Acotar and Tog [Discontinued, Will be deleted]

I Dare You

The sentries moved at once, all of them braced in a half step forward with their hands poised at the glimmering hilts resting on their hips, the beginnings of the silver blades beneath just beginning to show. Tamlin and Lucien took up the front, a delightful mixture of outrage and confusion I’d never tire of seeing muddling on their faces.

They wanted to attack. They wanted to attack so damned badly, I could smell it on them. Feyre likely did too even if she hadn’t honed her senses well enough yet to figure it out.

So much male aggression and it fell entirely flat against the Illyrian towering in their midst.

So much magic... and it felt like a shallow ripple above their lovely little lakes, delicate and dainty against the surge of venom hissing in my veins.

I held a single hand up and marked Ianthe, the only one with any sense among them, backing down.

“What a pretty little wedding,” I mocked, the taunting persona coming back to me with ease. Tamlin and his sentries froze and I felt Feyre go still with dread beside me.

I pressed my hands deep into my pockets and contentedly turned to Feyre when the guards didn’t dare move.

They’d been there. They’d seen me Under the Mountain. Lucien especially. I’d held his mind without so much as clicking my fingers at him. They wouldn’t dare move against me until I allowed them the courtesy and they knew it.

And Feyre.

Feyre standing there in a dress that positively drowned her out, the layers of tulle and gosselin piling up until every ounce of skin had disappeared save her face.

And then there were the gloves, lurking over her skin just up to the elbows where the lone mark - the lone trace of otherlingered. Naturally, they’d seen fit to cover it up and Feyre had... let them do it.

Out of spite, I clucked my tongue disapprovingly at it and felt Feyre stiffen.

“Get the hell out,” Tamlin growled. His claws snapped out of his hands revealing the beast within.

Of course his instincts inclined him towards violence as the most natural answer for dealing with the situation. He hadn’t learned anything in fifty years, not in fifty lifetimes.

In all the time that he’d known me - the most powerful High Lord to be born, heir to the Night Court, an assumed vicious and monstrous territory, and an Illyrian to top it off - never had he seen me as the savage he thought I was. All of my moves were made in carefully crafted words and twice concealed actions. If Tamlin hadn’t seen that by now, hadn’t seen me shudder away from the wings and talons and animalistic forms that came out so naturally in him, than he was a damned shade more foolish than I’d hoped.

And yet still his first instinct in anger was to shift, attack. Ever born from noble causes, still, he would have made a reckless trainee unable to survive the Blood Rite if he’d been born in the cold peaks of my homeland.

And here Feyre lived in the midst of his pathways daily.

I sent a reminder of that stupidity with another click of my tongue. “Oh, I don’t think so. Not when I need to call in my bargain with Feyre darling.”

No way in seven hells was I leaving her with this for life’s great answer to love. I’d been a fool not to have seen it sooner.

And yet, her stomach physically recoiled at my demand, the bond breaking her so open I could feel the clench of her insides against me. I was too livid to bother caring how much she loathed me, just so long as I could get her out when the evidence of her suffering was written all over her from head to toe, mind to mind.