21. I’m Not Snooping #2
“You wouldn’t leave well enough alone,” he said, and his voice was full of tightly bound restraint.
“You wouldn’t take my word for it.” His steps echoed with dangerous purpose as he approached me.
“Now that you have found physical proof that I am not infallible, are you happy? Does this make you feel better about your decision?”
My eyebrows dove to meet each other above the bridge of my nose. “Why would I be happy?” I asked, a little breathless. I didn’t truly understand what was going on. “And what decision?”
Lucais stopped in front of me and slid his hands from his pockets.
Reaching out, he brushed his thumb across my cheekbone from my earlobe to my nose, studying my skin as if it were marred with soot.
It probably was, but that didn’t explain the chemical reaction his touch left upon my tingling skin in its wake.
“The decision not to be with me,” Lucais answered at last, placing his other hand on the small of my back. He gave me a gentle push, guiding me over fallen debris towards the outskirts of the room.
“That’s not a decision,” I scoffed, twisting my neck to peer up at him. “If there’s only one option, do you still call that a choice?”
The question was rhetorical, so the only response he gave me was a small sigh and another gentle nudge to skirt the tangle of curtain strings lying across the floor.
I followed his instructions and felt a sliver of relief settle on my shoulders once we were no longer in the middle of the impending crash site.
“We went over this already,” I complained, shrugging off his lingering touch like a coat that was suddenly making me feel too hot.
I was irritated that he was the one who pulled back— twice —yet he acted as though the ball was in my court.
Pinning him to the spot with my eyes, I searched his face for answers, daring him to prove me wrong with more than a few pretty throwaway words.
“You don’t want to be with me any more than I want to be with you. ”
“No,” the High King agreed quietly. He folded his arms over his chest, golden eyes flaring as he stared me down with the power of a thousand suns. “But I also don’t go snooping around your bedroom looking for things to absolve me of the guilt of that.”
Head rearing back, my spine straightened, and goosebumps crawled over my skin with the gall of a huntsman spider. “I’m not snooping —”
In a flash, the High King grabbed my arm and pulled. My body crashed into his with the grace of a runaway shopping trolley, and my face snapped up, ice-blue eyes narrowed with the precision of a sniper as they locked with his galaxies of gold.
The lovely planes of his face reflected the small amount of light surviving in the dense gloom, casting dark shadows on the unforgiving angles and ridges.
I was momentarily stunned by his beauty once more—to be staring so closely at the face of someone who had been designed with magic in the forefront of the creator’s mind, who could manipulate the fabric of the world with the light that lived and died inside his eyes.
“Little white lies,” he interjected, shaking his head.
A ball of saliva gathered at the back of my throat, and I tried my best to swallow it discreetly.
“You were snooping,” Lucais insisted. His voice was a seductive purr, coaxing me to admit to my crimes and waive my right for legal representation.
“You caught a glimpse of something you shouldn’t have seen, and you’ve been desperate to find out if it’s real ever since.
Well, here you are.” He gripped my shoulders with both hands, long fingers splayed widely across the base of my neck and collarbone, and spun me around to face the collapsing wing of the palace.
I gasped as my back pressed into his chest, and warmth poured into my body from his solid presence in musk-scented waves. My skin prickled with the urge to touch him, to press my flesh into his until the fibres of our souls knitted together.
But why is the fog enchanted, Lucais?
“I am not infallible, Aura,” he said slowly.
I wasn’t quite sure if he was answering my question—if he’d even heard it.
“I am a man.” His hand slid down my chest a fraction, and embarrassment branded my cheeks a colour that only ever bloomed for him as my human heart cracked against his palm like a thunderstorm in the clouds.
“I am…” The High King trailed off, inhaling deeply.
His own heart slammed against my spine as it beat, five times to my two, as if there were a race that neither of us wanted to lose. It provoked a sigh to collect in my chest.
“A man,” I finished softly, lowering my gaze to the ground.
“There is a price to pay for everything, and this is how I choose to pay. The palace is older than our history books can determine, and it is part of the job description of any ruler to maintain it.” He bent his head down until his nose was nestled between locks of my hair, and a feeling that could consume my entire body in a single wave gathered against my scalp when he spoke again.
“It is one thing to possess such copious amounts of power as I do, but it is another matter entirely to actually use it and more .”
My lower belly clenched at the sound of his voice, a rapid warmth beginning to develop.
He spoke softly, but the edge to his tone was practically a weapon, stroking me from my skin down to my soul, sending an uncontrollable torrent of spine-curving shivers dancing across my limbs until my fingers and toes curled involuntarily and my breath turned ragged.
Lucais.
“The amount of power that I am expending on my extracurricular activities, like the wards and all of that nasty business over in the Court of Darkness, is a cost incurred in addition to my usual responsibilities as High King. And it means that something needs to give …” His hand slid down my arm until it was curled around my wrist, the pad of his pointer finger against my pulse.
Embers trailed his touch. I felt the vibrations of his voice in my core, setting things on fire.
“This palace—this city —is all I have that I am willing to give.”
I could not help the carnal sensation that swept over me as he moved his head, tracing the outline of my ear with his nose. The nape of my neck tingled with a delicate and desperate ache. He hummed in response, as if he could sense it, and I gasped. “Lucais.”
The profound depth in the sound of his voice was simply unfair. “Yes, bookworm?” he purred.
I was dizzy and distracted.
Focus, I told myself.
“H-how bad is it?” I stammered. My lungs were disconnected. I was suffocating under his touch. Swaying, my body leaned further back against the High King.
His nose skated down the side of my neck. I felt his lips press into my shoulder, kissing the groove inside of my collarbone, and it burned a line of fire all the way down my arm.
“Oh,” he groaned, dragging his lips up the side of my neck until he could burn another kiss into my flesh, placing it inside of the hollow beneath my ear. “It’s cataclysmic .”
I felt in his touch, more than heard in his voice, the suggestion that we were no longer talking about the damage to the palace or the price he paid for the use of his powers. We were talking about the two of us …
His teeth nipped my earlobe.
I tilted my head back instinctively, but pulled a deep breath into my lungs and gulped down the excess saliva pooling in my mouth. I could do very little about the wetness gathering between my legs, but at least I could stop myself from drooling on him.
“I like it better when you hate me.”
“I hate what you do to me,” Lucais replied softly, and my stomach flipped.
Using the hand wrapped around my wrist, he brought my arm up to rest across my chest and laid his hand out over mine, linking our fingers.
His other arm snaked around my waist with the pressure of a constrictor python.
When I turned my head to one side, he sank his teeth into my neck hard enough to leave a mark and send a shot of arousal straight to my nipples.
I couldn’t help it. I moaned, and the sound echoed through the abandoned wing, amplifying the intensity of every sense and sensation.
“I know that you’re a dreadful idea, Aura. But there’s this damn mating bond telling 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 just do it?”
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.”