Page 64 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“I know that you’re a dreadful idea, Aura. But there’s this damnmating bondtelling me that if I bury myself deep enough inside of you that I can never escape, everything else will be okay.”
Despite myself, I was tempted to let him. I could hardly breathe, let alone think straight, and there was a strange sense of possession combing through my body. Like it was looking through my genetic makeup and comparing its suitability to his.
A stab of fear pierced my heart, momentarily pulling me from the fantasy as I realised it might be all the bond needed to take hold and condemn us both. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. I’d never asked—
“Do it,” I whispered. And I could have sworn I heard his heart stop beating for a moment. “If this is how you feel, Lucais, then why don’t you stop talking about it and just do it? You’re the High King, and you…” I trailed off breathlessly and swallowed the lump rebuilding in my throat. “You’ve been throwing all of that innuendo at me like a set of daggers ever since I found out the truth. So why don’t you justdoit?”
There was a very long, very charged pause.
I suspected that time itself stood still for the rest of the world as he considered my words.
My offer.
Me.
“No,” Lucais said at last, lifting his head from mine like he was waking from a dream. His hands remained on my body, his touch a conflict between two warring realities that might never be resolved.
If it was not for that—the warmth of his skin against mine, and the strange sense of continuity it offered me against all the odds—I might have crumpled beneath the rejection. His dismissal might have stung. Instead, I simply felt validated, so I didn’t ask why he put us in such an intimate situation only to turn the offer of intimacy away yet again.
Lucais answered my unspoken thoughts anyway.
“No soulmate is better than a dead soulmate,” he whispered darkly.
My blood ran cold, and his arms tightened around me, holding me through the horrified shiver that rolled beneath my skin like an undercurrent. I was so hot and so cold at once, I felt suddenly as though I was coming down with a terrible illness.
Shakily, I asked, “Will you take me back to my room?”
A beat of hesitation pulsed between us like a solar flare.
“Will you invite me into it?”
My heart stuttered and slammed into my chest so hard I flinched. A single, violent pulse throbbed between my legs. “No.”
“Then yes.”
twenty-two
Doesn’t She Look Gorgeous in That Dress?
Later that evening, Wrenlock knocked on my bedroom door.
Officially, the carousal didn’t begin until the following morning, but there was already a great deal of commotion in Caeludor as faeries far and wide came to get a jump-start on the celebrations that were entirely premature.
I had sensed a deeply rooted insecurity embedded in the recesses of Lucais’s mind in the throne room—a fear that he was not enough for what his people needed and wanted him to be anymore. Once upon a time, they had chanted his name and revelled. And then…
Dot, dot, dot.
Truthfully, I still didn’t know what had happened next. I didn’t knowanything. I was aware that Lucais believed his feelings for me orbited the determinations of fate instead of existing within them, but whowashe? What had he done?
Maybe it was the Gift War that disrupted public confidence in his rule, but maybe it was something else. There was tension tightly wound through Caeludor—I could feel it in the air, thickas the fog surrounding the palace—and yet representatives from all over the realm seemed poised and ready to celebrate an outcome he hadn’t even delivered. Even those hailing from the Court of Earth—unless all of the smiling faces and revelry I’d witnessed were part of a sickeningly convincing act.
I nearly gagged on the politics of it all.
My stomach gurgled with a mixture of hunger and revulsion, the sensation of sleet shooting a line down my midsection, when I remembered what he was planning.
We need more of those pesky caenim,he’d told me. Because he was going to place them in the outlying towns of Faerie in a bid to encourage everyone to move inland while he dealt with the threats externally. Somehow, that seemed like a better idea to him than being honest about what had happened—and what was likely going to happen.
It was risky. It was stupid. It was irresponsible and not in the least bit regal. Personally, I wanted no part in it. Especially considering the fact that I had no idea how he was planning to actually capture the caenim. Lucais was so chaotic, and it was beginning to chafe.
