Page 68 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“I pay attention,” he said. His words, though whispered, were strong enough to flip my heart. “You’re the only thing I pay attention to anymore.”
Wrenlock’s hand slid an inch lower down my back, and a firestorm of arousal blazed from his fingertips all the way up my spine. It curled into a shiver at the nape of my neck, forcing my head back until I was looking up at him. His own face was tilted towards the floor, his lips barely separated from the top of my scalp. I tasted his breath tangling with mine before I could blink my eyes.
His proximity was startling and relieving at the same time.
“Answer my question,” I breathed.
“I don’t think it’s Blythe.”
“Answer it properly.”
One side of his mouth pulled up into a grin. “Good girl.” He glanced around as if checking to make sure we weren’t within earshot of anyone else. “I don’t think that the thing in the lapsus is Blythe Darkcloud.”
“Whatdoyou think it is?”
“I think it’s a symptom of something else,” he replied. “I think he’s trying to manage it when he should be trying to find and cure the cause instead.”
My eyes narrowed slightly. “Have you told him this?”
“Yes.” Wrenlock chuckled. “But do you think he listens?”
I sighed because I didn’t, but I knew he eventually would.
The High King was burning through his power on the wards, the lapsuses, and the fog—all of which could be symptoms of a greater problem somewhere in Faerie. I had no choice but to help him find out what it was. I’d already missed eight years of my sister’s life. I’d missed the chance to say goodbyeto my grandparents. I’d missed countless other milestones and important days in Belgrave, and all of it could be over in the blink of an eye if we didn’t act quickly. The longer I stayed in Faerie without them, the more of their lives I missed.
Bringing them with me wasn’t an option, either. If I somehow convinced them to come to Faerie with me, that would be sentencing them to the same fate. My mother would probably find it made no difference to her life, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Brynn what her life was like—to find out if she had a life that was worth giving up or if she’d even consider leaving it behind.
It wasn’t fair to ask, anyway. She already hated me enough for what I’d done.
For leaving her.
Even if I really wanted to go back to the human world, that was no longer an option. I would live with the sound of those nails knocking against the sky as the creatures from my worst nightmares tried to find a weakness in Lucais’s wards, knowing there was a risk that, one day, it would all come tumbling down.
“How were the caenim getting into the Court of Light?” I asked Wrenlock, trying to cover my tone with ignorant curiosity.
He didn’t know that I knew about the tunnels with the iron doors beneath each Court—that they had to be opened from the inside—and for Lucais to be surprised by them meant they weren’t travelling through the wards or stolen portals.
I waited with bated breath to see if he would be honest, hoping the slight acceleration of my heart didn’t give me away.
Wrenlock took a deep, thoughtful breath. “They’re travelling beneath Faerie through a series of underground tunnels, but they’re being helped on both sides,” he answered after a moment. “There’s a safeguard to prevent the tunnels being used like this, so someone is letting them in. We just don’t know who it is.”
All of the nervous energy that was twisted and pent-up inside of my bones and ligaments evacuated my body in an instant. I gazed up at Wrenlock with the most genuine smile I’d shown anyone in months. He was taken aback at first, but then his mouth mirrored mine, and a magnetic pull ignited between us.
It was like our souls were stitched together, but our bodies remained separate. I felt him everywhere, all at once—and yet, the only places we were touching was where one of his hands splayed on the small of my back and the other interlocked with mine. My heartbeat was accelerating in a thousand places across time and space with every moment we spent hesitating.
The ferity urged my head towards him until I felt the brush of his nose against mine, and my breath was ripped from my lungs.
Between our lips, the space yawned like a black hole laced with an overdose of desire; the air between us was sucked into oblivion, the pressure like a phantom fist wrapping around our bodies and squeezing to bring us closer together.
A flare of absolute need ignited at the back of my throat, swelling behind the hinges of my jaw as the hummingbird thrum of my blood searing within my veins burned every other thought and feeling out of my mind.
I parted my lips and pushed myself up on the tips of my toes as Wrenlock dropped my hand. He threaded his fingers through my hair, and I clutched his bicep as he gripped the back of my head and slammed his mouth against mine.
A burst of power materialised between us—a flicker of magic that caressed our silhouettes before dancing out of reach.
My satisfaction and surprise rolled into one sound—a whimper that was swallowed by his kiss. He slid his tongue into my mouth, and the taste of him took physical form, travelling all the way down my throat, skittering across the muscles in myabdomen like fireworks exploding in a cloud-soaked midnight sky, and finally settling in my core. He was a burning ache, a frantic necessity, an explanation for something I could not put into words.
Wrenlock gathered me against him like a blanket, greedily pulling me closer. I felt the rock-hard erection straining against his pants press into my belly, and my clit throbbed in reply.
