Chapter Thirty-Three
NIC
It’s too much and yet not enough.
Laurel flits behind my eyes, prickles inside my ears, seeing and hearing all of this.
I thought I was behaving normally. Thought Lola would believe me, draw close enough to share a few secrets to get Laurel off my back. But somehow, without even dipping into my magic, Lola has picked up on my tiny deceptions.
She’s calling my bluff.
I release one of my hands from the hoop to lift the voratium frames from her nose. Her eyes revert back to their normal blue hue, the shape rounding, the left eye drifting outward.
“There you are,” I breathe.
She shivers as my words skate across her mouth, and the feel of those shivers . . . Gods.
Laurel is going to be upset.
But maybe I don’t care.
I clip Lola’s glasses to my collar, then slide my hand under her hair, tilting her head back. Her fingers tighten on my neck, and her tongue flicks out to wet her lower lip, setting off a cataclysm inside me. I cannot bear it any longer.
Stars damn me.
I pull her mouth to mine.
It’s as soft and delicious as I remember. A faint sweetness of something she must have eaten after supper. Supple and slow and sensuous.
Her tongue slips between my lips, skating against my own, and my body ignites.
Every word she’s spoken, every time her curves have brushed up against me on this hoop . . . I’ve been teetering on the edge of an oblivion that won’t just claim me—it’ll claim Laurel and, in turn, everyone I love. Everyone I care about. Everyone in Aethera.
But with just one plea, the man inside me who has craved her since the moment I met her shudders. When she tugs my hair, he lifts his head. When she pulls her torso flush against mine, it’s all I can do to keep him tamped down.
This kiss cannot be too passionate. Already, Laurel’s leeching into my limbs. My arms stiffen. My fingers go solid. My head pulls back. She may be allowing this, but for how much longer?
If I want to stay in control, if I want to keep everyone safe, I need to lift Lola from my lap and set her down, gather my things and leave.
But she is stunning. With stage-light glow glinting in her hair, her blue eyes dancing, her cheeks flushed pink, and her lips so full and soft.
Her tongue twines with mine as she angles her head to deepen our kiss, and I find my hands fisting in her hair, dragging her harder and deeper against me in spite of all the warnings blaring in my head.
The hoop is still twirling, slow and steady, and I’ve always had a high spin tolerance, but with her clinging to me like this, I’m suddenly dizzy, instinct taking over.
I release her hair, and she arches, eliciting an involuntary groan from deep within me.
My hand skates down her spine until it splays against her hip.
I squeeze once, then draw it lower to where her skirt has ridden up, teasing it higher to caress the bare skin of her upper knee with my thumb and then farther still to grasp the curve of her muscular thigh.
She whimpers into my mouth, and Laurel ignites in me, unfurling hot and fierce and suddenly desperate. A thrill, a passion, a pain.
I have gone too far.
I should pull away from Lola while I still can. Stop before Laurel takes hold and does something I can’t undo. Leave before I damn myself.
But Lola’s arms tighten around my neck, and her lips move to my ear. Her tongue swirls along the outer curve.
Gods.
I battle Laurel back with everything I am, desperate to hang on to this moment for just one minute—just one kiss—longer. I hoist Lola tightly against me and swing down from the hoop, crashing her onto the mat beneath me. My pulse roars in my ears.
Fire licks through me as Laurel scrabbles for purchase.
“Not yet,” I growl, hoping Laurel can hear it.
“What?” Lola gasps, but I press my mouth against hers, pinning her into the mat.
My hands shake as they rove over her body, as one fists her hair, as the other drags at the buttons on her jacket. My heart slams quadrupletime as the fragile grip I have on the ice in my veins begins to thaw. As heat drowns me. As anger and fear and grief and wild, desperate want flood my soul.
I slide Lola’s arms out of her sleeves one at a time, breaking the kiss to draw desperate hands down both of her biceps as her mouth makes its way along my jaw.
“Do you believe me yet?” I breathe against her mouth, rocking against her.
“Almost,” she gasps, fingernails digging into my back. “I might need . . . some more . . . convincing . . .”
Her thick thighs tighten around my middle as I lower my weight against her.
Laurel claws through me, splintering along every nerve, and it is agony. She stops me midkiss, making my hands freeze where they’re knotted in Lola’s skirt.
But I. Am. Not. Done.
I hover over Lola, frozen in battle, body rigid.
“Nic?” Lola whispers, eyes darting back and forth between mine. “Are you all right?”
My tendons shred, my heart swells, my lungs freeze. If I resist for too much longer, my heart may short out, and though nothing else has been able to kill me since the moonshard broke on Laurel’s hands, its magic may be the one thing that could.
What would it do to Laurel then, if she were the cause of my demise, too? What horrors would she wreak to numb the pain? What excuses would she invent to absolve herself of the blame?
All that agony—hers and everyone else’s that would come after—would be my doing.
Shame floods me, white and hot and fast as wildfire.
She seizes control, shoving me to my feet like a puppet, launching me away from Lola.
The door slams open behind us, and Laurel whirls me around.
Forsyth and Ostena pelt toward us. Forsyth launches into me before Laurel is able to react, ramming me into the floor as Ostena lunges for Lola.
I try to move my limbs, but Laurel has full control, and she does not have the combat experience I do. She fumbles a weak punch, and Forsyth jams a pistol into my throat.
Lola screams, and panic jolts through me.
But I am powerless.
“Magnolia St. James,” Ostena grinds out. “How kind of you to come out of hiding.”
The glasses at my throat . . . the crowning piece to Lola’s disguise . . . I took them off, and now they’ve recognized her. I buck against Laurel’s control again to no avail.
Ostena drags Lola by the hair toward the door, a knife against her throat.
“Just kill her and be done with it,” Forsyth snaps. “St. James wants her to be his right hand. We bring her back; we lose our jobs.”
“If we don’t bring her back, we’ll lose our lives,” Ostena retorts.
“Not if we say it was the Liar,” Forsyth says, jerking the pistol harder against my neck.
Ostena frowns, considering me. Then her mouth curls. “I do think he’d believe that.”
Her arm tenses, but Lola screams, and my magic shards through me to her, exploding around Ostena. The blond woman shrieks, spine arching, fingers twisting as the dagger clatters out of her hands.
Lola snatches it.
“Let go of him,” she snaps at Forsyth, slashing the knife toward him as Ostena mewls on the floor behind her.
“You stop whatever you’re doing to Ostena,” he growls back, “or I’ll shoot.”
“The Liar can’t die.”
“Should we test that theory, love?” Forsyth cocks the trigger.
Laurel slams down hard on the stream of magic coming from me, cutting off Lola’s source. Startled, Lola swings her dagger toward Ostena, but she’s an instant too late. Ostena rockets against her, prying the knife out of her hands.
Once again, I’m not enough.
Once again, it is my fault.
Shame whips through me, harder and faster with every pulse of adrenaline through my system, and with it come a thousand memories.
I am seven years old, and my brother is being whipped, and I am lying to stop his torture.
I am fourteen years old, and I’m pleading with him not to steal a tiara.
I am seventeen years old, and I’m claiming I stole the moonshard, and the magic is screaming through me, capturing that lie, trapping everything I am and everything I ever thought I was inside a block of ice in my chest.
I am twenty-one years old, and a thief has stolen a pocket watch from my casino. Has challenged me on a roof. Has danced with me on my own dance floor. And suddenly, that frigid block of ice is less a cocoon of safety and more a cage.
I am turning her away. I am closing down my casino. I am running, running, running.
I claw for purchase, but I’m in a tunnel. I’m underwater. I’m buried alive.
There is no air, no breathing, no feeling in this place. Only cold, cold, cold.
“Nic!” Lola cries from somewhere far away.
The Liar puppet laughs.
But I do not.
Because I am not a liar, and I am not a puppet, and while I may have made mistakes, I won’t let this be my fault.
I drag myself upward, outward, into my arms and my legs, my eyes and my heart, claw through with teeth and with fire, with anger and with passion.
Lola, I try to say, but my mouth only laughs Laurel’s laugh.
Stop! I try to shout, but she raises my hands, wields my magic.
I have done terrible things, but there is no immortal god ready to rain fire on my head nor judgmental parent to rain blows to my skin. Now that I am free of them, what do I fear?
A curse screaming in my ears telling me I deserve this. Pain in my veins reminding me I am wrong, I am bad, I am worthless. Magic freezing me solid to shield me from my wickedness.
But I am more.
More than the curse, more than the mistakes, more than the liar I’ve become.
As that thought takes root, the shame in me roils into something warmer, and I twitch a finger.
It moves, ever so slightly.
And that’s when I realize what Laurel’s magic feeds on. Not sins, as she claimed, and not fear, either.
Laurel’s magic feeds on shame.
I think of the people she targeted at Nocturne’s opening ceremony.
How she focused on the man who begged for forgiveness for minor infractions, but ignored the one who purposely wronged people and felt no remorse.
The difference wasn’t their sin. The difference was the hatred they heaped upon themselves for it.
Have I given shame the ability to control me?
Laurel’s hold slips. I claw my way through the cracks and back into my own body, seize my hands and feet, my arms, my head, my heart.
I lunge for Ostena just as Forsyth’s pistol goes off.
And then there is only pain.