First Midas, now him. I want to run far away from every damn king in Orea and hide where none of them can find me ever again. How much more can I take?
It’s getting harder and harder to stand here, to look at his face and feel such crushing disappointment stabbing all the way through my heart.
“I want you to leave, Rip,” I say again, hoping this time he’ll listen.
“I told you, you can call me Slade.”
“No, thanks,” I reply curtly, enjoying the flash of frustration that goes through his eyes. “But I’ll curtsy for you instead, Your Moldering Majesty.”
He glowers at me. “Fine. I’ll leave. If you tell me one thing.”
“What?” I ask impatiently.
Rip leans in so our faces are right in front of each other, so close that I can feel the heat of his body. “Why were you screaming?”
I blink, caught off guard at his question. “I...I wasn’t screaming.”
The look on his face is wholly unconvinced, and my unprepared stammer didn’t help. “Hmm. Maybe I should be the one to retrieve the paper and quill to keep track of the lies between us.”
Bastard.
“You’re mistaken. You didn’t hear me scream,” I lie, though my heart is pounding in my chest so hard that I hope he doesn’t hear it.
In truth, I was like some caged animal, ready to tear down the door with my nails while the guards kept me locked in this room with no way out, but I’m not about to admit that now. Not to him.
Rip arches a condescending brow. “Really? So I imagined you shouting, begging to be let out?”
Shit.
It takes a lot of conscious effort not to reveal anything on my expression, especially with him so close. “Maybe you don’t hear as well with that ugly branch crown around your head.”
Much to my irritation, he smirks. I hate that the sight makes my stomach leap.
Even though there’s barely a foot between us, Rip leans forward, making me suck in a breath. He steals all the air in the room, yanking the pulse in my veins like a dog on a leash.
Nearly chest to chest, he tilts his head down while I tip mine up. We look at each other with too many mixed emotions written in our locked eyes, with no hope of ever translating them.
What are the words in the silent, churning eyes of this male? Why is it that I feel like I’m being crushed from the inside out? He has a power over me that has nothing to do with his aura, and everything to do with the way my gaze strays down to his lips when he sucks in a breath.
He gives me that maddening smirk of his. “Mmm. I like your anger, Goldfinch. If only it weren’t always directed at me.”
I open my mouth to yell at him, but before I can get a word out, he reaches down and takes hold of one of my ribbons, freezing me in place as my heart stutters.
We both look down as he holds it, and when he gently rubs the satiny gold length, I forget how to breathe.
As if it’s purring, my ribbon vibrates slightly between the pads of his finger and thumb. A shudder travels through the rest of them, each one going languid in relief as if they can feel it too. Chills scatter over my arms as he continues to stroke, easing it in a way I’ve never felt before.
I should yank it away. I should back up. I should do anything to put space between us.
But I don’t. I don’t, and I can’t even admit why.
His nearness, his gaze, it makes it too hard to think. I can’t function properly with the feel of his exhale against my face, with his barely-there touch.
I need to remember who he is, what he’s capable of. I need to keep my guard up now more than ever.
“You should always keep these out,” he says quietly, and for some reason, another tear wants to spill out of me.
I don’t like these feelings gathering around me. I want to hold onto my anger, to use it to help me push him away. The air between us has grown thicker, like we’ve passed the first line of trees and moved deeper into the woods. It’s so congested with branches and brambles that I can’t get through it without being scratched.
It takes effort, but I manage to clear my throat and whisper, “Go, Rip. Please.”
His expression shutters, and whatever moment we were just stuck in dissipates. He drops my ribbon, and it immediately sags down, drooping like a flower, a silent sigh of regret bent to the ground.
When he steps back, I’m both relieved and bereft. I try to feel nothing instead.
Rip opens his mouth like he wants to say something else, but then he goes still, his head cocking as if he hears something.
My hackles immediately rise. “What?”
“Hmm, seems I can’t leave just yet.”
“And why not?”
His infuriating smirk returns, but it’s not like before. This one is...mischievous, and it fills me with dread. “Because your golden king is coming. I think I’ll stay and say hello.”
Chapter 2
AUREN
My eyes flare wide. “What? Midas is coming back?”
Rip arches a brow. “What’s wrong, are you distressed at that fact?”
I press my lips together as frustration washes over me. If Midas is nearly here, then I’ve lost my chance at trying to sneak out.
Although, honestly, that wasn’t realistic anyway. I would have to know the ins and outs of this castle really well and be very lucky to make it out without Midas finding out. Even if by some stroke of luck, I did manage to flee, it would just be a matter of time before he tracked me down. He won’t ever let me leave him.
I’m trapped. A saddle knotted in reins.
“You need to leave now,” I insist.
Much to my aggravation, Rip just looks at me, not moving an inch. “Why?”
I blink incredulously. “Because if Midas finds you in here...”
“What’s he going to do? Turn me gold?” Rip mocks with a vindictive gleam in his eye. Of course he’s smug, why wouldn’t he be? He holds Midas’s greatest secret in his hands.
Tension wraps around me. “Don’t—”
The smile he gives me is sly. “Excuse me while I slip on my other coat.”
Before I can brace myself, his power lashes out, and nausea strikes my stomach. I slump against the door frame, nearly gagging at the turmoiled magic now clawing through the air.
Rip begins to transform again, and I watch as the sharpness of his features recede. His pointed fae ears soften, his cutting cheekbones smooth out, and his gray scales disappear. The row of short spikes above his brows are gone in a blink, just as quickly as the ones on his arms and back.
As Rip fades and King Ravinger settles in, his entire body quakes. He rolls his muscled shoulders, and dark, insidious lines appear beneath the skin of his neck. They crawl up, reaching his jaw like roots searching for better soil.
I inhale, breathing through the sick feeling in my gut. But before it overwhelms me completely, his power pulls away, taking my nausea with it. Trembling, my body slumps in relief as I stare at him.
His transformation finishes, and when he opens his eyes again, the familiar black gaze is gone. Instead, I see the deep green of a rotten king’s irises.
Look away, I tell myself.
I need to look away, because every time our gazes meet, my stomach twists and my chest aches, and I feel like I don’t know him at all.
My heart is pounding hard again, but I don’t know if that’s from the effects of his power or if it’s because he scares me in this form—King Ravinger scares me. Funny how he loses the scales and spikes yet somehow becomes far more terrifying.
I don’t like seeing this version of him. No matter how much I try to remind myself that it’s only Rip, he feels like a stranger to me. A stranger that I don’t dare trust.
My trepidation tips over into fear, and I turn and stumble into Midas’s bedroom, needing to put space between us, needing to flee.
But I only take a couple steps before I’m tripping over something on t
he floor. I manage to catch myself before I faceplant, only to realize that the thing I tripped over is a body.
“Great Divine...” My hand flies to my mouth as I look down in horror at the person sprawled at my feet.
The guard’s eyes are closed, and his mouth is left gaping. The golden chest plate he’s wearing gleams, but beneath it, his skin has gone wilted and gray. A grape picked off the stem and tossed on the ground for the sun to shrivel.
My gaze jumps from him to a second body, another guard in the same condition. And then another, and another, and another.
A strangled sound scrapes out of my throat, and my ears ring with chilling alarm. But I can’t look away from the prone corpses, from the dried out eyes staring in shock. Can’t turn away from the lips that have cracked and peeled, or the cheeks that have sunken in.
This...this is what Ravinger is capable of.
One second, all of these guards were alive, and the next, they’re nothing but dehydrated husks.
I feel my chest rising and falling with rapid breaths, but no matter how quickly I seem to be breathing, I’m not getting enough air, because one thought blares through my head.
Would I have done the same thing?
If the sun hadn’t gone down and my gold-touch power was still active, if I’d been able to break down that door, would I have been the one who’d killed them instead of Ravinger?
I feel tears burn my eyes. Maybe it’s my body’s only defense, attempting to blur the vision in front of me, though it doesn’t work.
What does work though, is when Ravinger steps in front of me, blocking my view. My eyes trail up his body until I meet his gaze. Green eyes skate over my face like steam stroking over fevered water.
“You need to breathe, Auren.”
“I am breathing,” I snap.
“You’re panting and going to hyperventilate if you keep it up,” he replies calmly. “Have you only ever seen death gilt in your own power?”
I almost laugh bitterly. “I’ve seen plenty of death.”
Old, creased memories tear open one after the other. I met death the night I was stolen from home, and it’s been stalking me ever since.
“These men didn’t deserve this,” I say, dashing a tear away angrily when it falls from my lashes.
“I disagree. They were holding you against your will.”
My eyes flash. “They were just following orders. Doing what they were told.” My mind floods with the things I’ve been told to do. “I didn’t want—” I hate that my voice breaks off. “This.”
I’m choked with a guilt that seems to grow in the silence.
“Those golden eyes of yours, so expressive,” Ravinger murmurs. “There’s hate one second and heart the next.”
With his forest-green gaze locked on me, he lifts a hand, and I flinch on instinct. He pauses, face darkening at my reaction. “I won’t hurt you, Goldfinch.”
My expression tells him he already did.
With a tightening jaw, he turns his hand, as if he’s turning an invisible handle. Slowly, the dark lines of his power swivel around the skin of his palm, wrapping around his fingers like creeping vines.
Like a breeze, I feel his power brush over me again. I brace myself for the nauseating impact, but it doesn’t come. This time, there is no pulse of putrid wrongness. Magic tugs in the air like a wraith’s grasp on an inhale, pulling breath into lungs.
Nothing makes me shudder or gag or keel over. I don’t become sick. Instead, energy thrums around us, and the base of each of my ribbons stretches, my back prickling with goose bumps.
Coughing suddenly erupts in the room, and I jump in alarm, whirling around at the noise. “What—” All around me, the sprawled guards are rolling over or sitting up, hacking on dry coughs like sandpaper against their throats, gasping in breaths through flaking lips.
My wide eyes snap to Ravinger. “How did you—I thought they were dead!”
He lowers his hand again, the lines gone from his palm. “They would’ve been had I waited much longer. A rotting body can only be reversed after so long.”
I blink, shaking my head while the soldiers get to their feet. They’re confused, looking like they just looked Death in the eye and aren’t sure how they were able to cross the line back into living.
“You just...you...why?” I ask breathlessly, because I don’t understand him at all.
Ravinger doesn’t get a chance to answer me though. The bedroom door is suddenly tossed open, interrupting us.
Midas jerks to a stop in the doorway. His golden tunic and pants glimmer in the low light, somehow making his honey blond hair seem even lighter. The look on his face reveals his surprise as his gaze sweeps the room, his tanned, angular jaw tightening. He takes in the staggering guards still attempting to stand at attention, and then his eyes latch onto me. When he notices Ravinger standing next to me, his expression fills with rage.
“What is the meaning of this? What the hell do you think you’re doing in my personal rooms?” I barely recognize Midas’s voice with the fury currently running through it. He stalks forward and stops beside me, though his brown eyes lock onto the rotten king.
Ravinger doesn’t seem bothered by Midas’s anger. In fact, he’s looking at Midas with bored amusement. It seems he hasn’t just transformed his appearance, but in a split second, he’s taken on another persona as well. Even his gestures look different. Ravinger appears cocky and relaxed, black brows arched with an expression that’s somehow both aristocratic and mocking.
The spikes, scales, and glare are all gone. In their place is a derisive turn of his lips and lines vined into his skin, crown cocked on his head. No wonder other people don’t suspect one for the other.
“Oh, are these not my guest chambers?” Ravinger replies with false innocence as he looks around the room. “My mistake.”
“You damn well know it’s not,” Midas grits out. “And what the Divine hell did you do to my guards?”
The men are still coughing a little, but at least they managed to stay standing, even if they do look like death rolled over.
“Oh, them? I rotted them a little.”
Midas blanches. “You...you what?”
I watch the two of them warily, stuck between two unyielding stones.
Ravinger shrugs. “They’re fine now. A little food and rest, and they’ll be right as rain.”
I can feel Midas’s anger as surely as I can see it simmering in his brown eyes. “This is an act of war.”
Green eyes hook onto Midas, spearing him through. “If this was war, you’d know it,” Ravinger says coldly, his disparaging expression replaced by something far crueler. My chest tightens, gaze shooting between them.
Midas seethes silently for a moment, and then his attention shifts to the open door of the cage room—the door that’s now gleaming gold. “What is my favored doing out and vulnerable to a foreign king?” he demands of the guards.
I don’t know how it’s possible, since their pallor is already so terrible, but the armored men seem to pale even more. A couple of them steal nervous, quick looks in my direction, and my stomach sinks.
They saw. They saw the door to the cage room turn gold. In my anger, I slammed my palms against it, trying to break out, and I gilded the whole thing for them to witness.
Midas’s brow gathers thunder, his eyes darkening as he realizes what they must’ve seen.
Shit.
“Foreign king?” Ravinger interrupts, seemingly oblivious. “Midas, we signed a treaty only a few hours ago, don’t you remember? You and I are allies now,” he says with a smirk.
“And yet, here you are, in my chambers, using your powers against my guards and standing beside my favored where you have no right to be!” Midas snaps. “You and I both know you didn’t think these were your rooms.”
Midas doesn’t like to be caught off guard. Being the planner that he is, he’s meticulous in the way things are supposed to play out. With Rav
inger having infiltrated his personal chambers, it’s leaving him threatened, like cornered prey.
Midas is dangerous when he feels cornered.
Ravinger looks around the room, noting the bed, the fireplace, the balcony—all of it with bored disinterest. “Perhaps you’re wrong. Perhaps I truly did mistake these for my own chambers, and I rotted your guards because I thought you were attempting to ambush me.”
A sound like a growl erupts from Midas’s chest.
“Or...” Ravinger goes on. “Perhaps I simply wanted to see how the acting monarch of Fifth Kingdom lives.” Green eyes slip over to me. “Interesting how one keeps a king’s favored,” he muses with a twist of his lips. “What does it say, do you think, about a male who keeps a woman in a cage?”
The breath in my throat catches. I can feel my heart pounding with the tension in the room. It’s as thick as ropes, ready to coil around my neck and yank me off my feet.
Ravinger watches Midas, and Midas watches Ravinger.
I watch them both.
Ravinger wants to poke and prod, be a thorn in Midas’s back. Midas, however, looks like he wants to pummel Ravinger to the ground.
But...he can’t.
Of course, usually I’m the only person who knows that. Midas plays his part very, very well. He’s had a decade of practice, after all. A sleight of hand here, purposely placing me there, bringing in gilded items after the fact...he knows how to act like he’s the one with power.
But Ravinger knows the truth now. Midas is ignorant of that—and I want to keep it that way. Yet maybe that’s all about to be ruined, right here and now. Maybe Ravinger is about to call his bluff. Or maybe he’ll simply rot Midas where he stands.
My nerves constrict, like a corset pulled too tight.
Midas’s guards fidget on their feet. Maybe they feel the threat as easily as I can. The last thing they probably want to do is have to go up against Ravinger again. It didn’t go so well for them the first time. But as guards, they don’t really have much of a choice.
The silence in the room only makes the tension worse, and even my ribbons, as sore as they are, stiffen along my spine, like they expect a fight to break out. If there is a fight, it’s one that Midas can’t win. You can only get so far with threats.
Gleam (The Plated Prisoner Series Book 3) Page 3