Diamond in the Rough: a Fantasy Romance (Daughter of Fortune Book 3) Read online

  Diamond in the Rough

  Vivienne Savage

  Domino Taylor

  With immense thanks and appreciation to my bestie Alisha and my girlfriend Britani. Without their help this novel would never have reached completion.

  Contents

  1. Under Their Eye

  2. The Chill of Death

  3. Opportunity

  4. Black Art, White Light

  5. Aiding and Abetting

  6. Hereditary

  7. The Way

  8. Desert’s Children

  9. A Trial of Fire

  10. Flames of Glory

  11. To Sacrifice in Love

  12. Friendship Made, Respect Earned

  13. Graverobbed

  14. Hidden in Rock

  15. The Path to Gehenna

  16. The Plan

  17. Secret Gateway

  18. To the Void

  Epilogue

  Other Books by Vivienne

  About the Author

  1

  Under Their Eye

  Xavier awakened to a merciless headache harsh as a cleaver dividing his skull in two. The world around him had no substantial shape or clarity, and pain reduced his vision to a blur of colors wavering in and out. He squinted through the haze at the stone ceiling of his hoard—what he believed was the Ilyrian hoard—and dragged in as deep a breath as his lungs would allow. His throat burned as if he’d inhaled acid, seemingly lined with concentrated misery. When he tried to sit up, agony sledgehammered into his brain.

  Rosalia pressed a hand to the center of his chest, stilling his movement. “Don’t rush.”

  “Inthuders,” he slurred, one side of his mouth uncooperative, his voice hoarse. His tongue felt thick in his mouth, another side effect of the wicked poison. It may as well have been a lump of dry cotton instead of moving muscle.

  Rosalia leaned close enough for her face to gain detail. “They’re dead.”

  A series of brutal coughs seized control of him. He tasted blood in his mouth. “How?” he got out at last.

  “I killed them.”

  As far as he knew, Rosalia had never taken a life before. “But—”

  “Rest, Xavier.”

  Her stern expression brooked no disobedience. Gentle fingers eased him down again, so he closed his eyes. He fell in and out of sleep, and the next time he stirred, the pain had dulled to a gentle roar. Rosalia was still there. He smelled her, felt her presence, and took comfort in knowing, without her confirmation, that she’d been there at his side the entire time.

  “I’m alive. I think,” he finally said without difficulty, testing his mouth. His tongue worked, but he could barely speak above a whisper. His enflamed throat remained tender, aching. Groaning, he shoved aside his discomfort and sat up. “Perhaps I should ask if you’re okay. Did they hurt you? And are you certain they’re all dead?”

  Rosalia nodded, tucking her chin and skating her teeth across her lower lip. He studied her expression and the way her eyes darkened.

  Later they’d talk about it. But not now.

  Now, he needed to get his ass off the floor and investigate the damage caused by the dragon slayers.

  “What hour is it?”

  “Almost morning in Enimura. You’ve been resting for hours.”

  Pushing up into a sitting position, he groaned and cradled his head in one hand. It thumped, pounding with visceral, cruel jabs to the temples.

  “Don’t move.”

  “I must. There were dragon slayers in my domain, Rosalia. I need you to show me where they came in at once, and then I must show my face above.”

  “In this condition?”

  “I’ll tell them I’m ill,” he muttered. “There are about a dozen illnesses that can befall a man while hunting in the desert. Sun sickness is one.”

  “But will they believe that?”

  He stepped in front of the translocation pane leading to Enimura’s hoard. “Would you?”

  Rosalia leaned back to study him. He knew what she saw. One glimpse of his reflection in the mirror’s polished frame had shown him an ashen face and sunken eyes shadowed by dark circles. “Maybe.”

  He had no other choice.

  Courtesy of the dragonsbane, Xavier did not need to feign illness. He chugged hot tea to soothe his throat and breathed in soothing vapors to ease the pain of speaking. By the eighth morning bell, the worst of the symptoms eased, leaving only those he could do nothing to conceal.

  As predicted, the city watchmen returned in force with a battlemage in their company, led by the same churlish sergeant Xavier had wanted to throttle the previous evening. He felt the presence of human sorcery humming beyond his protected doors, and knew if they wanted, they could enter while he was at his weakest and he’d be helpless to stop them.

  They didn’t know that, however. No matter what, he couldn’t afford to allow them to see the extent of his weakness.

  Rather than resist, Xavier opened the door and leaned against the open frame for support. The smell of sunbaked sand invaded the shop, wafting in on a scorching breeze with the scent of human skin and common magic. Their sorcerer stood to the left of the sergeant, a tall man with hard eyes set in a square-jawed face. His intimidating frame supported broad shoulders, and his cocksure air told Xavier the fellow thought he was tough shit. When their gazes met, they weighed one another like two strutting roosters.

  No matter how much the dragonsbane had ravaged his lungs and stolen the vitality from him, Xavier promptly straightened and met the unspoken challenge. On his worst day, they still weren’t evenly matched, but for the sake of his safety, he had pretended he was almost at his best and let the powerful aura of his magic ebb from him like an inexorable tide.

  “We returned with the proper paperwork and authorizations,” the watch sergeant began in a droll voice, feigning boredom with the whole affair despite the excitement gleaming in his eyes. This was a man overjoyed with a minor victory. “Once again, Bane, we’ll need your keys and—Are you…quite all right, sir? You’re…you appear to be a little under the weather.”

  Xavier smiled through the pain. “I am indeed. I must have caught something while exploring the desert for alchemical reagents,” he informed the sergeant. He plopped the heavy key ring in the man’s open palm, which the sergeant stared at before briskly passing off to another watchman and wiping his palm against his trousers. “For all your sakes, let’s hope it isn’t contagious.”

  “Contagious?” The watchmen to the rear of the officer fidgeted in discomfort. The sergeant eyed Xavier’s threshold with all the trepidation of men who didn’t fancy visiting the healing house for a remedy to an exotic desert illness. The prices were highway robbery, but they’d be fed a foul concoction brewed by some elderly priestess, and they’d be on the mend in a fraction of the time.

  Magic did not come free, nor did the convenience of curing the flux in twenty-four hours, as opposed to a weeklong trial of vomiting and fever.

  Xavier didn’t tend to fall ill often, and when he did, he brewed curatives of his own or retreated to his hoard and slept it off.

  “Well, gentlemen, don’t let my sniffles and cough hold you. You’d like to ransack my storerooms, yes?” Xavier smiled thinly, without pity as they shuffled in place. He departed the shop and gestured with a broad sweep of his arm to the open doorway, indicating they were free to enter and do as they wished. All of the draconic power in the kingdom wasn’t enough to hold an army at bay, and it was far too early to play his hand.

  While they investigated h
is storefront and rummaged through his belongings for proof of wrongdoing, Xavier slipped into the shade of a palm shading the walking path. The irony didn’t escape him. His father would have laughed at the sight, a rainbow dragon cringing from the sunlight and cowering in the shade. The dry weather and heat did little to aid his cough.

  “Master Bane,” the jeweler called from the stoop of her shop, her fair brow pinched with obvious concern. “What’s happened for the city watch to visit you again? Was there a theft?”

  Xavier shook his head. “No. Far from it.”

  She lingered, leaving one hand on the door. “Should we be worried?”

  “No. I merely seem to have fallen on the wrong side of the law by happenstance. It’s nothing of concern for you,” he assured her.

  Though Xavier tried to will her away with all of his might, the friendly jeweler stepped down and crossed the narrow stretch of dry grass between them. “Just the same, it would honor me if you came in and rested. It’s the hottest day of summer, say the weather mages. You’ll catch heat sickness.” Sharp eyes raked over him, taking in his appearance. Her mouth quirked and lips pursed together as she studied him with the critical eye of a mother. “If you haven’t already.”

  “It’s nothing, Moiranna. Just a little cough I picked up while out in the desert. You know how it is.”

  “Then you should especially be careful of your health now that you’ve already subjected your body to the heat. Come in. Please.”

  Rainbow dragons, as well as their other hot-blooded cousins, didn’t catch heat sickness, but she wouldn’t know that. Were it anyone else, Xavier would have viewed the offer under the heavy lens of skepticism while wondering what benefit she hoped to receive. Such was unnecessary with Moiranna. No one kinder worked in the merchant square. More than that, Xavier had attended her wedding to one of the most prosperous metalsmiths in the district only three years prior, a ceremony attended by almost every shopkeeper in the Gardens. Whatever kindness Moiranna offered, Xavier knew she always did so out of genuine compassion.

  “All right.”

  He spent the remainder of their search sipping tea for his ragged throat, wondering what, if anything, the watchmen would find while rifling through his belongings.

  As long as Rosalia remained in the hoard, Xavier had absolute confidence that the city watch would emerge emptyhanded.

  2

  The Chill of Death

  When the weredragon returned to his charade, Rosalia had no choice but to watch him leave. She wanted to follow him upstairs to the shop. She ached to lurk in the shadowed alcoves of the storefront and protect him the way he had protected her since the morning of her aborted execution. For him, she would have killed a dozen more slayers in the same manner he would slay hundreds more guards to protect her. Thousands.

  Taking a life wasn’t meant to be so easy. Rosalia knew this. Hadrian had verbally whipped the words into her from a young age when he’d put the first dagger in her hand and told her it was never to be used until all other methods of escape failed. If one was to be a thief, they were to become a master of subterfuge and an escape artist of the highest caliber to avoid leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.

  While she knew she had failed him in that, there had been no way nonviolent way to discourage the slayers. She could have led them away to safety, but Xavier had relied upon her.

  Slaughtering the slayers had no more troubled Rosalia than gutting a fish from the market. That troubled her. That it should prove so easy, and that in lieu of horror and remorse, she felt only a cool satisfaction that the weredragon was safe from the latest threat to endanger him.

  The whole while that she held Xavier cradled against her lap, Rosalia waited for the emotion to catch up to her. She waited for the guilt to crash down, and she waited for the moment she realized blood would forever stain her hands.

  Throughout her youth and years of stealing, she’d avoided bloodshed aside from the expected nicks and slices incurred during training at her former mentor’s behest, but she never took a life.

  Over and over, Hadrian warned her that day would come, though he reminded her they were not assassins frequently. He had not trained her to murder, but he had instructed her in forms of combat designed to keep her alive. Sometimes, murder became a byproduct of survival.

  For Xavier, she would do it again. After all, he’d murdered countless guards and many others for her on the morning of her scheduled execution. She imagined he’d slaughtered many more over the years of his long life. If the elvish queen was to be believed, her own mother had taken more lives than could be counted.

  She had assassin’s blood in her veins.

  Within minutes of being left to her own devices, she was pacing the underground and wondering what to do next. She needed a plan of action. She needed to map out her next moves because one wrong step could bring it all crashing down upon them again. It couldn’t have been by chance that the dragon slayers found his lair, and she had to believe there was the potential for others to come searching for them.

  The answer to Rosalia’s quandary came on a sizzling bolt of insight, lancing into her thoughts with the force of a crossbow bolt: Adriano. She needed to catch up to him, not only to confirm that he was safe, but to uncover the navy’s next step and determine if the war with Ilyria had been properly crippled by Xavier’s mischief.

  As she considered the route to the docks and how she would gain access to her friend, it occurred to her that her dragon lover would disapprove of her plan and speak of how unwise she would be to travel the streets in daylight.

  It’d be more foolish to sit on her ass and wait for everything to be handed to her. Xavier knew that, too.

  Which was why less than an hour later, she’d donned an ankle-length frock and veil to venture into the city under the protection of silk and a prayer that the propriety of the city watch would be enough to protect her identity. Typically, veiled women were courtesans or women in mourning. Without her wristbow, armed only with a single knife concealed under the layers of her fine dress, she felt naked and exposed.

  No matter how much he would have preferred she wait until he returned to full strength, Rosalia could not hide forever within the dragon’s subterranean hoard. She also couldn’t travel indefinitely via the underground network; her body was too large to squeeze through most of the Sewer Rats’ outlets to the surface. Those were designed for the smallest bodies, for children half her height, and sometimes smaller.

  He would never agree to me leaving during daylight.

  It also wasn’t his decision to make, and too much rode on her covering as much ground as possible before the other side caught up to them again. She had no doubt in her mind the dragon hunters were on the royal payroll and that their absence would soon be missed. No one spent that kind of money on Linradeshi mercenaries without expecting expediency.

  When the king didn’t receive those results, he and his vicious spymaster would no doubt send even more warriors to investigate the disappearance of the first group of dragon slayers.

  More people within the sewers meant a higher likelihood of discovery and busybodies likely to find the corpses of their enemies if they sent trackers with the mercenaries’ scent.

  While the dragon shifter diverted the attention of the city watch bound to arrive and investigate his storefront, she donned another disguise and emerged from an unobtrusive exit into the bottom of an abandoned shop in Gold Valley.

  More than she needed to find out information about the dragon slayers, she needed to recruit Adriano for his help. He could go places she could not travel by day, freely without the burden of excess clothing, disguises, or veils to conceal his identity. He could in fact, use his title as a ship captain to access places she couldn’t.

  And if all else failed, she could plead with her friend to abandon his post and flee Enimura, putting as much distance between himself and the kingdom as possible. Leaving the city wouldn’t be enough. The price of desertion meant he’d need
to leave Saudonia.

  What if he won’t leave? What if he declares the city to be his home and he refuses to leave because he loves Saudonia with all his heart?

  That was more in line with the Adriano she’d grown up beside, and she knew without a doubt that he’d likely choose to stay and fight for the kingdom with them, risking both his career and life if it meant the evil within the monarchy was exposed.

  Rosalia would have to cross that bridge when she reached it. They had no backup plan to speak of, and Xavier, despite his brilliant mind’s capacity for mischief, couldn’t hobble every ship he encountered without creating a pattern the naval officials would no doubt recognize. They already believed him to be harboring the dragon. If they connected the dots and realized he’d sabotaged a naval ship, they would have no choice but to flee the city altogether before they were ready.

  The alternative, if the admiral were dead set and determined to have more men at sea, was that Adriano and his crew departed aboard another naval ship to complete a patrol that would hopefully keep them out of the battle for the city’s safety once the elves arrived. She’d only need to tip Adriano off to which sea routes to avoid, otherwise they’d cross paths and he’d risk an elf-hating crew mutinying against him and initiating battle.

  Rosalia navigated the city streets in the unbearable heat, occasional drafts of cooler air stirring her silks and penetrating the thin fabric. That was the only reprieve from the unseasonably hot day baking down on the city. The weather should have long begun to edge toward the autumn temperatures.