Page 126 of Gemini Kings
“Shit.”Sharply his head lifts to find me, still clinging to the desk behind me for fortitude. His gaze narrows and his brow furrows. Obviously he’s sensing these thoughts I’m struggling to hide, through this mating bond I’m determined to renounce. “I freely admit this dynamic between us is confusing as hell for me. It has been from Day One, hasn’t it? Surely it’s the same for you.”
At least my clever snake of an alpha is willing to be honest about that much.
A little of the tension eases from my shoulders. I release my death grip on the desk.
“It’s certainly nothing either one of us planned to happen.” I heave a morose sigh. “In all honesty, that night you bit me could have ended tragically, with one of us tearing out the other’s throat, instead of with you wringing out of me the strongest damn climax I’d had in years.”
“Hmmmmm,” he hums, low and rich as a purring cat. “I remember. Having you submit to my bite like that… and then my body… it’s one of my fondest memories.”
He glides toward me like an adder winding across my bearskin. Hastily I raise both hands, palms out, to ward him off.
“But that’s all it is now,” I burst out in desperation. “It’s history! I’m talking about the present. I’m talking about the deliberate choices you made, you and Zara and Ronin, the night you snuck out of thisdomusand abused your faculty privileges and stole that damn aircraft—”
Impatience flickers in his imperious face. His breath spills out in a huff. “Yes, we were rash. Yes, we were foolish. Yes, we rushed off and got ourselves into horrid amounts of trouble and endangered Zara and by extension the future of the entire witching world without first consulting your august faculty personage—”
“Damn it, this isn’t about my faculty personage.” Clearly this entire effort is hopeless. Desperately I make a break for freedom, determined to whisk past him and straight out the door. I’ll sleep in my office at the church tonight, and every night if I must. “I don’t trust easily, and you betrayed that trust. Thus, I find that your betrayal is not possible for me to forgive—”
“Dolet me finish, Lucius.” Deftly he sidles to block my escape. Only two steps away, he towers over me.
Damn it to hell, he’s still between me and the door.
“Damnation, Vasili—”
“I rushed off to Vegas,” my impossible alpha slices through my protest “without recognizing that my position and responsibilities at this Academy have changed, that you were trusting me to live up to duties I still refused to accept, that my choices could hurtus. So if that’s what you’ve been waiting for… for me to admit I was in the wrong…”
For the first time, his confident voice wavers. His hands spread and his mouth tilts in a wry smile. “Well, I’m admitting it. I’ve accepted your dreadful improvement plan, haven’t I? I’m tutoring that fucking dragon practically twenty-four/seven, when all I desperately wanted the night he slithered in here was to piss all over him and light him on fire. Both for that rotten trick he pulled on me years ago, and for moving in on Zara and Ronin and coveting what we have here now, what he’s had all his life, but what I’ve never in my life had before—which is a fucking family, Lucius.Ourfamily.”
Finally, on the last word, his voice splinters.
Only once have I ever seen him weep. That was the night he bit me.
The secret truth is that I’m horribly susceptible to this terrible man when he’s upset.
And the instinct to comfort him, this frighteningly powerful and utterly lost young warlock who was my student and my charge for years, is overwhelming.
“Vasili, my dear…” Beyond doubt, it’s dangerous to venture close to him, especially now when I’m already so vulnerable to his blandishments. Yet I find myself taking the risk. “Maxim doesn’t want to take that away from you. He’s barely daring to hope for a very little of it for himself.”
His arm slashes through the shadows like a rapier. Wrath hones his voice to an edge like a saber. “Let’s leave Maxim out of this. I’m sick to death of Maxim as the dominant subject of conversation in thisdomus. Tonight is only about the two of us.You and me.”
With serpentine swiftness, he darts inside my guard. One hand brushes my cheek with fingers hard and sleek as talons. I flinch at his touch, even as my need for him rages like a bonfire.
I flinch because I crave his touch so desperately. But love is something he’s never looked to find.
He takes my flinch for loathing.
His delicate face fractures. His spurned hand falls away.
“What more do you want me to say to you, darling?” he whispers, every syllable ragged and broken. “Because I have no aptitude at all when it comes to these pretty graces that flow so easily from others, all humility and remorse and promises to do better. I won’t do better. I’m a snake and a villain and I’m rotten at being anything else. But I’m—I’m trying my damnedest to—make things right.”
My entire being, body and soul, is aching for him. I can barely speak, but I scrape around the bottom of my battered heart and dredge up a few words from the rubble. “Well, certainly, it’s to your credit—in the end—that you finally acknowledge your responsibilities as an alpha—”
“Fuck my responsibilities as an alpha,” he says rudely. “Good God, I was raised Mogadon. I barely even know what it means to be shifter. Lucius Laszlo Aries, the reason I’m trying so desperately to make things right between us is because I’m fucking in love with you, all right?”
His voice dwindles to a scrap of a whisper, as if he’s terrified to let anyone hear. “Darling pet, I’m so utterly and disastrously in love with you.”
These words are so unexpected I can literally make no sense of them. He loves Ronin deeply and always has, and I’ve heard him confide like a secret his love for Zara, which is new and therefore fragile—this love for a woman he never imagined himself capable to feel.
But he and I have been rival alphas in thisdomusfor so long. Our entire history has been one of wary circling and the baring of teeth. I had only begun to lower my guard and dare to trust him when he left.
