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She is beautiful, Jude, as she rounds the corner of the Locke estate hedge maze. She has Locke on her arm, his dazzling smirk in place, murmuring something about how this is his home and thus she is welcome no matter what his guests might think. Jude flushes, looks down a moment, firms her resolve, then looks back up with her own charming smile.
It immediately makes Cardan’s head hurt.
She is always beautiful, in the way she snarls and glares. In the way she never backs down, chin always held high even when she really ought to bow to his whims.
It makes Cardan’s skin crawl. His chest stir. His insecurities bare, even if he’s long learned to ensure his face shows nothing but arrogant savagery and annoyance. Just the way Balekin likes him best. And the way his father despises most, even if he won’t spare him the attention he would a blade of grass.
But like this, with her guard down and her inhibitions loose—delicately sipping on bright blue and deep green wines, eating salted fey fruit of gold, dripping syrups on cakes and cheese—Jude is completely different. She is.. sweet, almost. All smiles and giggles, wrapped around teeth near too sharp to be human, yet far too blunt to be one of the fae.
She is having the time of her life, not a care in the world. Cardan and Nicasia are barely even blips on her radar. Usually tense and defensive in their presence, even a little elusive at times, Jude is carefree and prancing around, much like the fawns on the skirt of her dress.
If Valerian were here—where is he, anyway? Not that Cardan minds the temporary peace that comes with his absence, but it does strike him as odd that he hasn’t shown his face yet—he wonders how different Jude would be acting right now. Bared teeth instead of them being gently revealed by a pleased grin.
She looks like a dream, in the golden fire light. Highlighted in the spill of blue-white moon light, a long forgotten memory. A ghost of a long passed loved one. All faded colors—she never does glow quite like the fae, does she—and a wispy, partly moth eaten dress wrapped perfectly around her body. The body that Cardan has had the misfortune of seeing.
He can’t get it out of his mind.
Her curves. Her skin, soft yet hardened with muscles and scars. Her breasts, full and obscene, even with her conservative mortal coverings. Hell, even the dull colors of her are stuck in his brain.
The way it all made him feel.
The shame of enjoying the view, even knowing she wasn’t herself. She wouldn’t have wanted him to look.
Cardan slams back an entire glass of wine, then pulls one of the courtesan’s he doesn’t know the name of into his lap. She giggles, pleased to receive what amounts to his praise as the other courtesan continues to kiss up his leg with more fervor. Like she can possibly win back his attention.
Cardan hates to admit she’s vying against the wrong woman.
She—the one in his lap—kisses his throat, never hard enough to leave marks. Never hard enough to make his breath hitch in his throat and his body seize with anticipation. As distracting as it should be, all it does is make Cardan think even more about her.
About Jude.
About the day she declared she wouldn’t back down from him. About how feral she was in the Summer Tournament. How doggedly she had fought against him. The beauty of it all. Ragged and dirty and viscous, and undeniably marvellous.
Cardan gasps at the same time the woman in his lap presses a kiss to his shoulder. It has nothing to do with her, but he clutches her waist anyways, letting his mind wander further.
How would Jude feel, in his hands?
In his lap?
Lips against his skin?
His lips against hers?
She would hate it.
He would hate it.
Cardan never allows himself to fall into the fantasies that near always threaten to overtake him whenever Jude is in his thoughts. But here, where she looks so pleased—where Cardan is heady with liquor and deep in his own pleasured stupor—he can’t help it.
He watches her, even as his lips are kissed by another.
It is wrong.
This woman—the courtesan—is utterly wrong.
Cardan doesn’t for a moment believe that Jude would be so gentle. She would surely nip, and bite, and tug, claiming and demanding. Steal her own pleasure from him well before thinking of his own. It would be punishing, as well as exciting.
It should not make Cardan shudder the way it does. Should not make his cock stir in his undergarments, pressed firmly against the hip of a woman he won’t even remember the face of in the morning.
Jude runs in a circle around the hedge’s centre, laughing loudly, girlishly, as Locke chases after her.
He is no match for her speed—Cardan knows this from experience—and yet, somehow, Locke always manages to catch her with ease. His hands go around Jude’s hips, her fingers to Locke’s hair, and then they’re kissing, soft and slow, and it excites Cardan as much as it pisses him right the fuck off.
Jude wouldn’t kiss him like that. Not at all, which is only part of the reason he cares.
The other part, the part that Cardan refuses to look into, is the fact that he can’t stand Locke’s little game with the twins. One weekend he’s green gowning Taryn, and the next he’s kissing Jude like she means the world to him.
Locke has always been like this, Cardan reminds himself. He hadn’t even cared this much when it was Nicasia Locke had been fooling around with, even though Cardan loved her.
Jude is.. not like the rest of the girls Locke messes with, though. In the sense that she isn’t in it for the fun or the adventure. She isn’t in it for the prestige, the power that Nicasia craved, or even for some wicked game of love that Taryn seems to be playing.
Jude’s feelings are true and genuine—whether she is happy or enraged, she does not hide it; not even when she used to hold her head down and likely thought she was keeping her all encompassing fury to herself—which makes Cardan’s displeasure with Locke grow with each passing day.
Jude’s eyes flutter open mid kiss and slide over to Cardan, where he still watches her intently. Where he is still being pleased by two others. Where he is torn between rage towards Jude, and rage towards those who wrong her.
Who hurt her.
Locke pulls back, crowds her on a blanket laid out in the grass, leans her back against the hedge wall, and kisses down Jude’s neck in a gentle caress. Jude laughs, a little obnoxious and mean now, and Cardan sees it.
That laugh — it’s for him. She has been mocking him all night, and all Cardan can think about is how nice it sounds in his ears. About how, against his greater judgement, he wants to hear it again, even if it is played up at his expense.
Cardan slides his hand up the back of the woman in his lap, gets his fingers in glowing amber hair, and urges her to kiss harder. Deeper.
Still, his gaze never leaves Jude’s. The dim shade of chestnut brown hair, braided up into horns. As if she is one of them. The twigs and leaves caught in the strands making it look like a crown. A halo of earth and purity.
Even more curiously, Jude’s eyes never leave him either — not even when they begin to glaze over with dull pleasure.
It must be a challenge, in her mind. The one to look away first looses.
Is that the game she wants to play?
Cardan doesn’t exactly hate it. Not as much as he really should.
In the end, Cardan isn’t so sure who wins. Up until the moment Jude pulled Locke away from going too far, then he led her back into his estate and up to bed, Jude’s eyes were always on him.
There was a heat Cardan has never seen in her settled there. Likely a deeper hatred. A new layer unlocked after seeing how he acts in his free time.
Cardan watches as she heads out of the hedge maze, hand in hand with Locke, and considers what it is like to live as Jude Duarte. To have everything Cardan wants, and yet have nothing at all.
He hates her all the more for it. And yet, his fae mouth can’t form the words.
I hate you, Jude Duarte.
I hate you.
“I—.”