20. You’re Not Invited to Book Club
Chapter twenty
You’re Not Invited to Book Club
T he House either didn’t know or didn’t care what my usual wardrobe contained. After the stunt it pulled with the water in the bathroom, I was inclined to tell it to mind its own business in any case.
Even without knowledge of runes, spells, and enchantments, the magic of the House felt the same as the magic in the Forest of Eyes and Ears, except the Forest had very determinedly been on my side, whereas the House seemed to have a similar attitude to Wren and an impassive, neutral allegiance.
I didn’t like it.
And I didn’t much like the clothes it was offering me, either.
Dresses of varying lengths and styles were hung up behind the two oak doors, alongside sets of silk or velvet shirts and pants that loosely resembled pyjamas. I pushed the hangers aside and searched the drawers, but I found only a selection of different coloured socks and scarves within them. No underwear. No normal clothes.
Choosing a set of midnight blue silk—simply because I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a dress in Faerie—proved to be even more frustrating. The silk shirt was cropped at mid-length, with the lower half of the bodice replaced by scantily detailed lace.
A dress was dangerous, though, so I would have to grin and bear it.
Wishing I could have been offered a bralette for security purposes, I ran a hand through my hair before I turned to the door. The House had provided a toothbrush, mint paste, and a hairbrush—all of which felt like an apology, and one that I’d reluctantly accepted—and I was feeling more human than I had in days.
Human in all of the good ways, that is.
The House opened the bedroom door for me before I touched the handle, and I gave it a disapproving stare before I stepped out into the hall. I was highly suspicious that it might be banking favours with the intention to come back and claim them in the future.
Wren was not waiting outside my room.
Candlelight illuminated the hallway in a murky golden glow from the sconces burning along the sepia-coloured walls, casting flickering shadows across closed doorways and between wooden cabinets and hanging tapestries. I did wonder very briefly why the High King had chosen to use fire when organic orbs and flares of pure light seemed to be so easily accessible to members of his Court, but I was grateful for any illumination as I began to walk down the corridor alone.
Of course Wren didn’t wait for me .
I had told him not to—after accusing him and his sovereign of locking me in the bedroom like a prisoner.
Despite the fact that I’d been warned about the House and its enchantment, I refused to feel bad about any of it after I’d considered that there was still every chance they were torturing prisoners in the basement. If they were, the House knew about it and hadn’t done anything to stop it. My conspiracy theory was becoming less likely, but I had to keep my guard up, and that meant assuming the worst of everyone and every thing.
Especially Wren.
When I made it back to the corridor of windows at the end of the hall, the candlelight behind me died off, and the flames burned brighter down the staircase. I was tempted to tell the House that I could find my way to dinner without help, thanks very much, but I didn’t want to risk losing light altogether, so I descended the staircase with my hand on the rail.
At the first landing, the candles leading to the ground floor had been snuffed out, and a string of firelight led the way down a wide corridor. Still, there were no signs of life, no sound beyond my footsteps padding along the mahogany floor runner as I followed the House’s directions.
My muscles tensed as I walked further along the hall, preparing for someone or something to jump out at me. Part of me wished that the High King’s inner circle had been alerted to my presence, if only to save the awkwardness of an encounter with any of them.
Ancient weapons, suits of armour, and arrays of crystals and gemstones were displayed in glass cases along the walls. When my gaze lingered on any of them for too long, I felt that humming presence circle back to me expectantly. Averting my eyes, I stifled a shudder and quickened my pace down the hallway.
Every so often, a dark corridor would branch off between cabinets or doorways, but the candlelight continued in a straight line ahead until two huge double doors, left slightly ajar, appeared at the very end. The clink of glasses filtered out through the space, accompanied by a low murmur of voices.
Taking a grounding breath, I braced myself and pushed the doors open.
The term dining room didn’t feel quite right, although a huge buffet table stretched down the centre of the room with a dozen high-backed chairs padded with emerald-green cushioning. Platters, trays, and crystal towers filled to the brim with food were cluttering the spaces between woven gold placemats. No places were set with plates or cutlery for guests, aside from the three seats at the other end of the table.
Bookcases that had certainly seen better days lined the walls on the far corner of the room, where chaise lounges and side tables had been positioned around a circular green rug. Books had been left open, stacked on top of one another or barely hanging on to the edge of each wooden row, and quills and ink were haphazardly abandoned in the empty spaces between them.
The opposite wall was lined by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the rear garden. A midnight sky swallowed the horizon, but the courtyard below was illuminated by blue light. That same blue light bobbed between the exposed beams above me like stars had been hung from the ceiling by invisible threads.
“It’s faelight,” Lucais called from across the room.
As if he had willed it to do so, one of the floating lights drifted down to meet me in the doorway. It was small, no bigger than a raindrop, though it had a hazy glow around it like it was blending into the very air. Although similar to a flame in shape, I could very clearly see that the little orb was, in fact, the branding in the Belgrave insignia.
The insignia shared with the Court of Light .
It was so peculiar, so ethereal, that it was no wonder we had been mistaking it for flame all that time. The faelight orb was not a concept that I could have conjured up myself—to have light appear right in front of me as if it had been scooped out of the sky in near-material form without any source of external power. As a source of power.
Once I’d spent a moment examining it, the faelight returned to its space among the rafters, and I walked around to the side of the table closest to the windows in order to avoid Wren.
He was sitting beside the High King, who naturally occupied the head, reclined back on his chair’s rear legs with his boots on the table as he flipped through a book.
I considered moving the third and last place setting to a different spot, but I was starving, so I took my intended seat on Lucais’s other side. Across from Wren.
“Now I understand where you get that nasty little tongue of yours from,” he remarked without looking up from his book. “Do all human women use such crude language when requesting intimate favours from their human mates?”
I frowned, eyes dropping to the cover…
Not Wren’s book.
My book. The book I’d been reading in Dante’s that night.
“Where did you get that?” I demanded, jumping up from my chair. I made a wild grab for it across the table—decorum be damned—but the space was simply too wide.
Wren defensively lifted the novel over one shoulder with both hands and looked me up and down. “Careful, now, or you’re bound to get sauce all over that pretty little blouse.”
Blood boiled beneath my cheeks as I glanced down and realised that my breasts were scarcely a moment away from knocking over a sterling sauce boat. Mentally cursing the House for not supplying underwear, I braced my hands flat on the table and straightened my spine, willing myself to look him dead in the eyes. “Give it back.”
Wren’s full mouth turned down in a pout. “But I’m not finished with it yet.”
“Give it back. ”
He glanced towards the High King, and I copied the gesture to find that Lucais was watching us with an unreadable expression on his face. It was as if we were children, and he was an estranged uncle only in town for a funeral. He looked damn near offended that I was leaning so close to the sauceboat. When he caught my eye, he cleared his throat.
Lucais did his best to look like he cared as he faced his companion and nodded his head towards me. “Give it back,” he encouraged with a grimace, his voice much quieter than I would have expected.
“Fine.” Wren rolled his eyes melodramatically and slammed the book closed, giving me a pointed look. “But you’re not invited to book club anymore.”
“What?” I blinked at him. Is he drunk? “You don’t have a book club.”
“Sure I do.” He threw a glance over his shoulder towards the bookcases in the far corner of the room. “Those are all mine. I meet with other book lovers in the Court as often as I can to discuss what we’re all reading. You work in a bookstore. Surely, you’re familiar with the concept?”
I stared beyond him, over the top of his head, at the enormous shelves and couches—at the reading nook .
Those are all Wren’s books?
There had to have been hundreds of them. And the reading pattern… With the way he’d discarded so many of them, he was either in such a hurry to get to the next one or he was in a major DNF slump where nothing he opened quite hit the right spot.
Or he was lying. But…he couldn’t lie.
I turned my deadpan gaze back onto his face. “You haven’t invited me to any book club.”
“True,” he agreed thoughtfully. “I might have, but then you got snippy with me, so now I won’t. Either way,” he went on with a shrug, “I’m not going to judge you for reading smut, bookworm.” He passed my spicy hockey romance novel across the spread of food and sauces, and I snatched it off him, quickly hiding it on my lap beneath the table. “You’re welcome, too.”
I was too overwhelmed to ask what he thought I should be thanking him for, but the effort was rendered unnecessary as Wren reached down and lifted my handbag into the air. It levitated to me over the table, and I caught it right before it fell into that infernal sauceboat. I couldn’t remember where I’d left it in the human world, and I had no idea why he’d thought to retrieve it for me or why he hadn’t bothered to say anything about it until then.
Wren stared at me expectantly, and I stared right back.
“If you are finished flirting with each other,” Lucais said at last, clearing his throat again. “I would like to begin the meal sometime soon.”
“Why would I flirt with her when I have your handsome face to make those—what are they called again, Aura?—those fuck-me eyes at?” Wren waggled both eyebrows at his High King, who exhaled a long-suffering sigh in reply. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?” he continued, swinging his attention back to me.
I bit my tongue. Truthfully, I couldn’t care less if Wren was Lucais’s lover, but I couldn’t come up with a better explanation for his initial description of the High King. Especially when it turned out to be so accurate.
Ignoring his probing gaze, I turned towards Lucais. “Your companion informed me very early on that the High King of Faerie was the most handsome and creative man I would ever meet,” I informed him pleasantly. “I can assure you that he and I have not been flirting.”
The High King rested an elbow on the table, his mouth forming a hard line. He looked at me as if he didn’t believe me. “That’s what he told you?” he asked. He didn’t wait for me to respond before he turned his head towards Wren and said with depthless disbelief, “High Mother spare you, my friend.”
“Oh, enough.” Wren waved a hand at us and began piling food onto his plate. “You’re not in the least bit creative. I used the word clever , but I must’ve been thinking of some other handsome man.”
Lucais huffed a laugh as he waited for Wren to finish plating up his food.
Until a moment before, I hadn’t actually thought about either of their sexualities or preferences. I hadn’t given a thought as to what their relationship might be at all. But watching the High King of Faerie patiently waiting for Wren, who had to be some kind of courtier at best, to select the largest cuts of meat and the nicest vegetables for himself had me absolutely stumped.
Kings and Queens were at the top of the food chain. Amongst any human aristocracy, behaviour like that would be considered disrespectful. Was it really so different in Faerie?
Lucais, noticing my observation of them, coughed loudly. Wren paused with his fork, loaded with roasted bean shoots, halfway to his open mouth. Slowly, he lowered his cutlery back to his plate and stared down at the pile of steaming food like he could become invisible at will.
“It is only the three of us tonight,” Lucais explained, reaching for the platter of roasted meats. “I would not be so cruel as to throw you into one of our typical dinner parties on your very first night here.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I surveyed the spread of food that spanned all the way to the other end of the table. There was enough food for an entire army laid out for us, and every chair had a gold place mat in front of it, so the decision to exclude everyone else must have been made very last minute.
“We’re old friends,” he went on, pouring some kind of black sauce all over the meat on his plate.
“Close friends,” Wren added suggestively, though his tone was lacking its usual humour, and the implication didn’t quite make its mark. I glanced over at him to find that he was still staring down at his untouched food.
“Not that close,” Lucais muttered. He offered me a small, forced smile—one that didn’t reach his eyes, which were guarded by that same hard, chestnut wall I’d seen on him upstairs. My stomach turned anxiously at the sight of it. “He’s my right-hand man. Please, eat.”
I had suddenly lost my appetite.
Lucais waited for a few moments before deciding to start his own meal, and Wren followed his lead a few moments after that. I remained motionless in my seat, my fingers curling around the edges of the book on my lap as I stared down at my empty plate.
Meticulously and repeatedly, I went through all of my knowledge of the two men and their world in my head. The Malum and their vicious pets, stalking me into the human world. The small group of High Fae I had witnessed lounging in the courtyard, who had simply vanished into thin air. The Court of Darkness disappearing on the Map ahead of a brewing war. And the table full of food intended for many more people than had actually been invited or shown up.
When I lifted my head again, I found Wren watching me. I registered the fear in his eyes before he blinked it away.
Swallowing the saliva pooling in my mouth, I turned back to the High King. “You knew I was coming here.” He’d said he was worried about me, and he’d recognised me almost immediately upstairs—like we’d been introduced before. “Why doesn’t your Court?”
Lucais took longer than he should have to chew his food. He tilted his head to the side, towards Wren, as he swallowed, and his black curls shifted across his forehead until they touched his eyebrows. He glanced at his fair-haired companion, whose face was angled towards his plate again, and my heart began to race in a disjointed rhythm.
“Why are you looking at him?” My voice echoed in the otherwise deathly quiet room.
The two men shared a look, the picture of that moment worth a thousand words over a thousand years. An entire conversation passed between their eyes, so knowing and intense that no emotions were spared, and I found my hands, curled into fists, were beginning to shake beneath the table.
“They know,” Lucais blurted before I could explode into a thousand pieces. Wren glared at him, but he turned away from his friend, the wall of solid wood in his eyes beginning to split. “The Court knows that you’re here.”
My legs began to shake, too. My whole body . “You lied to me.” I shot daggers at Wren with my eyes, trembling harder with each moment that he refused to meet them with his own. “But you told me that you couldn’t lie.”
Eventually, Wren’s sharp, unrelenting gaze switched from the High King’s face to mine. His expression was hard and unapologetic. “That was a lie.”