens if someone breaches them? If there’s no one patrolling the borders, who’s going to stop them or at least sound the alarm?”

“And you think my father would have had these patrols?” Even as she asked the question, she knew the truth. Of course Silus would have had them. He was paranoid about security, and now that she thought about it, she realized that when her father was alive, she had barely been able to walk twenty feet outside without bumping into a soldier or
factionnaire
.

“Of course he would have.” Logan echoed her own conclusions. “I’m assuming he wasn’t a fool.”

“He managed to hold on to his throne for more than four hundred years.”

“Then he definitely wasn’t stupid.”

“Which means that someone has ordered the soldiers to step down and told them they no longer needed to patrol. But who would do that?” She reached into the heavy chest that doubled as a coffee table and pulled out a blanket. Suddenly, she was freezing.

“It had to be one of the high-ranking
factionnaires
. No one else could make an order like that stick.”

“But what were they hoping to accomplish by it? I don’t understand.”

He studied her through narrowed, contemplative eyes. “How long have you been trying to take over the clan leadership?”

“Just a few days. And it’s not going very well.”

“Well, today’s my first day here. Maybe this is a recent development. Maybe someone’s trying to make you look incompetent.”

Her stomach started churning sickly as she thought about that. “Would everyone have to be involved in a decision like this?”

“I wouldn’t think so.” He reached out, stroked a reassuring hand down her back. “Just one or two key players.”

“But wouldn’t the
factionnaires
notice, even if they weren’t the ones who called a halt to the patrols? Wouldn’t somebody say
something
?”