Thorne (Random Romance) Read Online Free Page A

window. Her blonde hair fell across her face as she looked up at me.
    ‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.
    Smiling, she nodded. Radha had been mine for eight years. And for six of those I had kept her in this room. Each time my eyes turned gold for her, my heart broke a little at the cruelty of the life we led. The injustice of the ambition in my veins and the passion in my heart that meant she lived her life locked out of sight.
    ‘Did he fall from his horse again?’
    I shrugged. ‘Probably. I couldn’t bear to ask.’
    Radha gave a soft trickle of laughter. Everything about her was sweet and soft. I tried desperately to be more like her, but I was too cynical to keep it up for long.
    ‘He was attacked by six Sparrows.’
    Radha paused, lowering her embroidery. ‘Oh, Quill.’
    I nodded, slumping into a chair beside her. ‘They grow bolder every day.’
    ‘So what will you do?’
    I shrugged.
    ‘You know what the answer is,’ she murmured gently.
    I met her golden eyes and felt the bond pull at us both. An ache in my skin, in my bones and my gut.
    ‘Send soldiers in to control them.’
    ‘If I send soldiers they’ll see it as an act of warfare, which means there will be an ocean of blood shed. They are too many and too savage for us to expect any other outcome. I don’t want violence in my country.’
    ‘You will have it anyway, Quill. Making the proclamation to have your people seek out the end to the bond will excite everyone. And if you let the rebels grow in numbers and strength, if you fail to show yours, they will bring the war to you and the bloodshed will be much worse.’
    I closed my eyes, resting my head against the chair. ‘I can’t make that decision on my own.’
    ‘You may have to,’ Radha told me gently. ‘What help will you get from Emperor Feckless?’
    ‘He’s not feckless,’ I muttered, without much conviction. Radha didn’t dislike anyone, but if she did, I believed it would be Falco. They’d never met, but she’d heard enough about him to be equal parts amused by his antics and exasperated with his failings.
    I heard a rustle of silk and then she was upon me, her small frame sliding onto my lap, her lips tracing the shape of my jaw. ‘You’re a brave woman, Empress.’
    My hands went to her hips. ‘I’m not. If I was, you’d live with the country’s eyes upon you, as you deserve, instead of hiding in here as if I’m ashamed of you.’
    She made a soft sound. ‘You’d lose your throne.’
    It shouldn’t matter, but it did. There were too many things I wanted to achieve. I wanted a new life for Kaya. I wanted peace. And I couldn’t fight for that unless I sat on the throne. ‘I want you out of here.’
    ‘I won’t be apart from you.’
    A conversation we’d had every day for years.
    ‘How do you breathe?’
    ‘I think of you and it’s easy,’ she said, and then kissed me. A powerful hurricane consumed us; this was how she and I loved each other, with obsession and need and an impossible desperation.
    But when those things waned, when we chipped away at them until they broke, what would we have left? Unbreakable, the bond was said to be. Some days I felt the untruth of this. Because when the day came that this life was too much for her, when she forgot who she had once been within the confines of this prison cell, and when she finally grew to hate me, what would the bond mean then? What would it be worth?
    It was in moments like these that I wished my kingdom were a different place. In this different place, there would be no law against the Emperor and Empress having bondmates, and there would be no law against two women ruling together. And in this different place, Radha would walk free, and our eyes would turn gold, and everyone in the kingdom would see and rejoice instead of sending our corpses to sea.
    Falco
    I gazed at the row of naked women, all blindfolded. They sported various lengths of blonde hair; all had perfectly shaped bodies with perfectly unblemished