Page 115 of Mud

I swallowed hard. “No.”

He wasn’t fazed in the least. “Youneedme, Rosabel,” he said, and I thought,more than you could possibly fathom.

Luckily, I didn’t say the words out loud.

“I don’t need you,” I said instead, and if he could hear the lie in my voice, he didn’t call me out on it.

He did something worse. He grinned wider until the corners of his eyes crinkled and those delicious dimples showed. For a moment, I was transported back in time, back to school when it was just the two of us, and he smiled and laughed without looking if someone was close to see or hear.

When he was just him, and I was just me.

When the world was beautiful.

But the world was rotten from within, and whatever beauty I’d found with him back then, it was long gone. Only the memories remained.

“But you do,” he simply said, his voice smooth, slow, effortless. So different from the way he used to talk. Now he had an arrogance about him that I didn’t like at all.

He looked…bad.Almost evil.

“You know it, too, sweetness. Without me, you wouldn’t have survived this animal. You need magic to complete the other challenges. I can help with that,” he said, and he’d have surprised me less if he’d slapped me.

Or kissed me.

“You want tohelpme.” And that was the most absurd thing I could think of, even considering what my life was looking like right now.

“Yes, I do.” His eyes moved away from mine, and he did that thing he used to do, where he analyzed every little inch of me, every feature, as if he was hoping to find the secrets of life written on my skin.

“Why?” I choked because the game was slowly running out of oxygen right now, even if nobody else could tell.

“Because”—he squinted his eyes as he analyzed my lips—“I’m a generous fella?”

He could burn me just by looking, and the way my body was reacting to him was scary as hell. He touched my chin and I suddenly found myself rising on my tiptoes, slowly, closing the distance between our lips, making a complete ass of myself.

Moving away was harder than it should have been.

“Because I need your help, too,” Taland said.“A dealis what I propose.”

“A deal.” Again, I kept repeating everything he said, hoping he’d realize just how absurd he sounded.

“Yes—a deal,” he continued, leaning in slower than before as if he were hoping I wouldn’t notice.

I did. I still didn’t move away.

His proximity did things to me that I didn’t have the time to even acknowledge. My palms were sweaty, and my stomach was full of those crazy-ass butterflies, and my heart galloped and galloped like she hoped to be running toward her freedom someday.

Not to mention the vulcera wasright there still,watching, and I was more afraid of the man in front of me.

“What kind of a deal?” I asked because he kept staring at my lips like that, waiting for them to move, and I was never good at denying this guy the things he wanted.

“Glad you asked,” he said. “I help you make it out of the game alive, and when we’re out there, you help me break in and out of the IDD’s main vault.”

My mouth opened and closed a thousand times, but I couldn’t bring myself to even make a sound.

That’s how utterly ridiculous his words were.

“It should be easy. You have all the access, and when you return from the Iris Roe, you will be celebrated even more than you were for imprisoning me.You’ll have plenty of privileges. You will be able to get me to the vault and out without anybody ever knowing about it.”

He said all of this with an easy smile on his face that could have you thinking he was talking about a trip he took last weekend on a fucking boat. Or something equally relaxing.

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