Acotar and Tog [Discontinued, Will be deleted]

You Do What You Love, What You Need

I pushed off the balcony and walked towards my fate with my hands shoved deep into the plush fabric of my pockets. The motion only seemed to sharpen Cassian’s grin. There was no going back now.

Feyre stayed behind, but Cassian was quick to chomp at the bit wasting absolutely no time. “Come on, Feyre,” he said, his voice all playful teasing, a wolf ready to pounce. “We don’t bite. Unless you ask us to.”

Feyre jolted forward. Her instant reaction to his commentary had me biting out, “The last I heard, Cassian, no one has ever taken you up on that offer.”

Azriel snorted as Feyre stepped within proper viewing of my brothers and took her first real look at them and... quietly surveyed with a hint of awe ghosting her face.

Cassian stood slightly taller than Azriel with a longer crop of hair that fell to his shoulders compared to Az’s blunter cut. They both had that deep, tanned skin that marked the Illyrian people - and the hazel eyes, but beyond that... Cassian was all muscle and brute force, fashioned from the ground up, while Azriel was folded into smoke and darkness itself, the shadows crafting his form from the hollows of secrets themselves.

Day and Night, my brothers. Fire and ice. Stone and sword. A match and an opposition in every way.

The two briefly did something of the same to Feyre, Azriel lingering on her form a tad longer as Cassian looked me up and down with disapproval. “So fancy tonight, brother,” he told me. “And you made poor Feyre dress up, too.” He gave Feyre a wink and I wanted to smack him into the mud upstairs.

It wasn’t flirting, but it was enough of that banter I’d been anticipating since Feyre arrived in Velaris that the insufferable itch I’d known was coming, the one that would determine how this night ended for better or for worse, tugged along my skin.

Mercifully, Feyre didn’t give Cassian much thought as she slid her gaze to Azriel first, deciding he was the easier of the two to get along with. She held herself upright, stiff, as though she sensed the darkness that prowled beneath his skin, but she wasn’t afraid.

“This is Azriel,” I said, by way of introduction. “My spymaster.”

“Welcome,” Azriel said and extended his hand, which Feyre took and shook carefully. Feyre’s eyes flitted briefly over the brutal scars twisting along Az’s hands like ivy growing along a wall of stone ruins that had been warped and aged with time and war. The brief glance escaped none of our notice, most especially Azriel’s I was sure, though he gave no indication he’d felt her brief curiosity.

Feyre released Azriel’s hand, but her eyes didn’t move from the leathers he wore, nor Cassian’s when she shifted her gaze back to him. They didn’t often wear anything other than fighting leathers, but I’d asked them all the same to wear them tonight rather than a more casual ensemble. If Feyre was to work with us, she needed to see everything and all up front, and that included the painful bloodshed we were always one breath away from at all times.

“You’re brothers?” Feyre asked glancing between us.

“Brothers in the sense that all bastards are brothers of a sort.”

She looked at Cassian, tone tight. “And - you?”

Cass gave a shrug, forcing his wings to constrict behind him. “I command Rhys’s armies.”

Feyre gave a start, one I should have expected given that any mention of the war to come narrowed her focus and heightened the intensity of her thoughts, her feelings.

And Cassian - Cassian was watching her with utter delight already imagining all the ways he might play with her. Her movements. Her reactions. How he might teach her, which had been another of my requests for the evening. With how much Feyre was holding herself back just then, I wondered if it had been a mistake. If this all had been one giant mistake.