Page 60 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
One without a High Queen.
Ew.
You’d look good in a crown.
You’d look good with duct tape over your mouth.
Ooh, kinky.He picked a stray hair—one of mine, I realised with great horror—from his coat sleeve, and held it up to examine the colour against his light. A smirk slowly spread across his mouth.
Go away.
It’s my palace—
Wrenlock appeared at my side, summoned by the look on my face. He stood between us, his tall frame blocking my vision of the High King. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back. My feet were free, so I kicked at the floor with the toe of my boot, trying to suppress the twist in my heart. “How was your day?”
He shrugged. “Busy enough. I was thinking about you, though. Are you coming to the celebrations tonight?”
I peered around him at Lucais, who pulled a face and shrugged as if to say he didn’t know what I planned to do, and he didn’t care to find out. Wrenlock ducked his head, reclaiming my eyes.
“I’m not sure.” I sighed. “Are you trying to ask me something?”
His mouth pulled up into a lopsided grin. “Sort of, yes. I thought maybe—” He broke off, holding up a hand. “I have no expectations, but maybe you and I could go to the carousal in Caeludor together and…hang out.”
I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing at the suggestion, bottling it only when hurt flashed across his face. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “It’s only that you said… You want to hang out with me?”
His eyebrows knitted together. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s…” I fumbled for the right word. “Such a human notion,” I decided at last, speaking on a light exhale of breath.
The conversation reeked of nostalgia, as if he wasn’t a High Fae man a few hundred years older than me and I wasn’t being held half-a-prisoner in Faerie by an irritating High King.
My mouth curved up at the corners. “You know… Hanging out.”
“You realise humans descended from the High Fae?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Wrenlock. I know. Faeries came before the chickensandthe eggs.”
A smile touched his eyes, even as he chewed on his lower lip. “Do you not want to? Hang out, that is.”
Something inside of my chest fluttered, the sensation triggered by my silent laughter. “Yes, that’s fine. We can hang out.”
“Good.” Wrenlock beamed at me, all warmth and openness and trust. “I’ll come by your room at dusk.”
“Okay—”
Lucais strode up to us then, pausing on his way towards a side door out of the room like we were an afterthought. He waved that annoying finger between us, and I wished Ihadbroken a piece of it off in that cottage illusion or bitten it in the human world.
The memory of the way he pressed that hand up against the side of my face to hold me in place while he explored my mouth with his own streaked through my mind. But the way that he used it to poke and prod at me the rest of the time dulled any of the more pleasant associations.
“Whatever the two of you are going to do,” he said, his voice a lazy lilt, “you are not to leave this palace tonight.”
“Fine,” Wrenlock agreed, though his dark chestnut eyes flashed, and his shoulders tensed.
Lucais lifted a brow and pouted at him, as if he’d been expecting a fight. “Fine.”
They turned towards me like they assumed I’d break the tension or referee the back-and-forth idiocy of a situation the two of them had conspired to create all by themselves. Both of them held secrets and promises in their eyes, glimmering with devious intent, settling between us like an invitation.
