Page 71 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
And I didn’t want to give any consideration to how much I liked the idea that he had been watching us, or whether he might have continued to watch us under different circumstances.
I brushed past him and veered for the door.
Lucais grabbed me by the arm and pulled me backwards. I felt his chest hit my back as a trickle of arousal spilled down my thigh, and my cheeks burned with self-inflicted mortification.
“You cannot be with him,” he hissed.
Oh, he has got to be joking.
“You cannot tell me what to do.” I tried to swallow down my ire discreetly, but I could feel Lucais’s eyes trained on me like a hawk.
“Yes,” he argued with force. “Ican.”
Shaking my head, I pulled my arm free from his grip and spun around to face him. “I thought you didn’t care. You saidno.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why are you wasting your breath?” I demanded, lowering my voice into a cutting whisper and pointing behind me at nothing in particular. “Youmademe do this. At the House, you introduced me to him,knowingthis could happen—knowing that it was more than likely, given the circumstancesyoudesigned for us—and even after it started, younevertried to stop it—”
He cut me off. “That was at the House, Aura. This is in my city. Inyourcity, if you accept the bond—”
“You don’t even want me to accept it!” I shouted.
“Because I don’t want you to die!”
“Then why do you keepbringing it upall the time?”
“Because!” Lucais yelled, raking his hands through his hair. His eyes flared, the tendons in his neck straining. “It’s your choice, isn’t it? I won’t stop you if you decide that this is actually what you want!” He threw his hand out to the side, panting wildly, and I wasn’t sure if he was gesturing to the whole of Faerie or to the cryptic fog.
It didn’t matter either way.
“How am I to decide when yourfuckingOracle has already programmed you into the back of my mind?” I spat back at him. “You’re my first and last thought, the figure in the corner of my eye, thecreeping,crawling feeling underneath my skin, and that’s not a choice, Lucais. Not when we were meticulously designed for each other by a couple of bored deities. They call that fate!”
He yanked at the roots of his hair. “Some people should be so fucking lucky, Auralie!”
“Luck is different!”
“Oh, fuck this.” He chuckled without a whisper of humour. “It’s not some crystal ball sending the blood rushing to my cock when we fight like this, Aura. It’s you. Iwantyou—so bad I think it might actually break me—and I will defend your place at my side until my dying breath, but I’m not about to let you walk all over a fuckingminefieldof caenim with a massive target flashing on your back in order to get to me.”
My mouth fell open, and I blinked at him, utterly gobsmacked. “You’re insane.”
“Youmakeme insane.” His chest heaved in a despairing rhythm.
“Then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?” I smacked the palms of my hands against my face and groaned, dragging my fingersthrough my hair. “Fuck! Lucais, please. I need you to let it go. This is bad.Weare bad for each other.”
“No,” he shot back. “I will not let this go. If you’re happy, I don’t care what you do when there are not a thousand eyes upon us and the survival of my people doesn’t depend on it. But here, that is not the case. We are in the public eye almost constantly, andyouwere in the middle of a very public event. I’ll respect your free will when you’re not fucking using itagainstme.”
I giggled bitterly, a bit like a maniac. “Oh, so what Wrenlock and Ileavethe party to do is too troublesome for you, but whatyoudid with those Vampyr girls in front of both your Court and Enyd’s—and right up on top of apodium—is not?”
His shoulders trembled, and he waggled his finger in the air between us, swiping his tongue across his top teeth. “I was waiting for you to bring that up.”
“No, forget it.” I rolled my eyes and waved a hand at him dismissively. “Forget I mentioned it. I don’t care.”
His gaze zeroed in on my mouth, the gold flaring. “Oh, really?”
“Yes, really.”
“You don’t care.” Lucais folded his arms over his chest, a brow flicking up above narrowing eyes.
