Chapter 12 Sam #4
“Half my appeal is my age,” says Rook. “As long as the press get to print clickbait about the teen phenom who can beat up adult magicians, they know they can go viral and make their advertisers happy. But what happens when I turn twenty? What about twenty-five? Thirty? Forty? What then?”
“You won’t be forty when you duel Tamsin Blackwood.”
“Sure. But I will be, twenty-two years from now—if I’m still alive, anyway. And what then?” Rook spreads his hands over the comforter and offers me a wan smile. “How long do I get to stay a child prodigy? No one’s a child forever.”
Unwanted guilt claws at my heart. I’ve never thought about what Rook’s career would look like past age eighteen. At eighteen, he’d be my weapon in my private war against Mateus Blackwood. At eighteen, he’d fulfill the purpose for which I’d forged him.
I never really thought about what would happen after that final battle. To either of us. It never really occurred to me to care, I guess.
Jamie would have cared.
I recoil from the thought. I’m not my brother, and I never will be. No one will be Jamie ever again, not even close.
“Twenty-two years is an awfully long time,” I tell Rook, which is a coward’s answer, but I don’t have anything better for him.
“I don’t think it’s super productive to spend all your time at age eighteen brooding over what your life’s gonna look like a couple decades from now, you know?
For one thing, we have no clue what the world’s even going to be like twenty years from now.
Maybe hot fortysomething-year-old magicians will be all the rage.
Silver foxes making their comeback, or something. ”
Rook doesn’t smile. “I just want to know how long I’ll be relevant for. At least then I’d be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. To be abandoned, I guess. It hurts less if you know it’s going to happen.”
I sigh and straighten the blankets around him. “Is that what you were dreaming about? Being abandoned?”
“I dreamed about you.”
My hands pause on the blankets. “Me?”
He doesn’t make eye contact with me, but there’s a telltale vacant look in his gaze.
Rook gets like this sometimes, the same way he gets petulant or arrogant or insecure.
Sometimes, he’s none of those things. Sometimes, the lights are on with him, but no one’s really home—or someone is, but someone determined to keep their door shut, speaking only through walls and shuttered windows.
“I dreamed that you’d vanished one night,” Rook tells me. “So I looked for you.” He finally raises his eyes toward me, bright and blue and haunted. “I kept looking and looking, but you were gone. I just knew, after a certain point, that you were gone and never coming back.”
I take his hands and squeeze them tight between mine. I pray that it’s enough to remind him he’s awake. That I’m right here with him. “And then you woke up?”
“And then I woke up.” A harsh chuckle escapes him. His hands are clammy and cold between mine, but he doesn’t try to tug them free of my warmth. “And here you were. Thank you, by the way.”
I bow my head. “I’m your second.” I don’t know what else to say but that.
He sighs. “And so you are.” Dryly, he adds, “Cuddling me after my night terrors probably goes beyond even that call of duty, though.”
“I’m an overachiever,” I deadpan. Encouraged by the wan smile that earns me, I barrel on, “You’re not going to lose me, you know.”
And I find that in this moment, our fingers curled together, I mean it. I don’t want to let Rook go. I’ve spent so much of our time together making him mine. My monster of a boy. My weapon. And, against all odds, maybe, just maybe, my friend.
Rook looks down at our entwined fingers. “You know there are rumors about us, right? You and me.”
“There have always been rumors about us.” I roll my eyes. “That’s what happens when a girl and a boy of roughly the same age spend all their time in close quarters. It’s never bothered you before.”
“Who says I’m bothered?”
I do drop his hands at that. “Why bring it up, otherwise?”
“Just to remind you that I’m not the only one that people have eyes on.” Rook’s blue eyes practically glow in the dark at me, his expression deceptively neutral. “Do you really think a second is so invisible?”
I don’t know where this is going, but I don’t like it. “You’re the one they’re interested in. I’m only interesting by association.”
“Not if you keep hanging out with my opponent.”
I balk. “Rook—”
“You were with her out past midnight, Sammy.” The words don’t sound like a rebuke.
Rook speaks softly—unusually softly, for him.
He blinks those thick-lashed blue eyes at me.
“You’re smart enough to know how nuts the Internet will go over me starting beef with Tamsin Blackwood over some stupid question from Jensen Sykes.
You’re right, that can’t be helped at this point.
But what exactly do you think the Internet will do if enough people cotton on to you cozying up with the same girl I’m supposed to destroy in the arena? ”
“And what exactly do you want me to do about that?” I retort.
“Ignore her completely? The second’s job is to study their champion’s opponent.
To make sure you’re ready for anything she throws at you.
” I’m reaching, and I know it, but there’s something hot and heavy in my chest spurring me on. “I need to make sure you win.”
“Why?” Rook sounds genuinely curious. “I know why I need to win. But why does it matter so much to you?”
“It always matters to me. I’m your second, you’re my champion, your wins are my victories, too.”
“You don’t sound like you’re excited for me to win,” my champion says. “You sound like you’re afraid that I’ll lose.”
I try to retort, but I’m out of words. The stink of truth hangs in the air between us.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Rook wags a finger at me, wry faced. “I knew I was right. You’ve never been like this before a duel before.”
“I always study your opponents.”
“Not the way you study the Blackwood girl.” Rook leans forward slightly. “What exactly is she to you?”
What, indeed.
“The way you look at her,” Rook continues slowly, “I don’t know if you hate her or if you’re in love with her. Wouldn’t that be a story for the Internet?”
“Bullshit,” I insist.
“Bullshit that you hate her? Or bullshit you’ve fallen for her?”
“Neither! She’s nothing. You said it yourself.”
Rook shrugs. “Okay.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“And when has the truth mattered to people on the Internet?” Rook’s gaze bores into me.
“If it really matters that much to you, though, it wouldn’t take much to make a different rumor about you come true.
Distract the gossip hounds with a more palatable story than whatever’s going on between you and sweet little Tamsin.
After all, I’m all yours—my time, my energy, my victories.
You said it yourself. And I’m right here.
” He stares up at me through those stupidly thick black lashes.
“You must have thought about it, at least a couple times. Everyone else has, you know. Those rumors about us didn’t come from nowhere—and it’s not just about being the same age. We’re good together, Sam.”
“At magic. We’re good at magic, together.”
He grins. “Precisely. We’d be the power couple of the magical world. No one would be surprised if you and I turned out to be a little more than a duelist and his second. Hell, the press probably expects us to announce we’re dating any day now.”
My mouth goes dry. I hate myself a little for that.
The same way I hate myself for the way my gaze automatically drifts from Rook’s fine-boned face down to his bare, moon-pale torso.
He could be a classical statue, carefully honed, well-earned muscles popping out in stark relief beneath white skin still sheened in sweat.
How many girls back at school would kill to be where I am right now, sitting on a bed with a half-naked Lysander Rook baring his body toward me in the dark?
How many girls have thought about this exact view: Rook, beautiful and vulnerable, staring blue-eyed through long black lashes at them?
Everyone wants a piece of Rook. And now I’m the one who gets to have him—if I want him, that is.
And why wouldn’t I want him? Rook’s objectively one of the hottest people I’ve ever met in real life—and I’ve collected enough unwanted phone numbers from lovelorn girls at school to prove that I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Getting to be Lysander Rook’s girl is the offer of a lifetime.
So why don’t I want to say yes?
“If we got together,” muses Rook, “you’d probably have to quit spending so much time around Tamsin Blackwood. I hear I’m the jealous type. At least according to all the gossips on social media.”
I snap out of my reverie. “Is that what this is?” I demand. “Some weird honeypot ploy to get me to stop hanging out with Tamsin?”
“Would that be so bad?” Rook hasn’t denied the accusation. He looks utterly unashamed, in fact, meeting my gaze directly, unblinking. “I’m your champion, Sam. Don’t I matter more to you than whatever fascination you’ve got with the Blackwood girl?”
I stand up and, with an effort, jerk my gaze away from his body. “This is a ridiculous conversation, and you’re a ridiculous person,” I inform my champion. “I’m going back to bed before you propose some sort of unhinged arranged marriage.”
“You know I’d ask Master Silverstein for your dowry, too.
” Despite his physical beauty, now that the immediate aftermath of the night terror has passed, Rook mostly just looks like what he is: exhausted, probably mildly overtrained, and terribly young.
He grins up at me, defiant blue eyes hauntingly bright over the purple shadows underscoring them. He’s challenging me, even now.
“Don’t be stupid, princess,” I tell my champion. “You’d obviously be the one paying the dowry, not me.”