Page 103 of House of Lilith

“That’s strange,” she comments with a smile. “But if it’s a visual remnant of memory you have, maybe you should try checking out our old painting collections.”

Paintings,fuckingpaintings, I curse as my lungs fill with excitement. “Thank you,” I mutter and I turn to walk away.

“Do you know where to look?”

“I do,” I reply, only throwing a glance over my shoulder.

I’m in too big of a rush to crack openBlevin’s 15th to 19th century Art Book.

And once I’m back in my chair, I’m not hesitating a second. I’m flipping straight to 1865 and 1866.

Holding my breath, I start scanning the pages, noticing that there aren’t that many of them.

And I’m half-expecting to see someone I’ve never seen before, a woman with a crown on her head, against a background of bones and horses.

But what I see makes shivers run down my spine.

Lady X.

Right between a painting of a noble family in their sitting room and one of hunters out in the woods, there’s the portrait of Lady X.

For a while, I just stare at it, my frown growing deeper and my mind filling with questions that just keep buzzing around my head, refusing to be answered.

Then I hear the clock strike eleven thirty. And it makes me snap out of it and let out a little laugh. This is just an absurd coincidence, for my Lady X to appear here.

And besides, if I want to make it to my little rendezvous, I have to leave, like, right now.

Trying not toactuallythink about what I’m doing, I get out of the chair, I grab my bag and I rush back to the Elevator.

But as I ride, that just makes my mind go back to Mother’s words.We don’t want him mixing with the wrong crowd.

My eyebrows pulling down as the words keep echoing inside my head, I step out of the Elevator and onto the Lilith Tower ground floor. And I start making my way up, my mind buzzing. What about my own arrangement with a member of the said ‘wrong crowd’? If Mother’s not pleased with the thought of Nikolay very occasionally escorting Howe to the Games… How would she feel about me having regular fuck sessions with him in our House’s Tower?

If I back out now, I think to myself as I start approaching the top, it would be a thing of the past, a one-time judgment lapse no one ever found out about, a non-threat.

But if I meet him again… Lost in my thoughts, I slow to a stop just as I reach the door to the rookery. “Secrets have a way of surfacing,” Father used to tell me.

I frown. Then I let out a little scoff and I reach out to grab the doorknob.

Why the hell am I even worrying about this? This is just a private arrangement between two adults that couldn’t possibly be any more inconsequential.

Yes, I think with a smile. I’ll do exactly what Mother wants me to and I’ll take Nikolay off the buddy duty. They’ll just assign someone else to him. No harm done.

In the meantime, I think as I open the door and step inside, the near darkness waiting for me on the other side… In the meantime, I’ll just let myself have some fun, which is the very point of all this.

And this time, I see him straight away. He’s only a figure in the dark, there on the other side of the room, but he’s already closing the distance.

Losing my breath, I shut the door behind me and I let this pull take me to him.

I barely even see his face or feel his body before clothes start flying, hands grabbing and mouths searching as we stumble around the room, knocking into things and sending others crashing to the ground.

It all stops when he pins me against the wall, tightly, one hand caging me in, the other making its way between my legs and under my panties, the shock of pleasure when the fingers find the sweet spot making me move to bury my face in his neck.

He doesn’t let me. Abruptly, he pulls his hand out and grabs my chin to try to make me look at him.

I manage to resist, but he just does it again, more forcefully this time.

I finally see his face and the eyes boring into mine, and it knocks the air out of my lungs, how serious and intense they are.

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