A pulse of power seeps into the air. Not Slade’s magic in full force by any means, but just a push. An undertone that ripples from him and spreads out, making a chill trickle over my skin, my ribbons quivering.
Despite the lighting, I can see the blood drain from the scribe’s face as he’s suddenly reminded exactly who he’s talking to.
“I...of course. If she’s with you, then that rule is negated.”
Slade looks at him with an expression cut from stone. “Good. You can go.”
The scribe nods, not daring to glance my way before he turns and leaves without another word. As soon as he’s gone, an exhale of relief expels out of me. “Thanks,” I say, and then I start to walk away too, because being alone with Slade is bad for my plans.
Much to my irritation, he follows me, sticking like a thorn in my side. I shoot him a look. “Do you mind?”
Hands tucked into pockets, the bastard strolls. Leisurely. Like he has nothing better to do. “Not at all. I enjoy long walks in a dreary library.”
“Royal library,” I snip. “And great. Go enjoy that walk somewhere else.”
His brow furrows with a frown. “Are you...mad at me?”
The fact that he even has to ask...
A bitter laugh pops from my mouth. “Mad? No, of course not. Why would I be mad?” I reply breezily. “Now, I’d like you to stop following me and go do...whatever it is you were doing here before I sneezed and leave me alone.”
His footsteps falter. “Auren.”
I ignore him, but that’s never stopped him before.
“Auren,” he says again, tone insistent, an edge of impatience cutting through.
I stop in my tracks but don’t turn to face him. “What?”
Slade comes up to my side so that every word he speaks paints my lips with his air. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
The breath that comes in my chest is shaken, because my heart can’t take this constant disappointment, this circle of hope and distrust.
My eyes flick left to the bookcase, and I stare at the bindings, like I need to fasten my gaze onto something solid. Onto something other than him.
“Midas was always different in private,” I hear myself say, my lips feeling cold in this forbidding place. “In public, he was the king, and he acted like it. It was necessary, he said. It was necessary for him to marry Malina. Necessary to start calling me his favored gold-touched saddle. Necessary for appearances to use me like a shiny trophy to dangle in front of others. No matter that I was in love with him when he dragged me across the kingdoms and brought me to that horrible icy place.”
I shiver and cross my arms around me, and my ribbons cross right along with them, as if they’re trying to ward off the chill. Too bad this one is inside of me.
Slade is quiet. Listening. Like he’s hearing every word but looking at them in a hundred different directions.
“I put up with all of it because he was different in private,” I admit. “He said just enough of the right things. When we were alone, when there were no other eyes around, he whispered pretty words and swore grand promises.”
One of my ribbons slinks down to wrap around my palm, twining around my fingers like it’s giving my hand a squeeze of comfort.
“I don’t understand.” He sounds almost...at a loss. Which is impossible. Slade Ravinger is always sure of himself.
“I told you to prove it to me, and yet you sat there at that table and you were a king.”
He sucks in a breath. Like he’s trying to pull in my truth. Trying to taste it, understand it.
I turn to look at him, ribbons dropping to my feet, chin lifted, my expression unyielding. “Pretty promises in private, and the uncaring king in public.” I shake my head, letting him see the disappointed look on my face. “I’ve been down that road before, Slade. I won’t do it again. I asked you to prove it, and you didn’t.”
He expels a breath and turns away, shoving a hand through his thick black hair. “Fuck.”
I turn to leave, but faster than I can track, he somehow steps in front of me and blocks my way before I can take a second step. I try to turn back the other way instead, but that’s a mistake, because he stops my turn by jutting out an arm to cut me off.
Now I’m stuck, back against the bookshelf, his hands braced on the shelves on either side of me. He takes another step forward into me, even though there’s no space for it. His body crowds mine, making a gasp balk from my mouth.
“Move,” I tell him.
“No,” he quickly says with a shake of his head. “Let me explain.”
I scoff and roll my eyes, because how many times have I heard that? I don’t want to be that person anymore, that rug for everyone to walk all over.
“Things with Midas and I are precarious at best,” Slade tells me, his fixed eyes like emeralds, glinting unnaturally in the dark.
“You hate him. You’ve made that perfectly clear, so why not just kill him?” I ask, because I’m honestly curious. I don’t think his level of loathing has been a farce.
Slade’s eyes go shuttered. “Believe it or not, I don’t go around killing without thought. He’s a king. If I were to end him, especially using my magic, there would be implications to that, which would set off a chain of events. He rules people, and right now, he’s making plays to rule even more. But sometimes, if you cut off the head of a monster, two more crop up.”
Realization dawns. “You’re worried that if Midas weren’t king, someone even worse would take his place?”
He gives me a terse nod. “Better to play the game and be ten moves ahead of him, to learn his weaknesses and to cut him where it hurts. If I simply lashed out and killed him, I’d have more than just his kingdom to worry about. I’d have the other royals banding against me. They’re nervous enough about my reign and my magic as it is. I have the wellbeing of my own people to consider. No one likes a rotten king, but it’s my people who would suffer, as well as the innocents in the other kingdoms if any of the monarchs strike out against me and force war.”
I can see the shifting marks of his power move beneath his skin, each one as thin as a hair strand. They move up his neck and disappear beneath his stubble like fishing line dipping beneath water.
I’ve offended him, that much is clear. And for a split second, I see the male beneath the crown. I see the way the world perceives him and the damage that can do to a person. If anyone knows about being made notorious, about being made into a thing, it’s me.
My chest hurts all of a sudden, my resolve jabbed-through with little pinpricks of pain.
His voice lowers, eyes bright and sharp, poking even more holes through me. “You think I wanted to sit there and do nothing while that asshole spoke to you that way?” he bites out. “You think I enjoyed his childish power play by ordering you to be carried to that harp? I wanted to leap over the table and crush his throat with my bare hands.”
As if to demonstrate his words, he lifts his arm, and his palm wraps around my neck. Except he doesn’t squeeze, doesn’t hurt. His dark words coil around my thumping heartbeat, while his touch encompasses my throat. His thumb brushes against my drumming pulse, not in a threat, but as a caress.
It takes a lot of willpower not to let my eyes flutter closed at the intimate touch, not to lean into his chest, though I feel the warmth of it like a blanket around my body. Aside from Midas, he’s the only person who touches me.
Every grip and stroke seems to fill an empty well inside of me. Despite the fact that he knows what touching my bare skin can do, he never hesitates. It’s like he can’t help himself, like he needs to feel me.
Midas never touches me like that. His touches are always placating—a pat on my head, a tap on my jaw. Either that, or it’s possessive. But with Slade, it’s neither of those things. He touches me like he can’t resist, like he can’t go one more second without feeling me.
Resisting him is difficult. But somehow, I don’t let myself surrender to th
at heat he spreads, don’t give in to that aching feeling that thrums to life between my legs. Instead, I slap his hand off me.
He lets go, hand dropping down to his side, and I take a mental fist around my ribbons, stopping them from reaching out. This close to him, it’s too hard to curb my feelings. So I turn my cheek, because I don’t want to get caught in the trap of his eyes or taste the lure of his words.
But as soon as I turn my head, he goes utterly still.
It’s an unnatural stillness. The kind that makes my breath shrivel up while confusion and fear slithers through me.
Fury pumps into the air around us, and then, with a voice as dark as the pits of hell, Slade says something that makes my eyes go wide. “Why the fuck is there a bruise on your cheek?”
Chapter 25
AUREN
I have to hand it to him, the fact that Slade is even able to see the faded bruise in such terrible lighting is a credit to his fae eyesight.
My hand automatically goes up to the spot he’s staring at, fingers pressing against my cheek, but just like I did to him, Slade knocks my hand away so he can see it better.
Turning my face, featherlight fingertips graze over the spot of burnished gold, like he doesn’t want to put any pressure on it in case it hurts me.
It wouldn’t, not now. It’s a hell of a lot better than it was. A few hours after Midas first struck me, it swelled up pretty badly. I went to sleep that night with a cold compress resting on it, made from snow I collected off my balcony and stuffed into a rag. It reminded me of Hojat.
The bruise is barely showing anymore. My gold skin always marks up darker, bruising in shades of bronze and rust before it fades back to my usual gleam. But at least nearly all of the swelling is gone. The darkened mark can be mistaken for a shadow if you’re not really paying attention.
Clearly, Slade is paying attention.
His touch makes my nerve endings come alive, and it feels like my chest is swelling far more than my cheek did.
“It’s nothing,” I say with a hard swallow before jerking my head away from his scrutiny.
“That is not nothing. Did someone put their hands on you?”
I just look at him warily, which I guess is answer enough.
“Who?”
“Slade—”
“Who, Auren?” he demands, his dark, seductive voice so contradictory to the violence held in his tone.
Because he knows the answer. I can see it in his face.
“Midas,” he snarls, like a predator with its eyes trained on a trespassing hunter in the woods. He waits, looking at me to confirm, yet I don’t reply, don’t even nod my head.
But I don’t deny it either.
At my silent confirmation, Slade loses it.
All of a sudden, his eyes flare, going from startling green to a bleed of pure black. Spikes rip from his arms and pierce through the sleeves of his shirt, making a gasp fly out of my mouth.
I watch as he struggles, shifting back and forth between his forms with the click of his jaw, fury bunching his muscles. The lined power that marks his flesh writhes beneath his stubble, reaching, growing.
A cold sweat breaks out over me as I feel his power dominate the air. It thickens like syrup, and a wave of nauseating death ekes from his body.
“Slade...” The nervous plea falls from my lips as I move to back up, only to remember I can’t. I’m still pinned against the bookshelf, his presence blocking my front.
It’s a shock to see him like this, the way his body seems to be warring back and forth. But as his forms flicker, his essence does too—part corrupt magic, part comforting aura. Both of them beating like drums with a singular reaction.
Anger.
And just as quickly as the fear washed over me, it dissipates, like a burnt-up mist. Because his anger, it feels familiar.
The feathered creature in me, the one ruffling for a reckoning, she sits up and cocks her head. She pays attention.
Slade’s clash of manifestations stems from something dark and writhing. Something that’s cleaved the two halves of him, making him battle within himself. But that thing...it’s letting out a silent call, creating a palpable rhythm in the air. A strained song of discord that my bloomed anger can hear.
Breath buckling in an accordion bellow, I stare at him, not in fear, but in recognition as the beast in me rises up and answers to the beast inside him.
All twenty-four of my ribbons lurch to attention. They become charged with energy, as if they’ve felt the erratic spike of his magic and are answering in kind.
Yet instead of them lashing out at him like they did with Midas, they form a cocoon, like they’re creating another layer upon his aura that’s already surrounding us. These parts of ourselves feel so alive. So decadent.
“Look at me.” My voice is stoic, unafraid, even as his body struggles to hold its form.
His green and black flashing eyes latch onto me, hypnotic in their frenetic oscillation. I don’t know what would happen if he were to rupture, but power flows from him and pounds in the air. This time, it doesn’t make me want to vomit. Instead, it’s like a singing siren, and I want nothing but to be lured in.
“Can you feel that?” I whisper as my hand rises to his chest, my open palm connecting with the chiseled muscles over his racing heart.
The moment my touch settles against him, Slade’s eyes bleed back to a forest of green, like the needles of a pine appearing out of the dark. My breath catches, his heart beating beneath my palm in a rhythm that seems to match the push in my veins.
His touches I’ve savored have coalesced into the one I now press against him. And as innocent as it may seem, it’s somehow intimate.
“Your heartbeat…”
“What about it?” His tone is hoarse, breath gone ragged.
“It sounds like mine.”
Twin beats pulse, just as two tears rip down my cheeks in perforated anguish. Because I can hear it, this perfect harmony, like a hum of sun and soil, of depth and rise. But the moment is tainted, cheapened, because I had my head pressed to another’s chest, hearing a song that wasn’t singing for me. So how can I trust what I hear?
“Auren.”
My shining eyes rise up, and I fleetingly note the spikes sinking back beneath his skin and the scales disappearing from his cheeks. I start to pull my hand away, because I suddenly feel so undeserving of the touch. Yet before I can, his hand comes up to trap mine, and he holds it there as he watches me with an intensity that I can’t fathom.
“You’re warm,” he murmurs.
I nod, feeling the heat circling from my palm, dipping into the soft fabric of his shirt, sinking into the hard chest beneath. The drag of his calloused thumb against the back of my hand shouldn’t feel sensual, but it does.
Heat drips down from my navel, settling between my thighs and making my muscles go tight. His fingernail scrapes against my knuckle, an abraded edge of nearness that carries the hint of a need to dig in deep. Right then, I want to let him. To peel my layers open so he can get to what lies beneath.
“He hit you.” Slade grinds out the words, each one spoken from sharp back teeth.
Midas has done far more than that, but emotional assault doesn’t leave any marks on the skin.
Lines of power snap against Slade’s jaw like miniature vipers, and my gaze follows their insipid movements. “How long has he been doing this?”
“That was the first time.”
He looks wholly unconvinced. “And at the dinner table?”
“What about it?” I hedge.
“There was a moment when your expression changed. Was he hurting you then?”
“Just a pinch.” I don’t dare hint that the just a pinch was more than one, or that they left such dark bruises on my skin that they’re still sore to the touch. The only good thing about Midas’s physical assault is that he’s left me alone since then.
“He won’t ever touch me again,” I declare,
because I already made that promise to myself.
Something boils inside of Slade, burning so hot that my hand sears beneath his. “You asked me why I don’t just kill him,” he says, his hard, pitiless eyes hooked on my face. “But why don’t you?”
I blink in surprise as he throws my question back in my face, and my ribbons wilt, falling onto the floor like plucked petals.
His finger comes up to skim against my cheek, and even though he doesn’t lose control again, he’s no less angry.
“Since the moment I arrived in Fifth Kingdom, I’ve thought about little else other than ripping him to shreds with my bare hands. But do you know what stops me?” he asks, his thumb still caressing, our beats still in rhythm. “More than politics and potential world wars.”
I don’t want to ask, but I do anyway. “What?”
“You.”
My mind recoils at the way he spits the word, at the bitterness that stains his exhale, and I yank my hand away from his chest, like I’ve been scalded by it. “Me?”
“Yes. You would hate me for it, because for whatever reason, you still care for him.”
“I don’t,” I argue, saying it again when he scoffs at me.
“Oh, really?” he challenges. “Then ask me.”
My mind stumbles, like I’m riding too fast downhill and the speed is getting away from me. “Ask you...?”
“Ask me to kill him for you.”
I blanch, feeling the blood drain from my face. That was the very last thing I expected him to say.
Everything about Slade right now is fierce, unfettered, and completely fae, despite those parts of him hidden from view. “You say the word, and it’s done. You hear me?” His hand lifts, and he snaps his fingers so loud that I flinch. “That quick, Auren. I’d end him in a breath, in a room full of people who’d run screaming, with monarchs who’d band together against me. But if you wanted me to do it, I would. So say it.”
“It’s not just about me,” I try to explain, but he doesn’t even seem to hear me.
Slade looks at me with that crude, horrible challenge in his expression. “Say it!” he shouts, making me flinch.
Gleam (The Plated Prisoner Series Book 3) Page 26