Total pages in book: 295
Estimated words: 282090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1410(@200wpm)___ 1128(@250wpm)___ 940(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 282090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1410(@200wpm)___ 1128(@250wpm)___ 940(@300wpm)
The table could easily accommodate thirty people, but only five sit along one side, all dressed in rider black, perched slightly ahead of the door, at an angle where they’d have to turn fully to see us—which they don’t. Brennan paces in front of the table but not at an angle he can easily spot us, either.
My heart lurches into my throat, and I realize it’s going to take some time to get used to seeing Brennan alive. He’s somehow exactly the same as I remember—and yet different. But here he is—living, breathing, currently glaring at a map of the Continent on the long wall, the map’s size only rivaled by the one in the Battle Brief lecture hall at Basgiath.
And standing in front of that map, one arm leaning against a massive chair as he stares down the table at its occupants, is Xaden.
He looks good, even with bruises marring the tawny-brown skin under his eyes from lack of sleep. The high slopes of his cheeks, the dark eyes that usually soften whenever they meet mine, the scar that bisects his brow and ends beneath his eye, the swirling, shimmering relic that ends at his jaw, and the carved lines of the mouth I know as well as my own all add up to make him physically fucking perfect to me, and that’s just his face. His body? Somehow even better, and the way he uses it when he has me in his arms—
Nope. I shake my head and cut off my thoughts right there. Xaden may be gorgeous, and powerful, and terrifyingly lethal—which shouldn’t be the turn-on it is—but I can’t trust him to tell me the truth about…well, anything. Which really hurts, considering how pathetically in love with him I am.
“And what is the obvious thing you need to state, Major Ferris?” Xaden asks, his tone completely, utterly bored.
“It’s an Assembly meeting,” Bodhi whispers to me. “Only a quorum of five is required to call a vote, since all seven are almost never here at one time, and four votes carry a motion.”
I file that information away. “Are we allowed to listen?”
“Meetings are open to whoever wants to attend,” Imogen replies just as quietly.
“And we’re attending…in the hallway?” I ask.
“Yes,” Imogen answers with no other explanation.
“Returning is the only option,” Hawk Nose continues. “Not doing so risks everything we’re building here. Search patrols will come, and we don’t have enough riders—”
“It’s a little hard to recruit while trying to stay undetectable,” a petite woman with glossy black hair like a raven counters, the umber skin at the corners of her eyes crinkling as she glares down the table at the older man.
“Let’s not get off topic, Trissa,” Brennan says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Our father’s nose. Their resemblance is uncanny.
“No point increasing our numbers without a working forge to arm them with weapons.” Hawk Nose’s voice rises above the others. “We’re still short a luminary, if you haven’t noticed.”
“And where are we in negotiations with Viscount Tecarus for his?” a large man asks in a calm, rumbling voice, his ebony hand tugging at his thick silver beard.
Viscount Tecarus? That isn’t a noble family in any Navarrian records. We don’t even have viscounts in our aristocracy.
“Still working on a diplomatic solution,” Brennan answers.
“There’s no solution. Tecarus isn’t over the insult you delivered last summer.” An older woman built like a battle-ax locks her gaze on Xaden, her blond hair brushing just past her square alabaster chin.
“I told you, the viscount was never going to give it to us in the first place,” Xaden replies. “The man only collects things. He does not trade them.”
“Well, he’s definitely not going to trade with us now,” she retorts, her gaze narrowing. “Especially if you won’t even contemplate his latest offer.”
“He can fuck right off with his offer.” Xaden’s voice is calm, but his eyes have a hard edge that dares anyone at the table to disagree. As if showing these people they aren’t worth his time, he steps around the arm of the massive chair facing them and settles into it, stretching his long legs and resting his arms on the velvet armrests—like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
The quiet that falls on the room is telling. Xaden commands as much respect from the Assembly of this revolution as he does at Basgiath. I don’t recognize any of the other riders besides Brennan, but I’d bet Xaden is the most powerful in the room, given their silence.
“For now,” Tairn reminds me with the arrogance only a hundred years of being one of the most formidable battle dragons on the Continent can provide. “Instruct the humans to bring you up to the valley once the politics are finished.”
“There had better be a solution. If we can’t supply the drifts with enough weaponry to really fight in the next year, the tide will shift too far to ever hope of holding the venin advance at bay,” Silver Beard notes. “This all will have been for nothing.”