"Like them? I fucking love them."
Lexianna quickly launched herself to check out everything.
The white silk slipping off her shoulders was somebody else's problem. Food was essential, yes. But capital? Capital was survival.
She stopped in front of the nearest jewelry tray, her silver eyes moving over the haul with the focused aggression of someone conducting a hostile acquisition assessment. The craftsmanship was obscene.
The kind of work that didn't exist in a world where things were made quickly or cheaply.
She reached out and lifted a heavy, intricately carved bangle. Cool to the touch. Weighed a small fortune just sitting in her palm.
"Is this real gold?!" She whipped her head toward Arkin.
His dark brows furrowed. The question appeared to genuinely offend him.
"Do you think you deserve anything fake?" he said.
Lexianna's eyes lit up with a specific kind of fire that had nothing to do with the bond mark on her neck.
If I could find a portal back to Earth right now, she calculated, turning the bangle over in her palm, the sheer purity of this metal alone would liquidate for millions. I wouldn't just rebuild. I'd buy the entire block. Both sides of the street.
Arkin watched the manic gleam take over her face and decided to intervene before she started appraising the furniture.
With a snap of his fingers, four maids materialized from the edges of the room.
They stepped forward, gathered Lexianna, along with the trays of clothes, shoes, and cosmetics, and steered her firmly behind the massive carved folding screen at the back of the chamber.
She didn't lift a finger. The maids stripped away the white silk and began layering. Premium silk undergarments, soft as running water. Then the robes, deep blood-red, layer upon layer.
The fabric cinched tight at her waist, announcing the dramatic curve of her hips and the heavy swell of her chest to anyone in the vicinity who wasn't already aware.
Then the hair.
Two maids working in tandem swept the top half of her impossible silver waves into a complex, elegant updo, anchored with the gold hairpins she had just been mentally pricing. The rest fell freely down her back in a waterfall of liquid silver.
Then the cosmetics tray arrived.
A maid reached for a rouge brush.
Lexianna held up one hand. "I'll do this part."
She pulled the circular gold hand mirror from the tray.
Looked at her reflection.
Stopped breathing.
In her past life she had spent obscene amounts of money on luxury skincare, dermatologists, and chemical interventions just to hold the line against sixty-hour work weeks.
The face looking back at her now didn't need any of that. Impossibly soft. Poreless. Radiating a supernatural, inner glow that no budget could have purchased.
A flawless canvas, she thought. The audacity of this body.
She picked up the cosmetics.
Her hands moved quickly and with certainty. A sharp, vicious fox-eye in dark crimson — lining her lids with a single decisive stroke. Matching red shadow over her eyelids, sharpening the predatory slant of her silver irises into something that could cut glass.
Blood-red rouge pressed onto her lips in a glossy, devastating finish.
Finally, she picked up the tiny detail brush and painted a stylized golden-red flame mark directly in the center of her forehead.
She lowered the mirror.
She looked lethal. She looked exactly like the kind of woman the Fox Clan had been right to fear and catastrophically wrong to underestimate.
The maid standing closest let out a soft, involuntary breath. "Your Highness," she whispered, eyes wide with genuine awe. "You are so pretty."
Lexianna's mouth curved into a sharp, approving smirk. She reached out and patted the girl twice on the head.
"Good work," she said. "Let's go."
The maids pulled the screen aside.
Arkin was standing by the low table, a fresh cup of jasmine tea halfway to his lips. Utterly relaxed. When he heard the screen being pushed aside, he looked up.
The porcelain cup hit the stone floor and shattered into a dozen pieces. Hot tea spread across the toes of his shoes in a slow, ignored pool.
He didn't look down.
He couldn't look anywhere else.
The blood-red silk against her silver hair. The sharp, predatory lines of her makeup making her eyes look like blades. The absolute, unhurried authority in the way she held herself, like she had always owned this room and was simply choosing to occupy it now.
The sight of her made his mind blank. His blood roared. The feral need to drag her back to the bed was so immediate and so total it blurred the edges of his vision.
He raised one hand. Flicked his wrist.
And the servants immediately left, and the doors slammed shut behind the maids. The locks found their place with an echoing clack.
Silence.
He fixed his hazy, dying-star eyes on her and crooked a single finger.
Lexianna opened her mouth to ask about dinner.
A gust of dark red wind materialized behind her and physically removed the space between them. She didn't so much move as get relocated, thrown forward into the solid wall of his chest, her hands flying up to brace against his shoulders.
"Lord Arkin—"
His mouth came down on hers and swallowed the rest of it.
No build-up. No patience. Just hunger, absolute and unapologetic, his tongue sweeping past her lips and tasting the blood-red rouge, consuming the surprised sound she made before it could fully form.
There goes her lipstick, was her last coherent thought.
Her body, freshly satisfied and apparently completely without principles, flared to life immediately, like it had just been waiting for the excuse.
Damn girl, are you a succubus?
His mouth dragged from her lips to her jaw. Down her neck.
He bit her. Sharp and territorial, directly over her pulse point, with zero interest in being subtle about it.
Lexianna's spine arched off him violently. A broken, breathless sound escaped her throat as his hands moved down her back, found the curve beneath the layers of silk, and grabbed her ass.
"Arkin—" His name slipped out without the title. Entirely without dignity.
Something in him snapped at the sound of it.
He gripped her waist and walked her backward until her spine met the smooth wooden paneling of the chamber wall with a solid thud. His thigh pushed between hers, his hands moving through the layers of her pristine red dress.
He hooked his arm under her knee, lifting it high against his hip.
Lexianna's eyes fell shut. Her nails found his shoulders and held on.
He is absolutely going to ruin this outfit, she thought, distantly, from somewhere that had mostly stopped caring about the outfit.
"My Lord."
The voice drifted through the doors. Muffled. Oblivious. Arriving at the single worst possible moment in recorded demonic history.
Arkin went completely still.
His chest heaved against hers, his eyes burning red in the dim light, his expression that of a man deciding whether the interruption was a survivable offense.
"My Lord," the servant repeated from the corridor, entirely unaware of how close they were to losing their miserable life. "The Queen has requested Her Highness to greet her."