The mess hall was a cacophony of scraping chairs, clattering cutlery, and the loud, boisterous chatter of hundreds of cadets blowing off steam. It was a mundane, daily ritual that grated on my nerves on the best of days. Today, it was fucking torture. I sat with my wing, a slab of dry meat and some questionable stew on the plate in front of me, untouched. My body was here, at this table wedged between Garrick and Bodhi, but my entire being was focused across the cavernous room.

On her.

Violet was sitting with her own squad, Rhiannon Matthias chattering away at her side. But it wasn't her friends who held my attention. It was Dain Aetos, who had pulled a chair up to their table and angled himself so he was squarely in her space, his back to most of the room as if they were the only two people there. He was holding court, leaning forward on his elbows, his expression earnest and intense. He was talking at her, not with her. Even from fifty feet away, I could see the condescension in the set of his shoulders, in the way he gestured with his fork to emphasize a point.

I felt her emotions like a physical sting behind my own eyes. A frustrated, simmering anger she was holding tightly in check, but was dancing down the bond. On the surface, she looked attentive. She was nodding, her expression neutral, the perfect picture of a cadet listening to a superior. But I could see the subtle tells now. The slight stiffness in her neck. The way her fork was perfectly still beside her plate instead of moving. The way her gaze was fixed on his mouth, not with interest, but with the kind of focus one gives a venomous insect, waiting for it to strike.

She was tolerating him. Enduring him. And the fact that she had to was setting my teeth on edge.

Dain leaned in closer, his voice dropping, though his animated hand gestures didn't stop. He was lecturing her. I didn’t need to hear the words to know the tone. It was the same one he’d used on the training grounds—that infuriating, patronizing cadence that suggested he knew what was best for her, that her own thoughts and instincts were secondary to his superior judgment. He was treating her like a problem to be solved, a fragile piece of glass that needed his constant supervision to keep from shattering.

The memory of her in the parapet tower, her body arching into mine, was a stark, violent contrast. There was nothing fragile about the way her nails had scraped down my back. Nothing fragile about the strength in her thighs as she clamped them around my head, her hips bucking as she came on my tongue. That was the real Violet. A fucking storm of power and passion and intellect, all wrapped in a deceptively small package. And this fucking child, this boy who’d known her his whole life, couldn't see any of it. He only saw what he wanted to see: a girl he needed to protect, to mold, to keep safe.

He speaks to her as if she is a child who cannot wield her own power, Sgaeyl added, the thought sharp and laced with Tairn's disgust. Tairn is… displeased.

Displeased was a fucking understatement. The fury coming through the bond was a hot, agitated buzz, a direct reflection of Violet's own suffocated rage. It fed my own, stoking the embers that had been glowing since the training yard into a low, steady fire in my gut. My hand tightened around my knife, the handle digging into my palm. I wanted to get up, stride across the hall, and plant the point of this blade in the table right between his fucking fingers. I wanted to see the shock and fear on his face as I leaned in and told him that the next time he spoke to her with anything less than the respect she commanded, I’d cut his condescending tongue out of his mouth.

But I stayed seated, a mask of indifference plastered on my face. Exposing the truth of our connection here would be a death sentence. So I watched, my jaw clenched, feeling her irritation as if it were my own, a shared secret simmering between us across a crowded room. Dain kept talking, oblivious, poisoning the air around her with his concern. And with every word I couldn't hear but could feel the impact of, the fire in my gut burned a little hotter.

A lull in the surrounding roar of conversation, a brief, coincidental pocket of quiet, allowed a fragment of Dain’s voice to carry across the hall. It was sharp, clear, and laced with that infuriatingly patient tone he reserved for her.

“…far too reckless, Violet. That stunt on the mats today could have gotten you killed.”

My blood went from a simmer to a rolling boil. My hands, resting on my thighs under the table, clenched into fists so tight my knuckles turned white. The wood of the bench creaked under the strain as my leg muscles locked.

Reckless. He thought she was reckless instead of seeing the calculating force of nature she truly was.

The memory of her in the tower wasn't just a flash; it was a fucking brand on my soul. Her, on her knees, taking my cock down her throat with a ferocity that stole my breath. There was no hesitation, no fragility. Just a raw, demanding hunger. I remembered the slick heat of her mouth, the scrape of her teeth against the base of my shaft, the way her throat worked as she took me deeper than I thought possible. She wasn’t reckless; she was deliberate. She knew exactly what she wanted and she fucking took it.

Another snippet of Dain’s voice cut through the noise. “You need to rely on my judgment. I’ve been here longer. I know how to keep you safe.”

My judgment. The sheer fucking arrogance of it sent a wave of black rage through me. I imagined my shadows around his throat, not to kill him, but just to squeeze until that self-assured look on his face shattered into the terror he deserved to feel. He wanted her to rely on him? On his narrow, fearful, by-the-book view of the world? He would have her hiding in the Scribe Quadrant, buried under dusty scrolls, her power—her glorious, terrifying power—withering on the vine.

I knew her power. I’d tasted it. I’d felt it pulsing against my skin. After I’d gone down on her, when she was trembling and breathless, slick with her own release, she had pushed me onto my back. She’d climbed on top of me, her silver-tipped hair a wild halo in the moonlight, her eyes burning with an intensity that could level cities. She hadn’t hesitated. She’d mounted me, her wet cunt sliding against the head of my cock, teasing, controlling. She’d guided me inside her with a slow, deliberate slide, her inner muscles clenching around me in a hot, impossibly tight grip. She was the one who set the pace, her hips rocking, her body demanding everything I had to give. She wasn't some damsel needing to be kept safe. She was a fucking queen claiming her throne.

And Dain Aetos, with his condescending whispers and his suffocating concern, was trying to tell that queen she was a pawn.

He saw a girl to be protected. I saw a warrior who had fucked me with a strength and certainty that left me raw. He saw fragility. I saw the muscles in her thighs quivering, the sweat beading on her skin, the fierce, determined set of her jaw as she fucked herself onto my cock, chasing her own pleasure with a single-minded focus that was the most profoundly arousing thing I had ever witnessed. He saw a child to be coddled. I saw the woman whose guttural moans echoed off the stone battlements, whose orgasm had felt like a lightning strike, her cunt contracting around me in violent, exquisite spasms that left me dry.

My own cock was granite-hard, pressing painfully against the seam of my leathers. The rage was a physical thing, a sickness in my stomach and a pressure behind my eyes. Every instinct screamed at me to cross the room, to haul Dain out of his chair and show everyone—show her—what a man who truly saw her looked like. To show them the difference between possession and worship. Dain wanted to play house with a pretty, breakable doll. I wanted to kneel before a goddess of fucking war.

He saw her as a weakness to be sheltered. I knew she was a weapon, and the most infuriating part was that I was forced to sit here, silent and seething, while this blind fool tried to dull her edge.

“Riorson.”

Garrick’s voice was a low rumble beside me, dragging me from the red haze of my thoughts. I blinked, the image of Violet’s flushed face and sweat-slicked body fading from my mind’s eye.

“Did you hear a word I said?” Garrick asked, his brow furrowed with mild annoyance. “The quartermaster is shorting us on whetstones again.”

I forced my gaze away from Violet’s table, turning my head just enough to meet Garrick’s eyes. My own felt hot, my jaw so tight it ached. “Tell him I’ll pay him a visit if he can’t count,” I said, my voice flat and cold, utterly detached from the furnace burning inside me. It was a piss-poor response, but it was all I could manage.

Garrick gave me a long look, but didn’t push. He knew my moods. He turned back to his meal, leaving me to my torment. My attention snapped back across the hall like a taut string, pulled by a force I couldn’t fight.

Dain was still talking, still gesturing. And Violet was still listening, her posture a masterpiece of polite tolerance. But it wasn’t the memory of her body that held me captive now. It was the memory of her mind.

A few nights after the parapet, I'd found her in the archives. She’d been researching Navarre’s eastern border skirmishes, and she’d found a discrepancy in the official histories. She’d laid out the scrolls, her small hands tracing the faded ink of maps that were centuries old. She hadn’t been flirting. She hadn’t been trying to impress me. She’d been consumed by a puzzle.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she’d whispered, her brow furrowed in concentration. “The supply lines they claim to have used are impossible. The terrain is too treacherous. They’d have lost half their men to attrition before they even saw the enemy.”

I’d stood there, ready to push her up against a bookshelf and lift her legs around my waist, but her intensity stopped me cold. I looked at the maps, at the histories I’d been forced to memorize my entire life. I’d never questioned them. No one had. But she, with her Scribe’s mind and a warrior’s burgeoning instinct, had seen the lie hidden in plain sight.

We’d spent the next hour hunched over those scrolls, not as enemies or lovers, but as equals. She’d dismantled a hundred years of accepted military doctrine with quiet, ruthless logic. Her intellect was a weapon, sharper than any dagger, more devastating than any siege engine. The entire time, all I could think about was how that same brilliant, analytical mind had been focused so completely on my cock just nights before. I remembered her looking up at me while she rode me, her eyes dark with pleasure but still so fucking sharp, as if she were committing every sensation, every shift of my hips, every groan I couldn't hold back, to memory. She wasn't just feeling it; she was learning me. Cataloging me. Conquering me.

That was the woman I wanted. The one who could strategize an impossible campaign and then turn that same ferocious intelligence to figuring out exactly how to ride my cock to make us both come so hard the world fell away.

And Dain Aetos was telling her to rely on his judgment.

The rage came back, colder this time, more potent. It wasn’t just that he was trying to possess her body. He was insulting her mind. He was trying to smother the brightest fire I had ever seen. He saw a girl who needed to be led by the hand through training exercises. I saw a woman who could rewrite our entire understanding of this war. He wanted to cage her, to keep her safe and small and reliant on him. I wanted to hand her an army and watch her burn our enemies to the fucking ground. I wanted to see her unleashed, to see that brilliant, vicious mind set loose upon a world that would never see her coming.

I wanted to be there when it happened. I wanted to be the one she came back to, covered in the blood of her enemies, her eyes blazing with triumph, and fuck her on a table full of battle maps.

My gaze locked on her across the room, a desperate, silent plea. See him for what he is. A cage. A fucking anchor. I longed to feel the spark of her thoughts, to tell her that I saw her, all of her, and that I would never, ever ask her to be less than the magnificent, terrifying force of nature she'd turned herself into.

My thoughts were a godsdamned storm, a chaotic whirl of rage and memory and a desperate, aching need. And then, through the haze, I saw it.

Dain moved. He leaned forward, his expression one of earnest, patronizing concern, and placed his hand over hers where it rested on the tabletop.

Just like that. A simple gesture. A comforting touch, anyone else would have called it. But I saw it for what it was. An anchor. A claim. The brand of ownership being pressed onto her skin in full view of the entire mess hall. He wasn’t comforting her; he was staking his territory, marking her as his to guide, his to protect, his to fucking manage.

My breath caught in my throat. I saw the muscles in her jaw flicker. Her shoulders, which had been relaxed in a posture of feigned interest, went rigid. It was a minute shift, one that ninety-nine percent of the people in this hall would miss. But I saw it. I felt it, like a sympathetic tremor through the stone floor. Her fingers, trapped under his palm, curled slightly, a reflexive attempt to pull away.

She didn't want his touch.

And he ignored it. He fucking ignored it. He kept his hand there, pressing down with a gentle finality that made my vision swim with red. He kept talking, his thumb stroking the back of her hand as if she were a nervous mare that needed calming.

That hand. I knew that hand. I knew the feel of her skin. I’d held that same hand in mine, lacing my fingers through hers as I drove my cock into her, our clasped hands a bond of trust against the cold stone of the parapet. I’d felt her nails, short and practical, dig into the muscles of my back as she shattered around my tongue, her cunt clenching and releasing, drenching my face in her slick, sweet come. I remembered the exact texture of her palm against my cheek, a touch so tender it almost broke me, right before she climbed on top of me and took my cock deep inside her.

Dain was touching something sacred. He was putting his filthy, condescending hands on something that belonged only to us.

The memory of her riding me came back, sharp and visceral. I remembered grabbing her hips, my thumbs pressing into the soft skin just above her ass, guiding her, urging her on. I’d felt the powerful flex of her thighs, the way she controlled every fucking inch of my shaft sliding in and out of her tight, wet heat. She had been in charge, a goddess of pleasure taking what she wanted. And when she’d been close, she’d braced her hands on my chest, her head thrown back, a raw, guttural moan tearing from her throat as she fucked herself into her orgasm. Her hands, flat against my pectorals, had been the only thing grounding her as her body convulsed around my cock.

That was touch. That was connection. A collision of power and pleasure, freely given and ravenously taken.

What Dain was doing… that was defilement. It was a violation. He was touching the hand of a queen and treating her like a child. He was touching the body of a warrior who had screamed my name into the night sky and acting like she was a piece of fragile glass.

My shadows deepened around my feet, writhing with an anger so profound it was almost a physical entity. I wanted to send them across the room, to wrap around Dain’s wrist and snap the bone. I wanted to feel the crunch, see the shock and pain on his face as his hand was ripped away from her.

He had no right. He hadn’t earned the right. He hadn’t seen her at her most vulnerable and her most powerful. He hadn’t tasted her, hadn’t been inside her, hadn’t felt the very essence of her power contract around his cock. He didn’t know the way her breath hitched right before she came, or the scent of her skin after she’d been thoroughly fucked. He knew nothing.

He saw a project. A cause. A girl to save so he could feel like a man.

I saw the woman who had knelt for me and then made me beg for her. I saw the strategist who could dismantle a century of lies. I saw the fire that could burn the world down. And I wanted to be the one to hand her the fucking torch.

His thumb stroked her hand again, a slow, possessive, utterly oblivious gesture.

That was it. That was the final fucking straw.

A low, guttural sound, halfway between a snarl and a groan, tore from my own throat. My muscles went rigid, my entire body locking up in a wave of pure, unadulterated fury. My knuckles were white where I gripped the edge of the table, the wood groaning under the pressure. The shadows around my boots churned, no longer just deepening but coiling like starving serpents, hungry for violence.

He had no fucking right.

Dain’s thumb stroked her skin again. I had worshipped that body, learned its language, submitted to its power. And this fucking child, this condescending, self-righteous prick, was touching it like it was his property to soothe. He was putting his bland, sterile touch on the same skin I had marked with my teeth, the same hand that had held me inside her while she came apart.

It was sacrilege.

A violent tremor shot through me, a quake of rage so profound it threatened to split me open. I was going to kill him. Right here. I was going to cross that hall, rip his fucking hand from hers, and smash his face into the table until there was nothing left but blood and splinters.

The scraping sound of my chair against the stone floor was like a thunderclap in the sudden silence of the mess hall.

Every head turned. Garrick’s. Bodhi’s. Imogen’s. Across the room, Violet’s head snapped up, her eyes wide, finally breaking contact with Dain. Dain himself looked up, his hand finally dropping from hers, a flicker of annoyance on his face that quickly morphed into outrage as he saw me.

I didn’t see any of them. Not really. My world had narrowed to a single, burning path out of this room. Every instinct screamed at me to walk toward their table, to finish what my body was demanding. But beneath the rage, a colder, more desperate thought took hold. Her.

Her eyes meet mine with an intensity I could feel not just physically, but deep within my soul; like she's standing on the hillside above Aretia alongside me, gently but fiercely moving me to ground myself. In a second I feel her even deeper—She’s lowered her shields.

“Im ok, Xaden, It’s ok” her voice softens my shoulders for approximately one and a half seconds, but a twitch takes my attention away.

Dain.

His dumbass blundering hands are too close to her magnificent mind. Our mind, in a way. Gnashing teeth and a low guttural growl vibrate through my veins as Sgaeyl and Tairn voice their displeasure. One look down to Garrick makes me think he could feel Tairn's anger through me.

“Violence, you know your voice drives me wild, but he’s too close. You need to raise your shields.”

Her eyes roll so dramatically that the movement takes her head with it. “What, you don’t think I know what he can do? what he can see?” She lowers her chin and looks up to me across the room, her gaze brushing through the lower curve of her perfect lashes. I blink hard before she lets a wicked smirk grace her lips in what is again the hottest fucking expression I’ve ever witnessed; she keeps out doing herself. “Don’t look so flustered, Riorson, you’ll give away our little secret.” Her mouth opens slightly and I see her tongue play between her teeth. Fuck.

“Is there a problem, Sir?!” The drip of mockery in Dain’s voice gives me every reason to kill him. His face drains of all color as I imagine he's reached the same conclusion. I think he’s had enough time among us mortals.

Half a step towards their table, the searing ball of fire in my chest is dampened to a soft flame and I unclench my jaw. What the fuck?

“What did you do? how did you do that?” My eyes dart to the hazel ones I can’t get enough of.

“Maybe I’ll show you later if you play nice.” Violet stands up and scans my body, quickly, but thoroughly, before she clears her area and leaves the mess hall. Dain starts to stand as well, but with my Violence gone, the full power of my rage descends again.