Chapter Twenty-Five Taissa
Chapter Twenty-Five
Taissa
Well.
This is concerning.
(Well, perhaps concerning is a wee bit of an understatement. If not for the absolute horrors of the past few weeks, Taissa is pretty certain chills would be running up and down her spine at the sight of…this.)
She’d not had time to etch any level of a Protection glyph onto her doorway between practice, the interview, and what Kion is calling her “swot-off” with James.
Or, fine, maybe she’d had time but forgot as she dashed into her rooms to retrieve their one remaining jar of púca powder, this one the Branston Pickle container.
It was imperative, after all, to confirm with James that it matched what he’d seen as a child.
But now she’s very much regretting not taking the few extra seconds to carve out the glyph as she stares at the empty drawer of her dresser, where all of her underwear had once sat.
Everything from Taissa’s sleep shorts to thongs to bras to the limited lingerie in her possession is just… gone.
All she’d been trying to do was get her pajamas together before her shower.
Hands on her hips, Taissa blinks down at the barren drawer.
Her sports bra, she realizes, the one she’d lost soon after the Dust Bite.
Had she really lost it? Or had someone—the same person James had seen sneaking into her bedroom—taken it?
Déjà vu, this is. She’d had a stalker, a few years back, who’d stolen her knickers in this same fashion.
The Wyverns had been at a hotel—in Great Hartwich, actually, not very far from here—readying to play the NCL Phoenixes.
When she’d returned from the game, her entire underwear drawer had been entirely cleared out and a box of heart-shaped chocolates had been left on her bed’s pillow.
The magistrates had tested the chocolates for drugs and found copious amounts of Tickle My Fancy, a potent black-market love potion.
Her poor dear knickers had never been recovered, nor her stalker’s identity discovered.
Security upped after that, and then when she was kicked out of the league, well, she assumed even the stalker was disappointed in her. (That had cut strangely deep.)
Well, now—if the look of this is right—it appears her stalker may very well be back. The knickers, that’s what those crime shows call an MO, isn’t it?
But what could anybody want with her underwear?
What would they possibly do—
(Oh. She jerks her mind away from that train of thought. No. Nope. Not today.)
Taissa grips her qyl tightly in her hand as she marches out of the room, out of the flat, and right up to Kion Locke’s door. She knocks, sharply.
There’s no answer. Perhaps he’s turned in for the night. Or perhaps he’s gone out hunting the Withers despite their agreement to strategize first before confronting a group of murderous Unseelie.
Some fear finally kicking in (should she question why her immediate response is to run to Locke?), Taissa presses her mouth close to the wood, and, taking a deep breath, shouts his name against the door.
It opens less than a second later, and Taissa staggers inside, almost into his arms.
Almost. Not quite. (More’s the pity. Because he’s shirtless. Very, very shirtless.)
“Cho,” he says warily as the door clicks shut.
(Stop staring at his pecs, she tells herself, but then that only makes her stare at the V-bone just above the seam of his briefs.)
“Cho,” says Kion again, this time with concern.
(Her mouth is so dry. And his abs are so…numerous.)
“Taissa,” says Kion, and the shock of hearing him call her by her name, her first name, yanks her out of her trance with force. Wide-eyed, she stares at his face, slack-jawed in surprise.
“Did you,” she says, “just call me ‘Taissa’?”
Never. Not once, in all the years they’ve known each other, has Kion Locke called Taissa Cho by her first name.
It’s always been “Cho.” Cho and Locke. Locke and Cho.
Her heart beats faster and faster as their gazes remained locked, stuck like an old key in a rusted hole.
She can’t look away. Perhaps she doesn’t want to.
Her name on his lips. It’s…
(Erotic.)
(Sensual.)
Strange. It’s strange.
Kion’s Adam’s apple bobs slightly as he swallows. He ignores her question. “Are you okay?” he asks hoarsely. “What are you doing out here?”
“Oh,” she mumbles, blinking. Right. “Somebody has stolen my underpants,” she announces.
And if there’s any way to succinctly kill a moment, Taissa has found the quickest of them all.
She watches as Kion goes stiff (not like that), his eyes darkening, his brows slashing downward. Fury. It’s that emotion again, deadly and potent. A muscle in his jaw jumps. “Show me,” he demands, pushing past her to the door.
It’s then that she sees his scars.
A latticework. That’s the first word that pops into her mind as she stares at them, at the brutal crisscrossing over the expanse of his back, at the burns and the deep, silvered ruins of flesh.
Her heart quivers, and then breaks, in her chest. It’s more horrific than she ever could have dreamed, and it doesn’t stop after the stretch of his spine.
The backs of his legs. The backs of his arms. Running like a river down his limbs.
He freezes, suddenly, near the unopened door, as if realizing what she’s just seen. What she’s been able to see, without his Glamour glyph. Kion trembles, his head hanging for a long, terrible moment. His shoulders…slump.
The pillar of a man that she knows—the unstoppable force of cutthroat words and unyielding muscle—is frightened. She can feel it. It’s in the air around them, thick and potent.
Perhaps she makes a small, strangled sound.
Perhaps she reaches for him instinctively, wanting nothing but to draw him forward and to comfort the boy he had once been.
As if in a dream, she doesn’t know what she does.
Only that, suddenly, one of his hands is in her hands and she’s tugging him gently back to face her.
His eyes. Oh, Morgana, the wretched look in his eyes.
She wants—no, no she needs—to make it go away. Guided by that terrible need, she slides her free hand up his chest, up his neck, until she cups his face in her hand, standing up on her tiptoes.
“I don’t want your pity,” he rasps, and there’s shame in his voice. It cuts her just like any knife would.
“I know,” she murmurs, and absentmindedly strokes a stray lock of dark hair away from his sharp cheekbones.
Kion’s throat bobs. His breathing is shallow, and he’s watching her like a hawk poised for flight. But he doesn’t need to flee. Not from her. Never from her.
(Unless she’s chasing him around tables with a butter knife, as she once did in the carriwitchet dining hall during a particularly tense World Cup.)
Taissa angles her face up toward his. He bows his head, his forehead touching hers. His eyes flutter shut, and his harsh breathing softens, ever so slightly. One of his large, calloused hands slides to the small of her back and gently pulls her closer to him.
For a long, long moment, they stay like that.
“You definitely called me ‘Taissa,’ ” she whispers after a while, and is rewarded by a low rumbling from the depths of Locke’s throat.
“I did not.”
“Your neck is flushing,” she replies, smiling up at him. “And that’s your tell. Numpty.”
“Menace.”
“Dobber.”
“Newbie.”
He taps her nose and she breaks away, grinning. “Boop,” says Kion, delayed.
“ ‘Boop’?” she asks in disbelief. “ ‘Boop’?”
Kion’s brows snap back down and he bristles. “You’re hearing things today, Cho.”
“Must be, Locke.”
It’s ridiculous. A sure-to-be-stalker has just stolen her underwear, and Kion unwittingly revealed the scars of his darkest secret to her, but the two of them have never smiled at each other, not like this. (Her cheeks are beginning to hurt.)
One minute and one Glamour glyph later, neither of them are smiling. Kion’s staring down at her empty drawer, his arms folded over his chest.
“Fucking fuck,” he grinds out. “You’re not staying here tonight, Cho.”
“They’re not around anymore. Probably. If I do a Protection glyph—”
“I forbid it,” he nearly snarls, and that—that’s the captain coming out in him.
He might not be wearing the purple armband at the moment, but he might as well be.
“You’ll not be in here tonight. Not until the magis finds whoever the hells is fucking with you.
” Kion is already yanking out his phone and scrolling through his contacts for Rowan Elder’s number.
Exasperated, Taissa looks at him. “Then where, pray tell, shall I sleep?” There aren’t extra bedrooms in the Nexitory. And she doesn’t quite feel like sleeping in the media room or a closet.
Kion looks at her like it should be obvious. His eyes darken.
“With me.”
“Maybe they’re connected,” Taissa murmurs sometime later, curled up on Kion’s leather sofa (presumably where she’ll be spending the night).
He sits next to her, his jaw tight as he types out a clearly violent email (there are lots of capital letters) to Elder after his grand total of five calls went straight to voicemail. “The curse and my, ah, stalker.”
Kion, to her knowledge, has had his fair share of them, too: There was that (blonde and leggy) girl he’d dated, and she’d turned out to be a stalker herself (although how was he supposed to know?) and when Locke had supposedly ended things, she’d burned down his summer house in Saintfast.
On the telly, an old Minor League carriwitchet game is playing on mute. This must be how Kion spends a fair share of his evenings: a glass of Scotch and an NCL rerun. She watches from the corner of her eyes as the NCL Rarins play against the Rocs, squabbling bloodthirstily in the air.
“Hells if I know,” Kion mutters. He’s become very tense.
Protective.
And Taissa can’t deny that she…well…sort of likes it (not that she’s very pleased about her bras being in the hands of some disgusting burglar). Warm, fuzzy feelings have started in her chest. Intoxicatingly warm, fuzzy feelings.
(Oh, dear.)