Forbidden Embers (5 page)

“As always, it’s nice to see you, as well, Cecily,” Julian replied smoothly. “Although I must admit to being a little surprised by your choice of venue. The Dracon Club is not really the place for the likes of you.”

She raised one brow and gave him the most regal look in her repertoire. “The likes of me? You mean, royalty?”

Wyatt laughed, and she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He caught the look and winked at her, despite the disapproving frown on Julian’s lips. Her stomach relaxed even more.

“Of course,” Julian lied smoothly. “With your heightened stature, I’m not certain that you belong here. The only women to ever enter this club before have been . . .” He let his voice trail off, then smiled insultingly at her. “Well, let’s just say they serve a purpose quite different from your own.”

Her dragon roared and thrashed inside her, and Cecily had to bite her tongue to keep from lashing out at him. She carefully considered her next words. How was it that her father’s golden boy had just plainly said that she
wasn’t
a prostitute, and yet she felt a lot more insulted than she would have if he had actually called her one?

Perhaps it was the smarmy look on his face. Or the fact that, no matter how hard he tried to ingratiate himself, she always got the distinct impression that he found her lacking. As a member of the royal family and as a woman. And this was the man her father had wanted her to marry.

She felt the old, familiar stirrings start to undermine her confidence. God knew her father had pointed out her failings to her more times than she could count—usually whenever she opened her mouth to voice an opinion that didn’t agree with his. And she might despise Julian, but there was no doubt in her mind that he knew more about what was going on with the Wyvernmoons than she ever would.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking, Cecily darling, but is there a purpose to your visit? Or did you just stop by to say hello? I know I’ve been remiss in my attentions lately, but there’ve been a number of things here that required my input of late. I was certain that you’d understand.”

There it was again—the implication that their relationship was more than it had ever been. She saw Dashiell and Garen stiffen, saw Dax shoot a speculative look between Julian and her. Many of the others had varying looks of disappointment on their faces, as if they believed completely that she and Julian were involved in some kind of relationship.

She looked at him, at his too-cold smile and the leer of triumph he didn’t even try to hide, and knew that she was going to have to tread softly. She was the interloper here, the one who definitely didn’t belong. And if she hoped to make any progress at all, she would need his cooperation to do it. Antagonizing him was a bad idea. This time, when he moved to cup her elbow, she let him.

Swallowing the bile that rose in her throat, she smiled at him. Opened her mouth and began to give her prepared speech. The one she had practiced for hours in front of the mirror in her bedroom. The one she had painstakingly crafted over the past three days to ensure that she didn’t overstep her boundaries or unduly offend anyone.

But she couldn’t get the words out. They might have been political and smart and savvy, but they weren’t what the clan needed right now. They weren’t what her father’s
Conseil
—her
Conseil,
damnit—needed right now.

And they sure as hell weren’t what her relationship with Julian needed right now.

Which was why when she saw Gage leaning indolently against the wall, she knew she wasn’t going to give her speech. The much-older dragon was the only one in the room besides Julian who didn’t look concerned. Of course, he was the one here who knew her best. He was the one who had taught her to fly, the one who had helped her learn to shift, the one who, for all intents and purposes, had been the older brother to her that Jacob had rarely wanted to be.

She knew Gage was unhappy with the way things were going in the clan—with the unprecedented raids on the Dragonstars and Shadowdrakes, the infighting and jockeying for position amid the clan’s strongest dragons, the overall lack of leadership. He’d been by the house often enough in the past few months with dire reports of how the
Conseil
was falling apart. As she met his cool, black eyes across the room, she found herself swallowing the rehearsed phrases and saying the only words that really mattered.

“We can’t go on this way.” She paused, waited until she was certain every eye in the room was on her. “We can’t keep fighting battles on every front—not if we have any hope of remaining a strong, united clan. All of the pettiness, all of the positioning, is doing nothing but destroying us, and it has to stop. It
will
stop, from this moment forward.”

Julian started to speak, to ridicule her in his soft, it’s-for-your-own-good tone, but she cut him off. The floor was hers now, and she would not yield it until she had said what she’d come here to say. “There are things I don’t know about this
Conseil
, about this clan. A lot of things, as you all well know. That, too, has to stop. I may not be queen yet, but I will be someday, and I will not be just a figurehead like all those queens who have come before me. The time for that is gone.”

A low murmuring started in the front of the room, but she ignored it. She had bigger things to worry about. Like the fact that Julian appeared on the edge of a furious outburst.

“I know that you are all waiting for me to choose someone to marry, someone to make the next king. That is what much of this infighting is about. But that, too, has to stop.

“Yes, it is my duty to marry. And yes, I will fulfill that duty. But I will do it on my timetable, and I will choose the man that I want.” Every man in the room straightened, looked a little more alert—except Thierren, who was leaning against the wall, arms and legs crossed in front of him. His eyes were inscrutable, and she found herself wishing very much to know what he was thinking.

They had been friends for decades and there was no one in the room whose opinion she valued more, save Gage’s. More important, he was one of only two dragons in the room whom she truly believed had no desire to rule.

“But I don’t plan to marry for a long time. That does not, however, mean that I do not have a say in how this clan is run, in what we do, and how we do it. I am the last living Fournier heir, and I will not stand by and watch us fall apart. The more we fight, the more we end up hurting the clan.”

She gestured to the lot of them. “Look at yourselves. Look at what you’re doing to the
Conseil
. At this time, when we should be most united, we are desperately divided, and it is getting worse every day.

“Part of it is my fault. I take full responsibility for it. As things have gotten worse, I have done what everyone has always expected of me: absolutely nothing. I have stayed in my father’s house and watched as you fought each other for the right to be king. As you led war parties on the Dragonstars and the Shadowdrakes, war parties that seem to have no purpose other than to distinguish you as leaders. War parties that have failed abysmally, and have done nothing but weaken our clan when we can least afford it.

“All of that stops here. All of that stops now. I have been to too many funerals in the past five months. I have watched too many of my clan mates burn. Enough is enough.”

She paused, took a deep breath and gave her words time to register as she looked straight in the eyes of every single man in the room. Etienne and Luc both looked like they were going to have a stroke, their black eyes blazing with a fiery hatred neither even attempted to hide. Acel, Remy, Eriq, Nicolas and Blaze didn’t look like they were faring much better. But the others—Thierren, Dashiell, Dax, Gage and Garen—all looked surprisingly calm. And Wyatt looked downright gleeful. But, then, he’d always been the thorn in her father’s side, his inability to take anything seriously nearly getting him removed from the
Conseil
more times than any of them could keep track of through the years. He was probably reveling in the thought of total and complete anarchy.

As for Julian, his face was such a bright pink that she couldn’t help wondering if a stroke was imminent. She should probably feel worse about that prospect—after all, he had been her father’s favorite for centuries—but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Getting him out of the way would make things run that much more smoothly.

Besides, it felt good to know she wasn’t as alone as she’d feared when walking in here a few minutes before. But, then again, the fact that the
Conseil
had not condemned her out of hand didn’t mean that they supported her, either. While many of them enjoyed watching her pull Julian’s tail, she had no idea how many of them would actually back her when push came to shove. It would take a lot of work on her part to win them over.

She couldn’t let them know that she cared about their opinions, however, not now when she really couldn’t afford to care one way or the other. If she even looked like she was backing down now, any clout she had would disappear and her clan would suffer. That was the last thing her people needed, the last thing she would allow to happen. They had already suffered more than enough.

She cleared her throat, made sure her voice was as firm and irrevocable as her will when she started to speak again. “From this day forward, you are
my Conseil
and you will do
my
bidding. I may not be queen yet, but make no mistake, from this day forward, I
am
in charge. There will be no king until I say so, and if you think I’m going to choose my husband from a group that is acting like spoiled little boys, then you all have another thing coming. I will be back in the morning, and we will get to work fixing the mess you all have made.”

Head held high, spine ramrod straight, she turned and made a beeline for the door. She may not have ever had the chance to rule while her father was alive, but she’d learned something from him. And that was how to make an entrance—and an exit.

Voices exploded behind her in a mixture of English and French, and she fought down the smile that very much wanted to bloom across her face for the first time since she’d set her course that morning.

Oh yes, she had given them something to think about. The next move was theirs, no doubt about it. But if they weren’t careful, they would find that she wasn’t above wresting control away from them—any way she had to.

A
s she swept through the club and into the street, Cecily was hyperaware that half of the men in her father’s
Conseil
were following her and the other half were cursing her heavily, even as they refused to join the others. She didn’t let anyone’s reaction bother her, however, even when she realized Julian was one of the shifters hot on her heels.

Not letting their reactions bother her wasn’t the same as being stupid, though. And since Julian was only a step or two behind her, she knew if she didn’t hustle, he was going to catch her.
Not that I’m afraid of him,
she assured herself. Because she wasn’t. She had just proved that she could hold her own against him or any of the others.

But at the same time, she’d pretty much used up her quota of courage for the day. Maybe even the whole week. She’d need to get some back, and quickly, but she just didn’t have anything else left in her today. The idea of another confrontation left her shaky—especially one with Julian, in front of all the other
factionnaires
.

Still, she didn’t shrink when his hand closed around her elbow. Instead, she stopped and looked down at where his talons had punched through his fingertips. His nails were digging into her skin, drawing blood, but she’d be damned if she let him know how much it hurt. In the game they were playing, whoever flinched first lost. And she so was not going to spend the next five hundred years bowing and scraping to Julian. She would rather be dead.

“You’re going to want to get your hand off me,” she said in the most frigid voice she could muster.

“And you’re going to want to be very careful about whom you challenge in public,” he answered, leaning in so close that his lips were just a hairsbreadth from her ear. To the casual eye, it looked like a lover’s embrace, and though dragons had incredible hearing, he was being very careful to keep his voice pitched so low that even she had to strain to hear him.

“You may think you’re ready to play with the big boys,
ma chérie
, but you’re still just a spoiled little girl at heart.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out some money, then forced her clenched fingers open enough to take the thick wad of bills. “Why don’t you go buy something pretty and leave the real work for those of us who know more than which fork we’re supposed to use at dinner?”

His words hit far too close to home, and it was only the years of experience with her father’s cruelty that allowed her to keep her face serene as she scrambled for an answer that would not make her sound weak.