Chapter 646: Cooked

Grey woke slowly, his mind surfacing through the kind of grogginess that made it difficult to tell whether his eyes were actually open yet. Something warm was pressed against his chest and shifting every few seconds, almost like it was trying to burrow deeper into him, and Grey frowned before finally forcing his vision to focus.

Elowen was curled against him.

That by itself probably wouldn’t have been enough to short-circuit his thoughts, but she was also completely naked, one leg tangled with his while her face was buried against the side of his chest as though she’d decided sometime during the night that he was a particularly comfortable pillow. Grey stared down at her for several seconds, his brain immediately trying to take the situation in a direction that was not remotely useful.

’Nope.’

He spent a little while forcing those thoughts down before another, much more concerning one took their place. The last thing Grey remembered was collapsing onto marble flooring after nearly getting his chest turned inside out, so waking up in a soft bed with a naked Elowen wrapped around him raised several questions he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted answered.

Had they done something?

Grey’s brows furrowed as he searched his memory again, but there was nothing between hitting the ground and waking up here. Unless he’d somehow lost a chunk of time, he was pretty sure he hadn’t done anything, though the circumstances weren’t exactly making a convincing argument in his favor.

Elowen shifted before Grey could think much further, her face scrunching slightly as she stirred against him. Her eyes opened slowly, unfocused for a few seconds before awareness returned, and Grey cleared his throat when she finally realized exactly where she was.

"I don’t know what happened," Grey said carefully, "but whatever this looks like, I’m pretty sure this isn’t my fault."

Elowen blinked at him.

Then her expression changed.

The confusion faded first, followed by the faint tension that had appeared in her shoulders, and for several seconds she simply lay there as though listening to something inside herself. The pain that had filled every waking second for almost a week was gone, the pressure inside her mind had disappeared with it, and for the first time since becoming Empress, her thoughts actually felt like her own again.

Her eyes softened as she looked up at Grey.

"You did it."

Grey’s mouth opened, but Elowen didn’t give him the chance to answer before she pressed closer, wrapping an arm across his chest and settling herself against him again. A small smile appeared on her face as she closed her eyes for a moment, seemingly more comfortable than embarrassed by the complete lack of clothing between them.

"I knew you’d figure it out."

Grey smiled, but there wasn’t much happiness behind it.

Had he figured it out?

Elowen had spent days waiting for him to notice, and when he finally woke up, he’d kissed the thing controlling her without realizing anything was wrong. It had practically taken her screaming accusations at him while trying to carve him into pieces before his so-called intuition finally managed to catch up.

He couldn’t exactly call that impressive. ℴ

Grey looked down at her, and under any other circumstances the fact that a beautiful naked woman was practically glued to his body would’ve had his thoughts going in several directions at once. Right now, though, he couldn’t get himself into any real mood at all, not with the memory of everything Elowen had gone through still sitting somewhere heavy in his chest.

The door creaked open. Mauve stepped inside, took one look at the bed, and immediately stopped.

Grey’s lip twitched.

Mauve cleared her throat and looked very deliberately toward the opposite side of the room. "Good. You’re both awake."

Grey stared at her for several seconds before deciding that there were more important things to deal with than whatever expression she was trying not to make. "What happened?"

Mauve looked uncomfortable enough that Grey already knew he wasn’t going to enjoy the answer. She hesitated, glanced toward Elowen, then seemed to decide there wasn’t any graceful way to explain this.

"We found the two of you in the courtyard covered in blood," she said. "You were both mostly naked, neither of you would wake up, and neither of you would let go of the other."

Grey’s brows slowly climbed.

"We tried separating you first, but that went poorly," Mauve continued. "Your threads reacted whenever anyone pulled Elowen away, and she would hold onto you even while unconscious, so eventually we decided it wasn’t worth forcing."

Elowen’s cheeks finally started gaining some color.

Grey looked down at the arm still resting across his chest, then back toward Mauve. "So how did we get clean?"

That was apparently the question Mauve had been hoping he wouldn’t ask.

Her expression shifted just enough to make Grey suspicious before she answered. "Amunet helped me."

Grey went completely still.

Mauve continued before he could interrupt, probably understanding that stopping now would only make things worse. "We cleaned both of you, checked your injuries, and moved you here together since separating you wasn’t working. Amunet was actually quite helpful."

Grey stared at the ceiling. Did she just say Amunet? Grey almost wanted to ask if Mauve was sure as though she wasn’t there, but he was also kind of scared to hear the confirmation of it all.

Amunet. The woman he’d nearly slept with, then rejected because he wouldn’t promise exclusivity, had apparently spent part of the night helping clean his naked body before putting him in bed with another naked woman.

There were levels to being fucked, and Grey was discovering new ones. He honestly thought that he was immune to all of this by now, and he most definitely was not. How was he even going to look her in the eye?

Elowen looked up at him, clearly sensing the shift in his expression. "What’s wrong?"

Grey slowly covered his face with one hand.

"I’m cooked."

Mauve’s mouth twitched.

Grey’s voice came muffled through his palm. "Completely fucking cooked."