Page 25 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
But I was on my own again.
The palace was not the House.
There was no magic there. No enchantment. Its cruel hardwood and vicious stonework did not care about me. Still, I decided to give it a chance. If my magic was lost, maybe it had taken my ability to properly sense other kinds of magic along with it.
I sucked in a breath through my teeth, the sound too sharp and loud in my own ears. My eyes wandered over the palace’s interior, looking for a friendly surface and finding none.
“Hello?” I asked into the quiet vacancy. “Are you here?”
“Hello,” a smooth voice replied.
Whirling at the unfamiliar sound, I stumbled and nearly fell over from the shock of finding Wrenlock standing in my open doorway. I had not heard his footsteps or the door opening. He was a vision of shadows in the low lighting; black clothing, messy dark hair, unblemished skin cooled by the melancholy lighting.
“Was that you?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.
“Was what me?” he returned, pushing off the doorframe and striding towards me.
“I said something, and you…”
Wrenlock raised an eyebrow. “You did?” He stopped in front of me, taking in my outfit, and then reached up to tuck my hair behind my ears. I eyed the skin on the palms of his hands, noting the burn marks had been healed. “Are you talking to yourself, babe?”
If looks could set people on fire, he would be ash.
“No.” I shrugged his hand off from where it had come to rest on my shoulder and folded my arms over my chest. “Forget it.”
He sighed deeply. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have teased you. I just came to see if you were hungry because you don’t know your way around this place yet.” As if it heard him, my stomach let out a feral growl, which caused one side of his mouth to quirk to the side. “I see,” he stated, and then he offered me his arm. “Look, Aura, I’ll take you to breakfast. No strings attached. In fact, when you stab your fork into your food, you can pretend that it’s my heart.”
Groaning, I hooked my elbow around his arm and told myself it was because I was weak with hunger pains. Though relief chilled the fire in my veins slightly as we exited the macabre bedroom and stepped onto a thin navy-and-gold rug in the hall, it was momentary.
We were on a level of the palace that was basically an entire wing of bedrooms. There were closed doors separated by colourful portraits within copper frames placed in a square formation around an open, gaping drop leading down to the lower levels, walled by a solid ebony railing of modest height in the middle of the floor. High windows ushered in murky, silvery daylight that beamed down in a tight formation and exposed clouds of dust leisurely floating across the space.
The urge to throw myself over the bannister came and went in the blink of an eye.
“I do not want to stab you,” I snapped, glancing up at Wrenlock. Everything felt so hot and cold around him, and all of it was out of my control. “You broke my heart. You broke mytrust. You were the nice one who took me under your wing—and then took advantage of me. I don’t want to stab you, Wrenlock. I want to look at you without hurting.”
“Hmm.” He placed his free hand over my forearm and squeezed it gently as we moved through the shadows. “But you want to stab Lucais?”
My upper lip curled. “Is that some perverted standard of affection with you people?” I demanded. “You don’t care that the sight of your face physicallyhurtsme, but you care about how violent and aggressive I’d like to be towards your High King because you think that’s some type of fucked up foreplay for us?”
“Aura—”
“No!” I shouted.
Shoving his arm away, I stepped backwards and felt the eyes of the portrait paintings along the walls dart towards me, intrigued. I glared back at one set of painted black eyes for a moment before shuddering and returning my attention to the man in front of me.
“No. You know what?Fuckyou andfuckyourfucked upstandards of love! Because the truth is that I wouldratherhave Lucais fat-shame me to his unicorn and slut-shame me in these halls, every day for the rest of my life because the Oracle disappointed him with me, than have to remember what it felt like to have a completestrangerput his fingers inside me, his tongue in my mouth, and make me believe it wasfate.”
Wrenlock dragged a hand over his anguished face.
Guilt roared deep in my belly, devouring the scene with wicked delight. It was a greedy, starving beast I had been feeding all my life. My chest heaved with breaths I scarcely managed to pull up from the catacombs of my lungs as we stared at each other across the hallway. Wrenlock’s eyes were glinting in the reflection of light from somewhere, the chestnut dark as oblivion. For the very first time, I could feel the vexation radiating from him.
“Go off, Aura,” he hissed, the precision of his gaze cutting into me. “Please, keep going. Get thisoutof your system because you are not doing us any favours by playing the victim.” He took a step forward, and I stepped back, even though the distance between us suddenly felt like a void between worlds. “Iknowthat what I did was wrong. IknowI hurt you. If I could have done anything about it, I would have. Don’t trust me, fine. But trustthat.”
I took another step backwards until I could feel the ridge of the carpet edge beneath my foot. He remained in place.
“I amboundto him by a magic stronger than anything else in the world,” he went on, raising an apprehensive hand in the space between us. “The same magic that hides this realm from yours. The magic that ended a war so intense it created human beings. The magic thatalmostmanaged to reverse the curse of the Malum.” Wrenlock’s eyes shone with silver again, and I realised it wasn’t light.
Those are tears.
