Bran booked for them in the center of Orléans. It was a beautiful space on the top floor of a seventeenth-century building in the heart of the city. Balconies led off nearly every room, looking down on the cobbled street with its shops and trams.
Rose had seemed energized by her sleep in the car and the new location, still seemingly unfazed by all the shit that had happened to her in less than a week.
She amazed him.
And that was the problem.
His plans for her had become a constant knife through his throat.
There was no relief from that knife. Not only did Rose insist on eating with him at a restaurant across the street, she’d then tried to insist, like a nagging wife, that he rest before the fight.
Fionn couldn’t.
Too agitated.
Teetering on the edge of temptation.
Temptation he was destined not to outrun, apparently, because the bloody woman insisted on accompanying him.
“I want to see,” Rose had said, her expression taut with stubbornness when he refused her request. “And I’ve got your back.”
Just words. They irritated him almost as much as his desire for her. No one, except Bran, had ever had his back. “I hate to burst your bubble, Rose, but I don’t need you to have my back.”
Rose would not be shaken.
Damn her.
“So, this is an underground fight?” She gestured to the warehouse.
She’d showered and changed into the jeans and shirt the last hotel had dry-cleaned for her, but her singular summery scent overwhelmed the complimentary coconut shampoo she’d discovered in her en suite.
Fionn grunted in response and walked toward the fence. A man, almost as tall as Fionn, stood guard by the gate. He knew his face. The vampire was at least fifty years old, for this was the third fight in France Fionn had attended where this vamp acted as a doorman.
“I know you,” the vampire said, opening the gate. “Here to do some damage?”
He gave another grunt as he made to walk by the doorman.
“I don’t know her.” The vamp grabbed Rose’s arm.
Later Fionn would blame his response on his wasted nerves. As soon as the vampire touched Rose, Fionn whirled on him, gripped him by the throat, and lifted him off his feet. He bared the spell-cast fangs he wore to pretend to be a vamp at the fights and growled into the doorman’s face, “We mustn’t touch what isn’t ours.”
The vampire tried and failed to release himself from Fionn’s grip, shock slackening his features when he realized he was the weaker of the two. Finally he nodded, and Fionn lowered the vamp to the ground.
He could sense Rose’s tension at his back as he guarded her from the doorman’s study.
The vampire rubbed his throat, gaping at Fionn. “No offense meant,” he wheezed out. “I sensed magic, that’s all.”
“She’s a witch,” Fionn replied, “and she knows the rules.”
Still holding his throat in bewilderment, the doorman waved them on.
Furious at himself for responding like a territorial animal, it took Fionn a moment to look down at Rose and ask after her welfare.
She nodded solemnly at him. “I’m okay. And just for the record, I can handle myself. But thanks.”
Knowing Rose was right, that she could handle herself, only made him feel worse. He was born in the late European Iron Age, not long before the Romans would try to conquer his part of the world. Fionn believed differently from how modern humans might expect. Perhaps they assumed women were treated as they were for most of history, as the weaker sex, to be protected and owned by men.
As a human king, he had believed he owned Aoibhinn, but it was a mutual ownership. She owned him in return. As the man who loved her, he wanted to protect her, but as a king who was often away at war, he wanted Aoibhinn to be able to protect herself.
Just as he taught Rose to use her abilities, to defend herself, he’d taught Aoibhinn how to wield a sword as well as any man in his army.
This kind of belief in the fairer sex had been unconventional and only lent itself to expounding upon the uniqueness of his kingship.
That belief in Aoibhinn had been his undoing.
Three centuries above the dirt had allowed time to disintegrate some of those memories, to mute the pain.
But never his thirst for vengeance.
As Fionn strode into the warehouse, relief moved through him as he took in the two large circles that had formed. Two fights. Supernaturals circling each, fists above their heads, baying for