22. Doesn’t She Look Gorgeous in That Dress? #3
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.”
“What do you 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 goodbye to 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 my abdomen 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.
The heat building in my core intensified to the point of discomfort as he nipped my lower lip. Using the hand knitted in my hair, fingers pressed with gentle but firm pressure against my scalp, he tilted my head to the side to gain better access to my mouth.
I might have melted.
I was so hot, and I was so wet—
I am fucking melting.
My fingers reached for the waistband of his pants.
“Aura,” Wrenlock growled softly, tearing his mouth away. He rested his forehead against mine, panting quietly. I could practically feel the urge to undress me coursing through his body, triggering the tiniest flinch of his muscles or pulse of a vein. “We’re in the middle of a very crowded room.”
Fuck. My hand froze, and then found a resting place against his hip bone. “Why does this keep happening in the most inappropriate places?”
Slowly, he slid his mouth across my face until his lips brushed the point of my ear.
“Because I haven’t fucked you yet,” he murmured.
The bang of my heart hitting my chest was audible.
He heard it and sighed. “Baby, I don’t think we’re going to be able to focus until my cock is buried inside your sweet little cunt and you’re sighing foreign curses into my mouth. ”
There was a glitch in my brain—a momentary malfunction where I could have sworn I blacked out and would have fallen to the floor if it had not been for his arms locked around my waist. Holy fuck. My head swam with the heady scent of his cologne and the even headier impact of his words.
He wasn’t my soulmate.
But he was honest. He answered my questions. He apologised. Wrenlock never held back when he had the choice, and I felt a pull to him strong enough to realign the stars.
Glancing around the room, I saw Batre and Morgoya watching us from the sidelines. They were too far away for me to catch their expressions, but a thought slid into place in my mind, instantly establishing roots.
Do we appear to them as they appeared to me?
They were not fated to be together, but they were perfect, and it was enough to challenge the notion that an Oracle knew our hearts better than we knew them ourselves.
Do I know my heart?
“I need to focus,” I whispered shakily. “Take me—take me somewhere else.”
His breath hitched. “Aura?”
“ Wrenlock, ” I returned sharply. “Please. Take me somewhere else. Take me outside. I just need to get out of this room.”
“Okay.” He lifted me into his arms, and—
In a blur of colour and the whoosh of wind, we evanesced.
I pressed my nose into the crook of his shoulder and tried to breathe through the vertigo.
We stopped moving.
The air fell still around us, and the sounds of music and laughter became a distant clink between closed doorways.
I opened my eyes, blinking rapidly to correct my eyesight.
We were in a large stone hallway illuminated only by moonlight pouring into the palace through tall, arched windows.
I could discern nothing more than the shadow of nightfall, which graced the tops of a tree line through the fog coasting by the palace.
Wrenlock moved to release me from his grip, and some raw form of insanity took hold of me.
Grabbing his face in my hands, I practically jumped back into his arms, pushing off the ground from the balls of my feet and claiming his mouth in a desperate, clumsy kiss.
Stumbling forwards, his arms snaked around me and I fell back against the nearest wall.
I felt a twinge against my spine as he opened his mouth to let my tongue explore him again, heard a splintering crack as a picture frame fell and he hitched one of my legs around his waist. Wrenlock released a moan so deep I felt the reverberations of it reach my chest.
He trailed hot kisses adorned with gentle bites and flicks of his tongue all the way along my jaw and down the column of my throat.
I tilted my head to the side for ease of access as his mouth brushed my collarbone.
One of his canines scraped my shoulder, and the sensation sent a wave of unbridled pleasure rolling out across my body.
Everything that had ever been started and left unfinished came racing to the surface, tackling my nervous system with violence and desperation.
“Please,” I found myself saying. Fuck, I am begging . “Please, I need you. I can’t think straight. I can’t take it anymore.”
He groaned. “Aura, I don’t mind waiting. Until you’re ready, until you’re sure—”
“I do,” I insisted. “I mind. You said that if I had asked a third time…” I took his face in my hands and brought it up to mine again. It was ghosted by moonlight and shadow. We locked gazes. “This is me asking you.”
He studied my eyes intently.
“Please,” I added after a moment.
“I thought you’d never ask for me again.”