Eight - Evangeline
As we headed towards the restaurant where we were to meet with the Dame of Midnights in twenty minutes, I studied the himbo walking beside me. He walked stiffly, his eyes full of anger, and I kicked myself for not having spotted the coloured contact lens hiding his one green eye. It was a trait all necromancers shared as it allowed them to see the realm of purgatory.
I had dozens of assassins after me, two enemy kings, the entire Razian underground, and half of our nobles, and yet…this guy had been the one to kill me. He was a nobody, just a dummy I’d used to practise my magic on.
Worse, I now owed him for saving my life.
It was embarrassing.
If my daughter ever found out, she’d never let me live this down.
At the thought of Aurelia, my body tensed. Did he know about her? Was he planning on killing her to hurt me? Forcing me to watch as she died over and over again? She was the only person in the world I truly cared about, the only one whose death would break me like Testes so clearly wanted.
Forcing my words to come out as a tease, I asked, “So did you come all the way over here to kill anyone else, or am I just your special lady?”
He glared at me, his jaw twitching, and I delighted in how easy he was to irritate. My therapist kept telling me I annoyed people as a way to keep them distant, too scared of letting anyone in in case they died like Aurelia, nearly destroying me like her death had, but that was a bunch of hogwash. I loved pissing people off because it let me see the real them. No one was more honest than when they were angry.
And when you knew the truth of a person, you could manipulate them easier. You could understand them and what they would do. For instance, although Testes hated me a lot, I was pretty certain he wouldn’t just reveal my identity to the mafia as he wanted the pleasure of killing me all to himself.
“No,” he said, the word clipped and hard and totally not buyable as coming from a husband who loved his partner enough to go to therapy.
Grabbing his arm, I pulled him into an alley. In one step, he yanked himself free. “Don’t touch me.”
Rolling my eyes, I cloaked our words so no one could hear us speak. “Look. We’re pretending to be married. If you can’t fool the Dame, who’s seen hundreds of couples, if not thousands, you’re going to get the both of us killed, and I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re dead, you can’t then kill me.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you mocking me?”
“No, I’m explaining things clearly to you because I gave you two-step instructions, and you’re still managing to fuck them up.”
“Married couples hate each other all the time. That’s why we’re going to therapy.”
“But they don’t go if they don’t want to fix things, and you clearly don’t want to fix things.”
“There’s nothing to fix.”
I closed my eyes briefly, telling myself I needed him alive. “It’s called being undercover, Testes.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Looking at him, my face going soft as I stepped closer, I murmured, “I’m sorry, Redric. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re right to be angry at me for everything I did, and I know it’s hard for you to be helping me after how much I hurt you.” Reaching forward, I touched his arm.
His thick muscles bunched beneath me, but he didn’t pull away. Dropping my gaze, I trailed my hand down his arm. My words were soft and wobbly, whispered secrets I had kept hidden for so long. “You know…I did what I did to you because I didn’t want to kill you.”
I took a deep breath, warring with the words inside me. “I felt it that first moment we locked eyes. We’re –” I swallowed, pulling my touch away as I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Lifemates.” The word shuddered out of me, and I looked up to see his eyes widen. He looked so utterly shocked, I couldn’t help myself.
I laughed, dropping my arms with a grin. “See, Testes? That is how you play a married couple. Fucking learn to act.”
His jaw tightened as his eyes hardened back into a knife-sharp glaze. Grabbing my throat, he yanked me to him.
My smile didn’t drop, knowing damn well he was too noble to go back on his word. Even when we’d been at literal war, he’d had an honour system that had made me gag. He couldn’t attack anyone who wasn’t holding a weapon. No stabbing in the back. No kicking people while they were down. There was also the fact that he couldn’t kill me right now given the influx of magic in my body. My veins damn well buzzed with it, and if he managed to kill me, my body would be too broken to resurrect.
His fingers tightened, but it was the smirk on his lips that caused my pulse to hammer. Leaning in close, he sneered, “What if we are lifemates? What if my obsession over you, my ability to find you even when you’re in disguise is because that’s true?”
Everything inside me stilled. Lungs. Muscles. Heart. Then it all exploded in a furious ball of electricity. There was no fucking way. “Jace can spot me in any disguise too,” I said, the words flat as I struggled to keep them free of the energy twitching my every nerve.
His face lowered close to mine. “If you are my lifemate, I am going to find you in every lifetime” –although the chance of one finding the literal other half of their soul was astronomical, once found, the two halves would be pulled together on every rebirth– “and kill you in all of them.”
Oh thank gods. A sigh of relieve flooding my system, my pulse finally dropped down to normal. I understood fighting and being hated. That was fine, nothing new as long as he didn’t get all soft on me and fall in love. Not that we were lifemates. I’d just said that to mock him.
“Don’t worry. We’re not lifemates,” I said when his fingers finally loosened. Rubbing my neck, I kept my gaze on him. “But that still doesn’t change the fact that you need to learn to act like you love me.”
Uneasiness smothered his face. “I’m sure she’ll see that you’re impossible to love.”
“Ouch.”
His lips twitched, then flattened. “And we’ll be newly married. An arranged marriage where you’re dragging me to this because you want us to fall in love or some other sappy shit.”
I cocked my head. Maybe he wasn’t so thick after all. “Are you comfortable with playing you?” I’d banked on him wanting to pretend to be someone else, but if he was willing to play Vylian Redric who had come over here to claim his mafia bride –Elana, the identity I was currently playing, being well known as a ‘supplier of goods’– then that could really work.
“Who else would I be?”
I blinked at him. “Someone undercover…” I said slowly before shaking my head. “It doesn’t matter. You play you. You came over to find a bride because you want access to Raza’s underbelly. You run a network of mercenaries for hire –”
“I would never –”
“It’s acting, Redric. Back in Vyla. But now that our two kingdoms are at peace, you’re thinking of branching out.”
Which would give us a legit reason to want to infiltrate Midnights, easing suspicions about our sudden arrival. “You hired Smoke to assassinate the two whose places we’re taking.”
“Smoke?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. You don’t need to know much about her. None of her clients even know what she looks like.” I nodded. “This could work.”
And if I could convince Ashema to strike a deal with the Vylians instead of the Alzan king… I could kill two brats with one stone.
Thinking of kids, my mind wondered briefly to the girl who’d been trying to sell her brother. I hoped she got a good price for him. So many people took advantage of kids these days.
He exhaled sharply as he ran a hand through his red hair. “I might know a few mercenaries whose names I can drop.”
“You know Heshka and Vine? Those are the two big ones we know in Raza. I don’t think she’ll know any others.”
“Vine, no, but Heshka and I fought together in the war.”
“Did I meet him?”
“He joined our squadron after you left.”
I nodded. “Okay. So you came over to hire me to get you into Midnights. That way, we’re not even a real couple. We’re pretending to pretend to be a real couple. At the meeting, we’ll just tell her we’re newly weds. She’ll be paranoid about us suddenly appearing a day before the resort is to start, but she’ll want to know who we are, so she’ll most likely let us in. At the resort is where she will interrogate us to uncover the truth, and that’s when we’ll mention the mercenary stuff. Got it?”
“Why not just say that at the start?”
“Because if you make people work to uncover your lies, they’re more likely to believe them.”
He clearly didn’t know if he should be disturbed or impressed by me.
If he didn’t hate me, he’d totally be impressed.
“Okay. Got it,” he said slowly.
“Good. Now there’s just one thing we have left to settle.” I paused, wondering how best to get him on board with this. Figuring I was just going to have to come out and say it, I said, “You need to kiss me like you don’t hate me.”
He stilled, and I pressed on, not giving him time to resist the idea. “You came over here for a business deal. You can’t be thinking about killing me every time you look at me.”
I dropped my eyes to his lips. “So just close your eyes and relax. I don’t care what you think about, but we need to get this right.”
“No.” He took a step back, and I took one towards him.
“If you want to live long enough to kill me over and over again, you’re going to have to. You might think you can drag me away from here and torture me for years instead, get your revenge that way, but you only got the drop on me out of pure luck. You and I both know you won’t get that chance again.”
He had never stood a chance against me when we’d fought in the war. I’d been a teen; he’d been an adult. I had then gone on to learn every dirty trick in the library and had even written a few books on it myself. He still held onto his noble morality and honour. He was angry and pissed, but he had a good soul. I’d clocked that as soon as I’d woken up and realised the chef’s body had been moved instead of beheaded. If we’d fought properly today, there would be no contest, and I knew he knew that.
His nostrils flaring, he leaned down and kissed me. It was rough and awkward and clear to anyone that he was forcing himself to touch me, his body stiff and unyielding.
Releasing me, he stepped back. “There.”
Biting down my urge to mock him, I just grabbed the back of his neck and leaned up to kiss him again. My fingers threaded through his hair. My lips roved over his soft and gentle, exploratory passes that didn’t demand him to open. We didn’t need to kiss with tongue. I just needed him to bloody relax.
Trying not to listen to the ticking clock in the back of my head telling me we only had a few more minutes before our meeting with the Dame, I concentrated on the feel of his body.
He was still stiff, and not in the good way, so I grabbed his hand and lifted it to my breast. “You don’t need to care about me,” I murmured against his mouth. “Just use me like some fuck toy. Just a thing to give you pleasure.” My tongue flicked out against him. “Or someone to punish –”
His mouth slanted across mine as his fingers dug into my breast. Squeezing it hard, he dropped his other hand to my ass and hauled me to him. Twenty-five years of sexual frustration clawed its way out of him, his tongue pushing into me as his cock hardened against my belly, then my pussy as he lifted me up.
“Just use you?” he rasped as his hand left my breast to wrap around my throat. “Punish you? So you can find pleasure while getting me to hate myself even more?”
“Then don’t let me come,” I challenged. “Hit me. Choke me. Do whatever you want to me with no thought to my pleasure.”
“Fuck your mouth?” he growled.
“Don’t ask –”
His tongue stole the rest of my words, filling my mouth as he pushed in. There was no technique to his kiss, no hint of foreplay, just a raw need to dominate. To punish. To take what he wanted and give nothing in return.
“So I could take you like a whore right here in the street –”
My pulse quickened as he yanked up my shirt and pushed down my bra. Latching onto my nipple, he bit it hard. I jerked against him, my hands curling around his head to shove him away, knowing he wanted me to resist, to fight him so he didn’t feel like he was pleasuring me.
“I could sell you to my associates. Take you home and pass you around –”
When he latched onto my other breast, I cried out, unable to stop myself as pleasure ripped through me.
Redric stilled as I shuddered, and I knew I’d just ruined it for him, but fuck, my body was hot and my thighs were wet. He might be shit with his dick, but his tongue was fucking wicked.
Lifting his head, he glared at me. “That good enough for you?”
I swallowed down my hammering pulse. “You were a bit rough, but it’ll have to do.”
Genuine heat flared in his eyes over my ‘discomfort’, and I tried my damnest not to let him see the affect that was having on me. He might hate me. He might want to kill me over and over again, but to me, he was just a guy I could sleep with.
Such luxuries were few and far in between for me given I rarely let my guard down enough to have sex with someone. Case in point, I had a couple hours ago after nearly five years of celibacy and had got killed for it.
But knowing Redric was going to kill me...it was oddly relaxing. I knew what the outcome would be, and I knew he would resurrect me after. There wasn’t any real risk.
“You’re delusional,” Aurelia said, shaking her head. “You need serious help.”
“What I need,” I replied as I eyed the bulge in Redric’s robes, “is a day of hard fucking to last me for the next five years.”
She snorted.
I licked my lips and prayed to the gods I could rile him up enough he would slam me against a wall.