Page 6 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
He regarded me like I had suddenly grown a tail. “It’s not Enyd who will send word.”
The urge to roll my eyes at him was intense, but I managed to keep it at bay.I have got to be civil if I want to get out of these chains.“You can’t silence her soldiers?”
Lucais was already shaking his head at me. “Do I look like the High Mother to you?”
Fuck civility then.
I ignored him. “Can you let me out of these chains?”
He ran his tongue along his bottom lip as he considered. “Ican.”
Glowering at his obviously misleading truth, I remembered all the times he had manipulated our language to lead me astray while keeping within the bounds of his inability to outright lie. It made my blood boil. I had enough to worry about and work through in my head without having to wade through the unlimited variations of phrasing the High Fae took advantage of whenever they spoke. Something as simple as“You can call me Wren”had almost ruined the both of us completely.
He acknowledged my irritation with a raised brow and went on to ask, “How likely is it that you’ll attack me if I do?”
Chewing on the inside of my cheek, I shrugged. “Like you said, I have no magic.”
“It is actually your fists I’m afraid of.”
“I would nev—”
“You’ve done it before,” he interrupted, giving me a pointed look.
And though I loathed to admit it, Lucais was right—I had slapped him across the face in Dante’s Bookstore.
“That was before I knew who you were,” I argued miserably.
Lucais chuckled. The sound was dark, low, and sensual. I tried to shake it off, but it gripped onto my hips like a pair of hands and sent a bolt of something entirely unwanted between my legs.
“Does it really make a difference who I am?” he purred.
Defeated, I shook my head and let my shoulders slump forward.
It wasn’t worth the effort it would take for me to lie to the King of Deceit himself.
“The cuffs remain until I am certain that you won’t run for your life once I let you loose,” he declared, like I truly was a beast he was rehabilitating before releasing back into the wild. “You don’t see it like this now, Auralie, but we’re lucky that all you did back there was black out. If you disappeared, you’d find that there are worse things than scorned High Kings in Faerie, and you’d be tripling the reward for your own neck.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to be your enemy. It makes no difference if you like me or even if you trust me, but if you could just try to refrain from betraying me again—atleastuntil you stop being such a liability—then we’ll be fine.”
I snorted.Hypocrite.
Lucais’s eyes flashed as if he’d heard the private thought, but he said nothing. He simply ran a hand through his hair and readjusted his position, resting his elbow on the windowsill and propping his chin on his fist. The High King was so handsome; he would make a stunning portrait posing like that, and I hated it. I absolutely hated it.
Until you stop being such a liability.
He was too beautiful to be so cruel.
Bored with our conversation and wilfully ignorant of my charged gaze, Lucais occupied himself by watching the scenery flash past us outside, and I decided to do the same—
Except I couldn’t. Because I was chained in place.
I don’t want to be your enemy.Lucais couldn’t lie to me outright, but he could trick me into believing things that were not true. Crucial things—like his identity and the Oracle only knew what else.
So what is it now? He doesn’t want to be my enemy, but he will be? He already is? He wants to be friends even less? Oh, it’s giving me a headache.
The urge to rub my temples to ease the pressure building inside my skull was intense, and the fact that I was restrained from doing so made me want to cry. But I didn’t. I would not play those games with him, not when the odds were stacked against me so high that I was destined to lose count every time I tried to calculate the distance I needed to cover in order to get ahead.
Glaring at Lucais’s side profile, I vowed to never allow myself to be made into such a fool by a faerie again. A fool who was tempted by fate only to find out it was a lie. That everything was a lie.
No.
