When she looked at Azrael, I could see just how pale her lips were. High, feverish color still lingered in her cheeks from those damned drugs.
“We don’t need your friends.” I ran my hand up her arm to her shoulder and pulled her against my chest again. “You are going to hurt yourself. Just relax.”
Azrael stared at me with jealousy flaring in his deep purple eyes. I glared back over her shoulder. He’d put me in the position of pretending to care for her. He shouldn’t resent how I played the game now.
“We can take care of the shifters on our own,” I added.
She rolled her eyes. “Sure. You don’t know anything about the shifters but—”
“There are eight of them.” I tucked my chin over her head, wrapping her in my arms. “Easy enough.”
I didn’t know why I pulled her against my body—although it would annoy Azrael, which was always a hobby of mine—but for some reason, she stopped fighting me. She must be exhausted.
I clarified, “Eight male shifters. I think there are two females there, against their will.”
“Eight to four, I like our odds,” she muttered.
“Eight to three, Majesty,” I mocked her. “You don’t need to do anything.”
She laughed, rubbing her hand across her face as if she were still exhausted. “You want me in a management role? I’ll just boss you around?”
“That would be what you usually preferred,” I said. “You’ve generally taken the easy way out.”
Azrael shot me another warning look. I gave him my most innocent expression in return.
“You were just injured,” Azrael said, sitting on the edge of the couch and leaning toward Alisa.
But I was the one holding her. Azrael must relish that.
He seemed to be trying to ignore me, focused on Alisa as he went on. “We can take care of the shifters, and then we’ll go home.”
“Why don’t you want my friends to come?” she asked.
“Fae try not to reveal themselves in the mortal world,” Azrael explained.
“The mortal world,” she repeated, her lips quirking. “This all seems quite unbelievable, you know.”
“From our perspective,” Azrael said, “the idea our beloved princess of summer was hidden in this world all this time is unbelievable.”
Beloved princess. Azrael was really overselling this.
She glanced up at me skeptically. “I thought he was my ex. Doesn’t he hate me?”
“Yes,” I said.
The look Azrael shot me was murderous.
Well, he should despise her.
I shrugged. It didn’t matter what I said. She’d spent so long immersed in the human world, and she knew nothing of ours. She’d laugh off the truth.
The door swung open then, and Tiron came in.
“Did you guys lock the door?” She struggled to sit up. “I have enemies, you know. You shouldn’t be leaving the door unlocked.”
I could’ve laughed. She had enemies. As if she had to tell us. I was one of her enemies, and here she was, snuggled on my lap. The lamb wrapped up under the lion’s paws.
Although it was hard to feel entirely confident that I was the lion, while I had a hard-on and kind of wanted to lean forward and breathe in the scent of her hair again. She was so fucking dangerous, even when she seemed sweetest. I knew that.
Tiron glanced at her, then at me, skeptically. “What did I miss?”
“We’re going on a mission together,” Alisa said cheerfully. She finally struggled off my lap to sit beside me. “Duncan found the shifter compound, and it looks like they’re holding some women they abducted against their will.”
Tiron set a paper bag on the coffee table between us all, his face troubled. “A mission. In the mortal world.”
Azrael shrugged. “Whatever Alisa wants.”
Tiron nodded slowly. I didn’t know why it mattered so much to Azrael to bring her home willingly. Unless he wanted to increase her distress when she woke in a world where she was surrounded by enemies.
I didn’t think my brother was that vengeful, though, even if he should be.
“Why?” Tiron asked Alisa, frowning. “Why do you care?”
Azrael raked his hand through his hair, obviously irritated by us both.
“Because they’re in danger?” Alisa frowned up at him. “Because I should have protected them in the first place? I was sloppy, or the shifters wouldn’t have been left alive to hurt anyone.”
“The Princess Alisa was careless with someone else?” I deadpanned. How unexpected.
She turned to me, frowning. “Did I do something to you in a past life?”
A past life to her. Over her head, Azrael fixed me with a dark look, his mouth moving with threats that I didn’t bother to lip-read.
I met her gaze. She had luminous eyes, as brilliant and blue as the ocean that Faer was going to bury her under.
“Yes,” I said. “You were spoiled and willful, and you hurt everyone who ever got close to you, Princess Alisa.”
Her eyes widened, then shuttered, a look of calm coming over her face as her chin rose. But I’d seen the flash of hurt and, more than that, fear first.
She was afraid I was right.
“If that’s who I was,” she said carefully, “and I’m not saying it’s true, then I’m not that person anymore. For the last five years, I’ve tried to protect people. I’ve hunted down the dangerous things in the night—”
“And you enjoyed it,” I finished. She had always enjoyed fighting and killing.
It was the one thing we had in common.
The crease between her eyes deepened. “Yes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your work,” Azrael interrupted, as Alisa and I stared at each other. “Tiron, what did you bring back?”
“Chinese takeout,” Tiron said cheerfully, although I could feel his gaze fixed on Alisa and me. “I love Chinese.”
Azrael groaned. “I do not, but fine.”
“Alisa does,” Tiron said. He nodded through the doorway to the tiny kitchen, where a scribbled-on Chinese menu was stuck to the door with a magnet.
Alisa pulled her gaze away from mine. I could tell she was shaken by the way her posture was perfect, rigid, her chin held high, and she rested her open hands on her lap as if she were back at court. She didn’t even know she sat on this threadbare couch as if she were on a throne.
But anyone who knew her could see it. Already, I could see her shifting, covering her upset with relaxed confidence.
“So Tiron is the charmer,” she said, fixing him with a smile that he returned, “and Duncan is the grouch.”
“Who am I, then?” Azrael asked, without looking up from the paper bag he rustled through.
“That’s a mystery,” Alisa said, her voice light.
But I used to be good at reading Alisa. We were alike in some ways, as much as I hated to admit it. The perfect straightness of her spine, the way she folded her hands into her lap and tucked one ankle over the other, was the power pose of a princess.
She’d been taught how to stand, and how to sit, and how to be in every moment. When we were young, she’d shattered the glass cage the summer court tried to put around their doll. She’d insisted on being her own person—a person who was messy and flawed and dangerous, but at least her own.