by Dany Stone
I reach out a finger. Adjust the cup slightly so that the Lux-face is fully facing me. No.
“I — guess.”
Smiling at me the way the real Lux hasn’t smiled at me for weeks.
I twist the face back out of my line of sight.
“But there are doubts.” Blade retrieves the silence that had been between us, but this time it’s even more awkward. Enhanced now that Lux’s face is between us.
The slow mournful notes of a sax rises from the LifeScreen. Twists its way around my heartbeat.
“After all, she was found at the scene at the bombing.” Blade reaches for my cup next. Fingers never still. “And the magic at the scene traces back to her. And with all her connections to the Underworld—”
My shaggy hair appears near the upside-down bottom of the cup.
“She never showed any tendencies toward criminal activities.” To me. “Until —well, recently.”
“A given.” My skeptical eyes, now mirrored on the cup. Blade doesn’t look up, drawing steadily, as if he has every line of my face memorized.
Knows the indecision on my face without even having to look.
In dream-blurred movements, I stroke the outline of Lux’s face on the finished cup. “It started making things awkward. Little things she’d say, different things she’d do—”
The stylus sketches a hardened mouth. Frustration dominating me in caricature as well as in real life. “Left you in a hard place.”
“Left me like this.” I pull my hand away from the caricature of Lux’s face. Arms folded over my chest as I sit back again.
“You still have a strong connection.” Lux-cup is turned abruptly, facing away from my cup. “Exactly why you are the best one to get into her memories. A quick in and out, and that’ll be the end of your involvement. You can forget you ever knew her.”
No.
You don’t understand me.
You don’t understand her.
“It’s not— it’s just—” I slam my palm down on the table. Pain stings all the way up to my wrist. Up my bloodstream to my heart. “I won’t be the lure to draw her in.” Totally refuse.
“Even if it saves her life.”
“Saves her—” Incredulous laughter rifts through the maelstrom of my emotions. I fold my arms a little tighter until sensation has deadened into disgust. “Who in the Fracture do you even think you’re fooling.”
Blade puts the cups side by side, tweaking them until Ki-cup and Lux-cup are facing each other. The rims leave behind faint circles of coffee every time they’re moved.
“OK,” Blade says finally. “Let’s try a new angle.” He never lifts his hand from the Lux-cup. Fingers so close to the caricature that it’s all I can do not to punch them away. “I’m not denying she’s the one you loved. The one you still care about. But you gotta think about this.” He inches the Lux-cup to the edge of the table until it’s dangling. A touch away from dropping down out of range, being crushed underfoot under the wave of passersby. “Here she is, she’s desperate, we’re desperate. Who do you think she’s going to turn to?”
My mouth moves mutely until I can find my voice. “Her fellow inmates.”
Watching, but Blade never moves the caricature away from the edge.
“Unless you’re back in her life. Unless you’re the one she trusts. Unless you’re the one to save her.” Blade crushes the Lux-cup in his palm. In the strength of his grip, it takes only a squeeze to splinter Lux’s face in half.
Her smile disintegrates between his fingers.
I close my eyes, fighting against the memory of Lux being taken away. See the haunting pain, the guilt that gives new, forbidden depths to her eyes. More than anything else I want her. Want what we once had.
Want to gain her back.
But to betray her?
Finally, reluctantly I open my eyes. Cutting out Lux’s image, her pain.
All emotion carefully locked away.
“Tell me what I would need to do.”
Sixteen
LUX
A knife traces across my face, coming to rest on my eyelids. I don't blink, don't dare move with the blade pricking my lid. Eyelids burning like they have been ground with sand.
A voice purrs from behind my neck. “That’s right. Be still, like a good little divine.”
Who —what— Awareness burns in the back of my sensations: cramped muscles, screaming sinews, a general burning across my body. I couldn’t move, even if I dared.
Snakes of rope twist my arms behind my back and hold me fast.
What in Hades—
“I’m going to remove the knife.” The devilish voice, still just beyond me. “I want you to open your eyes slowly.”
I don’t know what I’ll see, don’t know what to fear most —- the darkness or what it hides. The muscles in my face quiver as the cold blade drags across my eyelid. Dissolves away into a tingle of emptiness.
I find the courage to open my eyes.
The first thing I see is the light. A lantern burns inside a cage suspended from the ceiling, illuminating the row of faces leaning directly over me. Five of them, by my quick count: three guys, two girls, all of them dressed in jumpsuits far too large for their tiny fae forms. Blood stains the torn corners of their uniforms.
Fellow inmates?
They weren’t the cell when Damien and I fell asleep. So how—
Damien.
I search for him out of the corner of my eye. Still asleep, squished between me and the wall, and completely oblivious to my predicament.
Since when do you rely on a reaper for protection?
“Whoever attacked you certainly did a thorough job,” I say. A subtle test of my bonds. For tiny buggers, they tie a mean knot.
No one laughs.
“Under your command perhaps, divine?” The guy in the middle — a perfect blend of African and Greek, judging by his features— leans closer. Dark eyes scald through me. His smile is literally broken — a division of skin and muscle where he was slashed by a blade. The effect is bloody. Terrifying.
I can’t look away.
“What? No. Why would I—”
He slams the hilt of the knife against my mouth.
I taste blood in the corners of my mouth.
“Tigo isn’t happy the way you played him, divine. Might as well spare yourself the pain your lies will cause you.”
His face is too close, everything is blurring. I stare past him at the lines of the bunk above me. Claw marks skid across the floors and the walls, a reminder how dangerous this pen is.
Broken Smile presses the knife into my shakes me, hard enough to rattle me, and I scramble for my voice.
“I have nothing to do with this. I’m like you. An inmate. I have nothing to do with—”
Broken Smile releases me abruptly. My skin cold where his fingers left me. “That’s not what we heard from him.” He snaps his fingers and a tiny blue-hair girl separates from the group. A tiger-headed dagger clutched in her hand.
“Him?” I repeat. Buying for time. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the blue-haired girl land on Damien’s shoulder. She teases the back of his neck with the dagger’s tip, her smile wicked as she looks back at me.
A thousand protective instincts scream for release.
I tense my muscles so that I don’t move at all.
Can’t give myself away by flinching.
“Aiden.” Broken Smile leans into my face. Tiny hands pressing into my cheekbones like shards of glass. “He told us how you set him up. How you turned him over to the CTC.”
What the fuck?
He’s lying.
You know he’s lying.
I twist my fingers around my restraints. “Does it look like I set him up? I’m the one in the fucking pen, for god’s sake!”
The blue-haired fairy laughs aloud and tickles the dagger into Damien’s skin. My stomach roils as I see him flinch in his sleep.
Damien! Wake up!
He’s gone still.
> OK, I can handle this. I just need to convince them that what happened with Aiden is not what they were told and I’m the real victim here. I mean, honestly, do I look like a threat? Disheveled, bruised, disoriented?
“I’m Tigo’s ally.” My lips tremble over the words. “I risked – no, I gave up everything for him. To end up like this. There’s no reason for you to—”
“To see through your lies?” The lead fairy interrupts me smoothly. The mould of his features is hard like stone, but the bloody corners of his mouth twist up gruesomely. “Unfair of us, isn’t it.”
Why can’t I break these fucking bonds? I need my freedom. Now.
I growl under my breath and pull against the rope, no longer attempting to hide my struggle. All too aware of my own weaknesses.
The vulnerabilities they’re mercilessly exploiting.
It doesn’t help when I see them exchange smiles.
Blue Hair drives her dagger a little deeper into the back of Damien’s neck, testing, twisting, adjusting. She looks back at me and whispers, “he’s enchanted.” Smiling to herself as she turns back to her tortures.
Don’t show a reaction, I scream at myself. That’s what she wants.
Wants to force me to an extreme where I will do anything to make it stop.
I tear my gaze away from her dagger.
“Tigo isn’t happy to be left out of the Shroud’s location,” Broken Smile hisses. “Tigo would be happy if you would give up the information before we have to kill you.”
Lava rises up my throat.
Anger and betrayal throttling each other for dominance.
“I don’t know where it is, OK? Aiden was supposed to deliver it, but he—”
Broken Smile looks back at his comrades. They’re all nodding, sage and unimpressed. “Exactly what he said she’d tell us.”
What? No. Aiden couldn’t have been playing me this entire time. We were too close, so fucking close it hurts.
Yeah. How long do you think he was working to get close to you?
Just to obtain the Shroud?
You don’t know that’s the case.
Could just be the words of some crazy fairies with a bizarre agenda.
Except – he abandoned me.
Left me to be taken while he got away with the prize.
What true friend would ever do that?
“He’s a liar,” I whisper, more to myself than the fairies. “One fucking hell of a liar.” I lift my gaze to Broken Eyes and defiance sparks to life within me. “Tell him, you little sprite. Tell him that he’s a liar and a thief and his powers are so weak they can only be used to save himself. If he wants to start rumors, he can fucking come into this cell and say it to my face. Not send a lackey who doesn’t know how to use a knife.”
The fairy’s face twists with fury.
Not even a blink.
Before the knife is twisting down to my face.
“Say something like that again and I’ll—”
Something rattles in the doorway.
The clank of metal against metal.
The fairies on my chest freeze in a panic. “The patrol. Move it, move it, move it!”
Tiny moving bodies blur before my eyes, Blue Hair springing back from Damien’s neck to join the others climbing over the base of the bunk. On the floor, running for the wall, the instant the cell door clicks open.
“Hey.” I fight to tug free of the ropes. “Aren’t you forgetting something, cowards?”
They don’t even slow. Broken Smile grabs the hands of the fairies nearest him and they begin to climb, scaling the wall at a rapid rate.
Out of sight as the cell door opens.
And Ki enters.
Seventeen
KI
“I’m here to escort you to the showers. Not rescue you from some pixie devils.” I slice part the rope that binds Lux to the bunk, and the trust in her eyes makes my heart sink. She thinks I’m here to rescue her.
That there’s still a chance I will take care of her.
She has no idea I’ll be her destruction.
“In an hour I’ll be off duty and there will be no one here who’s weak enough to care about you. Keep your head down and maintain a low profile.”
“And if I don’t?”
A muscle in my jaw twitches. “This is HAVOC pen. I’ll probably come back to find you in pieces. Or worse.”
“Vague but interesting.” She presses her palm against my chest. The touch sends sparks all the way into my bones. “Really, Ki. You kept the morning from being a complete cesspool of boredom.”
Growling, I push her back from me. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Might be hard to talk once I’m cut up in pieces, but I’ll give it a shot.”
Why the hell does she have to be so stubborn? Unholy gods, it’s all I can do not to push her under me and end this tension between us for once and for all.
Forget about the cameras watching.
Forget about my career and my life and any dreams of us both surviving.
I want her.
Now.
In every way that I can’t have her.
The last fray of rope falls free and I help her sit up. She winces as she pulls her knees up to her chin. Holding herself close.
So vulnerable I have to look away.
“I’m not a villain,” she says softly. “If people would just take the time to listen to me.”
I spent two years of my life listening to her.
Believing in her dream that magic should be free.
Look where that got me.
“You’re in HAVOC,” I say. “People stopped listening a long time ago.” I drop the rope into a pile at my feet and crouch in front of her. Behind me, I hear the pixies frantically attempting to open the door, but I ignore them. Let them be trapped for a few minutes longer. It’s just preparing them for their time in solitary.
And whoever allowed them access to Lux will be screwed.
I’ll see to that.
“They cause a lot of trouble, but they’re mainly harmless little bitches.” I shake off the pixie attempting to bite my elbow. “Think of them as rabid dust bunnies.”
Her shoulders jolt with unexpected laughter. “Dust bunnies with knives.”
What the— I shove up to my feet, towering over the pixies cowering by the door. Without their stolen advantage, they just look small and foolish, caught in a trap of their own making.
And irritating enough I want to kick them.
Make them pay for daring to touch Lux.
Instead I pull out my radio, call up Katch from his patrol. “Deuce. Care to pick up some pixies?”
His curse doesn’t sound too pleased and the pixies droop in their corner. Irritating buggers. I switch off the sound and bury the radio in my pocket before turning back to Lux. She is turned slightly on the bunk, shaking the shoulder of the guy beside her, and jealousy rears its head with a vengeance inside me.
They slept together all night.
His body pressed to hers.
The way mine used to be.
Long summer nights where I would hold her close. Laughter from shared secrets. Skin pressed to skin, her curves setting me aflame.
And now—there is nothing but emptiness between us.
I bite my lip to keep back the anger rising in me.
“He won’t wake up.” Lux glances back at me, a long strand of hair falling into her eyes. “They told me they enchanted him, but—”
“He’s drugged.” Notice I don’t care. “Standard pixie procedure.” I should know. Every crim in this place uses the pixies as their personal vendetta guard, sending them out to the dirty work they don’t want to be caught handling.
It’s not surprising they were sent after Lux.
Her hands lingers way too long on his shoulder, clenching until she’s white-knuckled. I grab her arms and tug her off of the bunk, pull her back until she’s pressed against me and even then I can’t get her close enough. She bites her lip as she
looks up at me and a growl escapes my lip.
I want to be inside her.
Fuck her until she’s screaming my name.
Show her all the ways I’ve missed her.
I tighten my fingers around her arm until she gasps. Bottom lip drooping in a delicious pout it’s torment not to kiss away.
“Look. This can’t happen. Nothing can happen between us.” In one swift move, I’ve pushed her back against the wall. She’s at my mercy and there are a hundred things I want to do to her.
Starting with opening her legs and finding that sweet taste I’ve been deprived of for so long.
I don’t know how long I can resist her.
LUX
I stare up into Ki’s face. Mortified as I realize how I must look – unwashed hair falling about my shoulders, grime smeared across my skin.
I drop my gaze.
“Lux.” His voice is soft. A caress against my aching heart. He doesn’t back away, but instead leans closer. “This is not how we were supposed to reunite.”
“We weren’t supposed to reunite.” A whisper. I struggle to find my voice.
I should pull away, but I let him hold to my hand as he escorts me from the cell.
The corridor is empty as we exit and I have the feeling that they waited to fetch me until they knew the area was empty.
Less chance of confrontation that way.
Ki holds my hand until we reach the bathrooms, then, abruptly, releases me.
Almost like he finally sees me for who — and what— I am.
And just wants to step away.
You have ten minutes. Max.”
My searching hands find the rough concrete of the wall in the dim lighting. The bathroom entrance is swallowed up like a dark hole, a sudden awareness that everything is dank and wet. Find the next door by feel rather than sight. The handle slimy under my grip.
OK. You can do this.
I open the door to an explosion of mildew, assaulting my sense of smell until I’m no longer aware of my own stench.