Page 138 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The sound of glass shattering forced my eyes to open, and I swore, instinctively lowering myself to my knees so I could clean it up, though my hands were bare and empty.
“Hey.” Morgoya’s face was in front of mine a moment later. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head. “I dropped it.”
“You levitated it for a moment first, I think,” she whispered. “It kind of fell out of your hands in slow motion.”
“Damn.” I laughed without humour. “I was really trying, too.”
She stroked my hair back from my face before cupping my cheek. “I know you were. You did well for your first meaningful attempt. We’ll try it again tomorrow, okay? Something a bit different.” When I nodded, she proceeded to offer, “Would you like to come with us for some tea? You can leave all of this here. We’ll send someone up to deal with it later.”
“Uh…” I sat back on my heels, exhaling in a huff. “I appreciate that, but I think I need to sit here for a minute and think. That brought up some things for me, which is”—I swallowed—“why I dropped it. You two go ahead.”
Morgoya hesitated for longer than I expected her to, but she eventually conceded to my hint and placed a gentle kiss on the top of my head before standing up. I didn’t take my eyes off the broken glass to watch either of them leaving because I didn’t trust myself not to cry or show some other kind of emotion if I did. That would make them feel bad about it, even though I really did think I needed to process the resurfaced memory.
But when I was certain that I was alone, I tried to manipulate the glass shards back into the beautiful rose it had been before I dropped it.
I felt so silly doing it that I’d never even attempt it if I wasn’t by myself, but it was the part that had upset me the most—the fact that the item I’d damaged had been so delicate and pretty before I touched it. If Morgoya and Batre had handed me a glass toothbrush, I probably wouldn’t have experienced quite the same surge of untempered emotion in the wake of its demolition.
If destruction was a form of magic that all faeries should be able to access, then surely restoration wasn’t far behind as an attainable skill, and I was already so good at destruction.
The eerie, unsettling sensation of being watched fell over me as I tried different gestures and hand positions over and around the mess of broken glass in a series of failed attempts to coax it back together. Eventually, I gave in to my frustration and scooped the glass shards up in my hand, determined to clean up my own messes even if it was the mortal way, but a particularly large piece of a broken petal slid too close to my thumb, slicing the skin open.
“Ouch. Fuck!” I dropped the glass shards, staring at the gash on my hand as the blood pooled.
Are you okay?
My head snapped up, the pain forgotten as I stared at the empty training room in front of me and heard Lucais’s voice in my mind.How can you possibly know that I hurt myself?
Have you already forgotten that we are fated mates who solidified the fuck out of the bond last night?
You can see when I hurt myself through the bond?
No.He laughed into my mind, the sound soft as wind chimes.Don’t be ridiculous. I can see when you hurt yourself because I’m standing behind you.
I whirled, sending glass shards spinning out across the floor as I searched the room for a blond head and exasperatingly sexy smirk.
Lucais emerged from the shadows in the doorway, hidden from view while he watched me for the Oracle only knew how long when I thought I was alone.
“This is becoming a habit for you,” I complained as he closed the distance between us, and then I gasped as Wrenlock entered the room behind him. “Not you, too!”
Wrenlock rolled his lips together to suppress a smile. “I’ve missed you, too, baby.” He waved a hand at the floor, and all of the broken glass disappeared. “In my defence, I didn’t want to interfere with your concentration.”
While Lucais took my injured hand in his and hoisted me to my feet, I rolled my eyes at the both of them, although I had to admit that their appearance was an instant mood booster. I was so happy to see them that I didn’t even flinch when Lucais started to remove shards of glass from my flesh, which normally would have made me feel unwell.
“We’ve been in a meeting with the Court of Wind,” Wrenlock apprised me. He was wearing his usual attire—grey tunic, black pants—and had a dagger strapped to his hip. “Enyd found out we weren’t technically even in the city when she arrived, so she’s been on a rampage all morning.”
“What does she want?” I enquired.
“Oh, she wants to swap spit and create a secret handshake,” Lucais groused, squinting at my hand. “You’ve got tiny little shards of glass in here, bookworm. I need to get them out before I can heal the wound.”
Before I could even reply, he brought my palm up to his face and placed his mouth over the cut. My stomach flipped with an alien feeling of arousal and disgust as I felt the suction like a kiss—so similar to the way that he had sucked on my neck, my nipples, and my clit, but so different as blood and glass shards were pulled into his mouth—and when his eyes met mine, aureate and filled with so much heat, I felt a wet warmth sliding between the apex of my thighs.Lucais withdrew and spat onto the ground, which made it even worse.
I gulped as a flare of light magic stretched between our hands, the colour rich and vivid, the warmth stronger than ever, and my skin was stitched back together as if the injury had never happened. It was a magic I’d seen before—a magic I resentedand coveted at the same time for all the good it could have done me, but never did.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for the glass rose, because Wrenlock had already made the remnants of it vanish, but when Lucais kept his suggestive gaze locked with mine, I found that my train of thought was beginning to derail completely. A feeling overcame me—hot, needy, and essential—and I couldn’t name it other than to admit that it made me want to be ruined and repaired by the man standing in front of me, over and over again, until I was no longer the same person I was when we first met. His touch could remake me in ways that I had craved my entire life…
And if he didn’t stop looking at me the way he was looking at me, I was going to fall onto my knees and start humiliating myself in front of an audience again.
