Chapter 11
“No. Just no.” ~ Myanin
Myanin didn’t move. That was the first problem. The second was that she wanted to, and she could not entirely tell which direction the wanting pointed.
The space between her and Shade had not been wide for several seconds now, and yet the distance had taken on a weight it had no right to.
It pressed against her sternum, thick and humming, charged in a way that had nothing to do with the Nushtonia and everything to do with the male standing in front of her with his hand still hovering less than an inch from her cheek.
He had quietly shifted the ground beneath her feet, and now he was waiting, the way he always waited, to see whether she had noticed.
She had. She just had not yet decided what she was going to do about it, which was, frankly, not her usual style.
She was a woman who decided first and dealt with the consequences after, preferably with a sharp word and a sharper exit.
Standing here weighing options was deeply out of character, and she resented him a little for that, too.
“You’re not making this easier,” she said again. The words came out quieter than the first time, with less bite and more truth than she had meant to put in them.
“I’m not trying to,” Shade replied. “But I’m not screwing with you either. This isn’t me trying to mess up your life, Myanin. I know I’ve done some stupid things in our history together. But, this is not one of those times.”
Shade had never been the kind of male who made anything easier. He made things clearer, which, in her experience, was a much crueler service. And right now, clarity was sitting awfully close to danger, breathing the same air she was.
She dragged her gaze off his face, and the effort of it irritated her, because it should not have required effort at all.
She had stared down monsters, rulers, entire councils of beings who wanted her dead before she finished her morning coffee.
Shade’s eyes should not be the thing that made her pulse misbehave.
Shade’s nearness should not be the thing that made her acutely, infuriatingly aware of every inch of air between his body and hers.
She was mated, dammit. What was wrong with her?
Had Gerick even crossed her mind in the past fifteen minutes?
Do not answer that question, she warned herself.
It was disturbing. Deeply, profoundly disturbing.
And it felt worse than when she’d taken the life of the elder.
How could killing someone be less important than setting aside your mate’s memory for a few minutes?
She didn’t know, but it felt like the ultimate betrayal.
She lifted a hand and gestured vaguely at the space between them, then immediately wished she had not, because the gesture had just openly acknowledged that there was a between. “Let’s just not do whatever this is.”
His brow lifted in that single, controlled motion she remembered too well. “Whatever this is?”
“Yes.” She nodded once, with the kind of confidence she was inventing on the spot, because confidence was load-bearing in situations like this. “This. The standing too close. The intense eye contact. The whatever emotional ambush you just pulled with the tragic backstory oath moment.”
His mouth tilted up. Not a full smile. Worse. A knowing one, slow and certain at one corner, the kind that suggested he had already heard everything she was not saying.
“That wasn’t an ambush,” he said.
“It absolutely was.” She nearly stomped her foot, but managed to stop herself just in time. That would have killed whatever dignity she currently held onto.
“You asked.” It wasn’t said with the smugness she’d come to know from Shade. This was a different man, one she didn’t know what to do with. And she didn’t like that. At all.
“I did not.” She caught herself, narrowed her eyes at him, and conceded ground only because lying to Shade had never worked, and she was not about to embarrass herself trying. “Okay. Technically, I did. But that is not the point.”
His head shifted a little to the side, like a predator stalking its prey. “Then, what is the point?”
She opened her mouth to answer. She closed it.
The point was that something inside her had been rearranged, the way a foundation shifted when a single beam was pulled out of place, quietly and without anyone expecting it.
Another thing she did not like. She did not trust it.
She did not want to examine it too closely, because she had a very uncomfortable suspicion that if she did, it was not going to go in any direction she was prepared to handle today, in this book, with this male.
So she did what she had spent centuries perfecting. She deflected.
She lifted a finger and aimed it at his chest, hoping the gesture might create some of the distance her feet had refused to.
“That you do not get to show up after centuries and start saying things that make my life complicated, messy and confusing. Especially when I have no cotton candy to deal with the emotional backlash that is sure to come. You haven’t been around to understand that I can’t deal with shit without my fairy floss.
It’s essential to my survival and there is none in this manuscript hellhole and I just want to go away.
” And there went the foot. Full on stomp, complete with arms folded in front of her chest. Shit, shit, shitty, shit, Myanin mentally cursed herself as she narrowed her eyes on him.
Shade glanced down at her foot where it now currently rested on the ground as if she hadn’t just used it like a toddler emphasis. Then he lifted his gaze back to hers without comment, the motion unhurried, the corner of his mouth still doing that infuriating thing.
“Your life was already complicated,” he said smoothly.
She shook her head. “Not like this.”
“No?” he asked, mildly.
“No,” she snapped, dropping her arms and gesturing with one of her hands aggressively.
“Before, I had a perfectly clear understanding of my poor decision-making skills and the consequences attached to them. I had a system. Now I have whatever this existential emotional crisis is.” She wanted to pace again.
She needed to move, but she didn’t want to turn her back on him, afraid he might do something stupid like wrap his arms around her in an attempt to comfort her.
Myanin didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to stab something, or many somethings.
Was it a healthy way to cope? No. But they’d just established that she had poor decision-making skills.
That’s why she was friends with Tenia. Bloody hell, where was Tenia when she needed her?
Not in a damn, demented book hell-bent on destroying her sanity. Lucky bitch.
“That sounds like growth.”
Do not stomp your foot, Myanin, for the love of sharp objects, I will stab you myself, she mentally growled at herself. “That sounds like a nightmare.”
His lips twitched again. She hated that she noticed. She hated, more than that, the small and traitorous part of her that wanted to lean into the way it changed the line of his mouth.
Absolutely not.
She doubled down, because doubling down was a survival skill she had cultivated very deliberately. “We are trapped in a sentient book that wants to emotionally eviscerate us. This is not the time for you to revisit unresolved feelings like you’re working through a centuries-old diary entry.”
“Unresolved,” he repeated.
Her stomach did something deeply uncomfortable at the tone he gave the word, low and considering, as if he were turning the syllables over in his hand to see how they caught the light.
“Very unresolved,” she said firmly.
“Interesting,” he said slowly.
“It is not interesting.” The words came out fast. “It is inconvenient, and rude, and, and, and effing irritating. There is a difference.”
Shade studied her with an intensity that made it very clear he had stopped listening to her words a sentence or two ago. He was reading everything underneath them now, and she knew that look intimately. She had used it herself, on prey far less aware than she was being right now.
“Oh no,” she muttered.
Shade shifted from one foot to the other, becoming a little more alert. “What?”
“You're doing that thing.”
His brow drew into a deep ‘v.’ "What thing?"
“That infuriating thing where you stop listening to what I’m saying and start paying attention to what I'm not saying.”
His expression did not change. “That’s because what you’re not saying is considerably more honest.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I am being perfectly honest.”
“No,” he said, calm and unhurried, “you're being defensive.”
“I am not.”
He laughed.
She stepped forward without thinking, the movement sharp and instinctive, the way she always closed in on a fight she intended to win.
He did not retreat. Which meant, she realized half a heartbeat too late, that she had just closed the distance herself.
Again. Fantastic. Excellent. Truly inspired strategy from the woman who had somehow survived battles without her djinn magic, endured judgment from the djinn council, and received mercy from the Great Luna that she did not deserve.
“I am not defensive,” she said, jabbing him in the chest with one finger because apparently touching him had suddenly become acceptable, despite the warning sign in her mind flashing abort, abort.
“I am making a very reasonable request that we not further complicate an already extraordinarily complicated situation.”
“With what?” he asked.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
She had to name it. That was the trap. He had set it cleanly, the way he set everything, with patience and a long view, and now naming it would make it real, and real was a problem she was not equipped to manage at the moment.
Shade waited. Of course he did. He had always been very good at waiting. She had always, unfortunately, been less good at it.
“With this,” she snapped finally.