2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

A knowing sparkle in his eyes.
He really wouldn’t tell me. He’d dangle it before me like a piece of meat—
I lunged. Blindly, wildly, but I sent my power lashing down that line between us.
And yelped as it slammed against his inner shields, the reverberations echoing in me as
surely as if I’d hit something with my body.
Rhys chuckled, and I saw fire. “Admirable—sloppy, but an admirable effort.”
Panting a bit, I seethed.
But he said, “Just for trying … ,” and took my hand in his. The bond went taut, that
thing under my skin pulsing, and—
There was dark, and the colossal sense of him on the other side of his mental barricade
of black adamant. That shield went on forever, the product of half a millennia of being
hunted, attacked, hated. I brushed a mental hand against that wall.
Like a mountain cat arching into a touch, it seemed to purr—and then relaxed its guard.
His mind opened for me. An antechamber, at least. A single space he’d carved out, to
allow me to see—
A bedroom carved from obsidian; a mammoth bed of ebony sheets, large enough to
accommodate wings.
And on it, sprawled in nothing but her skin, lay Ianthe.
I reeled back, realizing it was a memory, and Ianthe was in his bed, in his court beneath
that mountain, her full breasts peaked against the chill—
“There is more,” Rhys’s voice said from far away as I struggled to pull out. But my
mind slammed into the shield—the other side of it. He’d trapped me in here—
“You kept me waiting,” Ianthe sulked.
The sensation of hard, carved wood digging into my back—Rhysand’s back—as he
leaned against the bedroom door. “Get out.”
Ianthe gave a little pout, bending her knee and shifting her legs wider, baring herself to
him. “I see the way you look at me, High Lord.”
“You see what you want to see,” he—we—said. The door opened beside him. “Get
out.”
A coy tilt of her lips. “I heard you like to play games.” Her slender hand drifted low,
trailing past her belly button. “I think you’ll find me a diverting playmate.”
Icy wrath crept through me—him—as he debated the merits of splattering her on the
walls, and how much of an inconvenience it’d cause. She’d hounded him relentlessly—
stalked the other males, too. Azriel had left last night because of it. And Mor was about
one more comment away from snapping her neck.
“I thought your allegiance lay with other courts.” His voice was so cold. The voice of