Chapter 70: Furious
Stefan’s POV
I helped Kara up first, then Jonquil, both of them still loose-limbed and slow from everything that had just passed between us.
I pulled Jonquil close before she could fully gather herself, my hands framing her face, and I kissed her slow, unhurried, between whispered words.
"Go get that soft treatment," I murmured against her lips. "The treatment baths. Go join the others."
Jonquil blinked, and I felt the refusal building in her before she had even said it, her whole body going a shade stiffer under my hands. I kissed her again before the word could leave her mouth.
"If you go," I said, low, promising, "I will let you enjoy a lot more tonight. Whatever you want."
She blinked again and said nothing, and the beast mood insight flickered up at the edge of my vision.
[JONQUIL — CURRENT MOOD: Pleased.]
I grinned against her mouth. "You should go," I said, kissing her once more, softer this time. "Will you go?"
"I will go," she said, flat as ever, though something in her voice had softened at the edges.
[JONQUIL — AFFECTION: 80%]
I smiled properly at that, watching the number settle into place. Eighty. Climbing steady, no signs of stalling.
Beside us, the beast mood insight flickered again, this time tagging Kara.
[KARA — CURRENT MOOD: Curious.]
I hadn’t even finished reading it before Kara’s mouth was already moving. "What is that described as?" she asked, blunt as ever, nodding toward the space between my mouth and Jonquil’s. "What you just did with your lips."
I laughed, low, and turned to press the same thing against her own mouth before answering, feeling her go still with surprise for half a second before she caught up.
"Kiss," I said, pulling back just enough to watch her face.
Kara repeated the word slowly under her breath, testing the shape of it like she was deciding whether it deserved a place in her vocabulary at all.
"I’ll go now," Jonquil said, already turning for the door.
I caught her wrist before she made it two steps. "Wait. Do you know where General Belladonna is staying?"
Jonquil nodded. Then she told me, gave me quick directions, a hallway and a turn I already knew I’d forget the second I stopped looking at her mouth.
"I will get lost," I admitted. "Walk me there first."
~~~~~~~~
I stood outside Belladonna’s door far longer than I meant to, running through every possible opening line and discarding each one before it fully formed.
She was going to ask about her Flowers. She always asked about her Flowers. And somewhere underneath that question, unspoken but never forgotten, sat the bird. The gold one. The one I’d pried off her horse’s neck with my own hands and dropped straight into a slave’s cooking fire out of pure desperation, the one I’d been quietly, expertly avoiding any mention of ever since.
I heaved a breath and knocked.
Nothing answered.
I frowned, wondering if knocking meant anything at all on this planet, then pushed the door open and leaned my head through the gap.
Belladonna sat cross-legged on a low bench, a scroll unrolled across her lap, her eyes fixed on markings that meant nothing to me, some looping, angular script I couldn’t have read even if my life depended on it, which, given who I was talking to, it very possibly did.
She looked up, and her frown deepened the instant she registered my face in the doorway.
"I’ve been wanting to see you," she said, voice flat, dangerous in that quiet way of hers that never needed volume to land. "Have you brought my bird?"
I bit down on my lip, buying half a second I didn’t actually have.
"Hand it over," she went on, before I could answer. "Then go heal my Flowers. That is the only reason you are still breathing."
I let out a slow breath, running the math fast in my head. Three deadlines now stacked on top of each other like some cosmic joke, heal the Flowers before two sunsets, prove my worth to the Queen inside two days, get this exact woman into a bath before her treatment window closed, and now this, a debt she still believed I could simply produce out of thin air.
I slid into the version of myself that had made grown women sign over their life savings with a smile still on their faces.
"I came to you myself," I said, voice smooth, steady, "because I don’t lie to the people who matter. And you matter, General."
Belladonna said nothing, watching me the way she had watch an enemy’s blade, waiting to see which direction it moved first.
"But you need to choose. The bird, or your Flowers. I don’t have the strength for both right now." I said firmly.
That earned the smallest flicker of something, not belief exactly, but attention.
"My magic isn’t unlimited," I pressed on, letting real frustration bleed into my voice because it wasn’t entirely fabricated. "It draws from me. From my own strength, my own rest, my own worth being properly recognized. And since I landed on this planet, I’ve been treated like something scraped off the bottom of a boot. Beaten. Starved. Punished for things I didn’t do. That kind of treatment doesn’t build a healer’s strength, General. It burns through it."
Belladonna’s expression didn’t shift.
"Every hour spent chasing a trinket," I went on, quieter now, "is an hour I don’t spend restoring what’s left of my strength to heal two women who are currently lying somewhere between life and nothing at all. I can find your bird eventually. I promise you that. But not today. Not while your Flowers still need me more."
She looked at me for a long, silent moment, and I genuinely couldn’t tell whether the argument had landed or simply bought me a few more seconds of being alive.
"Heal the Flowers," she said finally, flat. "But know this. Once they stand again, you will answer for wasting my time and letting me believe you were worth keeping breath in your lungs."
"I am worth keeping," I said, straightening my spine, refusing to let the threat rattle whatever confidence I had left. "I need a little time, that’s all. I have an arrangement with the Queen herself. Two sunsets, and your Flowers will be healed."
"Then see that it is done," Belladonna said, eyes already dropping back to the scroll in her lap, dismissing me the way she might dismiss a servant who’d overstayed her patience.
"Remove yourself from my presence."
I backed out through the door, the beast mood insight chiming one last time as it swung shut behind me.
[BELLADONNA — CURRENT MOOD: Furious.]
I gritted my teeth as I stopped dead in the hallway, staring at the door where the woman who had just threatened to have me answer with my life for wasting an hour of her time, was.
How in the actual hell was I supposed to talk that woman into a bath?