Chapter 28
Lucina
Iweigh a thousand pounds.
My limbs, my chest, my organs—they’re all heavy and impossible to move. It’s a miracle that I’m able to open my eyes.
My hands—Alesi’s hands—grip the armrests of a chair. How I was able to maintain my illusion in the midst of whatever just happened is beyond my comprehension at the moment.
The first breath I take is like pulling something sticky through my lungs, but I’m instantly rewarded when oxygen goes straight to my brain, sharpening my senses a fraction.
I lift my heavy head to survey my surroundings—
And I freeze.
Judging by the dreary opulence and dim lighting of the room I’m in, I’m still somewhere in the Estate, but that isn’t what makes my blood run cold.
A man is leaning against the door.
He stands with arms crossed, head tilted, and most of his face is hidden in a shadow.
Even at an incline, he’s tall enough that he nearly reaches the doorframe, and I know he’s breathing because I watch his chest rise and fall more than a few times before he straightens, arms falling to his sides.
“Man,” he drawls, and I flinch at the foreign cadence to his voice. An accent I’ve never heard before. “That could have been really bad, huh?”
I rush to get to my feet, but my body isn’t as ready for that movement as my brain is, and I stumble backwards, catching myself against the wall behind the chair.
The man pushes off the door, taking a graceful stride forward. Then another. And on his third step towards, he moves into a beam of moonlight shining through the window beside me, and it fully illuminates his face.
I stiffen, flat as a board against the wall.
He isn’t Sol. He isn’t Rogue. He isn’t…human.
The symmetry of his face is too perfect—like it was sculpted this way.
Intentional. Custom. But his flawless ivory skin isn’t what gives him away as a species I don’t recognize.
It’s the vivid, cerulean of his irises. A swirling mass of glittering crystal fractures that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
Clad in a dark suit, the same shade as his neatly styled jet-black hair, he carries himself like he’s much older than he looks, and I’d have to be blind not to think he was beautiful. But he’s striking in a deadly way—like a pretty pattern on a venomous snake or soft petals on a poisonous flower.
Lovely on the outside and lethal everywhere else.
I know it deep in my bones. Like the instinct of prey to know when they are in the presence of a predator.
And there’s no hiding the tremble of fear in my voice. “Who…are you?”
The man smiles, amused by my question. “No,” he says, coming to a stop inches from where I stand. He lowers his head, closing some of the height difference between us, and those bright blue crystals stare straight into my soul. “Let’s talk about who you are first.”
The words crawl over my skin, stealing my breath.
Spine digging into the paneled wall behind me, I strengthen the steady stream of magic powering my illusion and clear my throat. “My name is Ales–”
“Don’t lie to me, Lucina.”
If my heart were made of glass, it would have shattered with how fast it drops to my stomach.
His smile grows. “Parading around as Alesi clearly hasn’t done you any favors. So, why don’t you drop the illusion, hm?” Standing to his full height, he flashes open palms, showing me his empty hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I strengthen my illusion with such force that magic spills into the room.
“Seriously?”
“Who are you?” I ask again, pressing further into the wall.
I’m running entirely on adrenaline, my body sluggish from whatever he used to get me into this room. Whatever he drugged me with.
The man rolls his eyes, casually tucking his hands into his pockets. “I’m not your enemy, you know.”
“That’s exactly what my enemy would say.”
He shrugs. “Actions speak louder.”
I know what he’s insinuating. That he saved me from whatever that guard would have done to Alesi. But he did so by drugging me and tying me to a chair, which, in my opinion, negates the intention behind—
No. Wait.
I glance at the empty chair beside me, finding no sign of any restraint. He…set me in a chair?
When I look back at him, a smirk ghosts his lips.
Panic flares in my chest and I dart to the side, preparing to make a break for it, but he—too easily—steps into my path, anticipating the movement before I’ve even made it.
“Hold on, now,” he takes a step closer, and I flinch back. “I can help you.”
“Help me?” I breathe, my heartbeat wild in my ears. “Help me with what?”
The man nods to the door behind him—to the Estate beyond it. “Freeing them.”
My grip on my illusion falters, but I slam it back into place. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The energy rippling off him darkens, swallowing up all the breathable air between us. “I hate liars,” he hisses, flicking his chin at my clothes. “Drop the illusion.”
With all the Sol magic I gave up in the dungeons, keeping Alesi’s appearance is becoming strenuous, but I’m not giving up on it that easily. This disguise is all I have.
I find the strength to reinforce it, lifting my chin in a false display of confidence.
The movement pulls his attention, his gaze locked on my face and not my hands as I slowly reach for the knife in my waistband.
And when my fingers brush over a whole lot of nothing, my chest caves in.
He senses it—my panic—dark brows lifting in a silent challenge. His eyes never left mine, but maybe it was obvious in my body language, in the way my arm stiffened. Somehow, he’s reading my emotions before I’m even aware that I’m displaying them.
I shift against the wall, inching farther away, and he makes no move to stop me. Not concerned in the slightest that I have a chance of making it past him.
“I saved your life,” he mutters incredulously. “You do realize that, right? If I wanted to hurt you, I would have left you down there.”
Sweat gathers at my lower back, my real voice breaking through Alesi’s accent, “He wouldn’t have killed me.”
The blue in his eyes flares, and for half a second I think he’s going to call attention to the change in my voice.
Instead, the man’s expression shifts into something far more serious. “No,” he shakes his head. “What he wanted to do to Alesi was much worse.”
The breath I inhale gets trapped in my lungs, burning my throat. Something slick drips over my skin in the wake of his statement, slippery like oil, and I can’t help but picture the hungry look on the guard’s face when he finally got his hands on me.
“As I said,” the man sighs, sweeping his gaze down my rigid stance, “she’s not doing you any favors.”
Despite my odds, I take the risk anyway, darting around him and pushing off the wall.
“Nope.”
He grabs my arm and yanks me right back like it’s nothing. Like I’m a mouse he’s just pawed back into the corner.
His fingers stay wrapped around my bicep, squeezing hard enough to keep me in place, and my heart pounds—from fear and from the sheer amount of energy it’s taking to stay upright and keep a solid grip on my magic.
“I have a proposition for you,” he confesses, and my eyes meet his.
For one curious moment. A selfish moment.
There isn’t a single inch of this man that screams trustworthy. Sure, he saved me, but I have no idea what his motivations were for doing so. He hasn’t killed or tried to hurt me, but he won’t tell me who he is, and he won’t let me leave.
My gaze drops to the hold he has on my arm, the illusion flickering in and out around it.
A proposition?
I draw in a deep breath and narrow my eyes on his. Entertaining it could reveal his motives. “What kind of proposition?”
For a moment, he just stares back at me, bright blue irises burning into mine. Then he shakes his head. Slow. Moonlight shifting over his jaw. “I have a proposition for Lucina.”
My hands curl into fists.
I hate that he knows my name, but I hate even more how comfortable he is with saying it. How easily he speaks it and how foreign it sounds in his accent.
“Why?” I challenge.
“Be more specific.”
I shake my head. “No.”
The man’s head tilts, lips twitching ever so slightly. “No?”
A tingling sensation sweeps me from head to toe, and the longer he looks at me, awaiting my response, the more I want to crawl out of my own skin.
“Let me ask you this,” he starts, a stone thrown into the taut silence.
“Why, when a hundred of your people are suffering beneath us, are you refusing to explore the only help you’ve been offered?
Why, knowing the conditions that they are suffering in every minute of every day, are you too stubborn to entertain an ally?
Even a stranger? Are they not worth that risk? ”
I swallow, maintaining his eye contact even though I want nothing more than to avoid it.
“Why,” he lowers his voice, “are you fearless sneaking around this Estate, brave enough to step foot inside it, yet terrified to drop this charade and face me as—”
It’s a relief to sever the connection to my magic.
It flees the second I give it permission to, burying itself at the base of my spine, and he watches the illusion fade, trailing it down my frame as it dissolves—all the way to my boots.
He doesn’t finish his sentence, dragging his gaze back up my body, and as soon as he gets to my face, I expel a rush of power, enough to shove him backwards.
I should have given up my illusion earlier—the extra strength provides much more protection than Alesi’s disguise.
The hit jolts him back only a foot, and his recovery is so graceful that I’m hesitant to even call it a stumble.
I take advantage of the space it grants me, feeling the weight of his attention as I rush across the room and plant myself closer to the door.
There’s a small seating area between us now—not that that would prevent him from getting to me if he wanted to—but he doesn’t take a single step in my direction.
He simply straightens, turns so he’s facing me fully, and stuffs his hands back into his pockets. The feel of his eyes on me is different now. Like the illusion had been a buffer. A two-way mirror that he can now see perfectly through.