Page 18 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
My lashes touched my eyebrows as I glared up at him. Lucais held my stare for long moments with the same rigid control he used to keep his arm and pointer finger firmly in place. He took deep, measured breaths that filled his chest and stirred the curls of my hair as each exhale swept over me with the scent of ink, musk, and the heat of a midday sun.
Oh, fine. I see how it is.
I couldn’t be sure which one of us relaxed first, but that was all it took. Somewhere between the two of us, a singular muscle twitched, giving in, and then the tension of our stand-off collapsed into the space between us like a fallen house of playing cards.
“The High King ofLiars,” I muttered, sullenly folding my arms over my chest as I began to walk again.
“The High Queen ofBeasts,” he returned, pinching me on one of those arms.
I ignored the sting of his cruelly playful touch. Ignored the way itlingeredfar longer than it should have.
As our silence bloomed once more, so did my discomfort. The palace expanded, the ceilings getting further away and the windows rising higher up the walls with the growing distance we put between ourselves and the scene of the crime. Every corridor we turned down was empty, as though I’d killed the only staff member in the whole palace.
I killed him. I killed someone.
“Where are you taking me?” I questioned, breaking the quiet spell of guilt as Lucais walked with purposeful strides.
“To the dungeon,” he replied stoically.
I skidded to an abrupt halt in front of a closed wooden door, the colour draining from my face.
Lucais tossed a smirk at me over his shoulder. “Not to throw you in there, you insufferable woman,” he promised, completely misunderstanding the source of my panic.
Even if he did try to lock me up in a dungeon, I would simply scream until he got so sick of hearing my voice that he let me out again. Or, in the worst-case scenario, I was fairly confident that Wrenlock would come to my rescue.
No, it’s not me that I’m worried about.
It was the image ofLucaisin the dungeon that crossed my mind, sending a storm of sickness to the pit of my stomach, wreaking havoc against all of my internal organs like a battered ship fighting to stay afloat against the wrath of the water gods. The sound of his voice when he screamed—which had happened in the months that he was bruised by iron weapons and drowned in buckets of icy water—indicated that an insurmountable amount of pain had been inflicted upon potentially the most powerful man in the world.
I hadn’t had a nightmare about it since my first night in Faerie. I’d actually started to convince myself it was merely a conjuring of my imagination and had nothing at all to do with the suspiciously timed Oracle’s prophecy, the disappearance of the Court of Darkness from a Map I was yet to see for myself, and general tomfoolery of faeries and their war-central politics.But if it was—
“Tell me what that look on your face is for,” Lucais said, the demand long and drawn out with languid trepidation.
I could have sworn I detected a whisper of concern for someone other than himself in his voice, but it was surely a symptom of post-murder trauma on my part.
“It’s nothing,” I muttered, dropping my gaze to the floor.
Even if I wanted to tell him—and Ididn’t—I couldn’t.
I’d never been able to talk to anyone about my dreams because something beyond my control always stopped me. I’d experienced it often enough at the House to realise what it was—a big step from my tormented winter nights alone in my room—and I could recognise it as magic. I’d felt it myself in the House and even tasted it inside Wrenlock’s mouth. Some kind of magic had been threaded into my dreams, and while my presence in Faerie had lifted the spell far enough for me to remember what they were about again, I didn’t think I could say it out loud. My tongue tingled with the threat of going numb even when I did nothing more than consider it.
“Little beast,” Lucais purred, stepping towards me with a note of warning in his voice. He donned the skin of a predator effortlessly, his eyes taking on a feline glow. “If we are to be honest with each other, you need to realise there’s some work to be done there on your end of our bargain.”
I rolled my eyes. “You aresucha hypocrite.”
He scoffed. “Hardly. As a matter of fact, I think what I’m about to show you will go a long way in my favour where you’re concerned.”
“Oh, like you care what I think.”
The plain wooden door clicked open as Lucais placed one palm flat against it, the other hand patting the space on his chest above his heart. His eyes captured mine, sparkling like stolen gold.
“You wound me,” he lamented.
“I wish,” I mumbled in reply.
Climbing down the stairs with my hands firmly pressed against my sides, we cleared a few flights before we arrived at another door. A chill crept along my arms, the tiny pinpricks like those of a rat skittering up to find a perch on my shoulder. The second door was bound by iron, and when Lucais extended an arm towards it, I couldn’t reign in my reaction in time. I couldn’t even control it. I grabbed his wrist with an unyielding grip, pulling his hard, heavily muscled forearm against my chest.
His brow furrowed as he cast me a downwards look, head tilted to the side. Without trying to recover his arm, he turned his body and used his free shoulder to push the door open, keeping between the reach of the iron reinforcements.
