Chapter 25 #2
“Is there something that needs to be done?” he asks smoothly, inclining his head even as his fingers dig into my arms, holding me still.
The female’s gaze flicks between us, lingering on me with open disdain. Her jaw ticks once.
“The ballroom,” she snaps. “They need more wine.” She jerks her chin toward a line of dark green bottles sealed with golden wax. “Deliver them and return immediately.”
Pax bows far deeper, far more submissive than I can force myself to be. He nudges me toward the bottles, not gently, and I grit my teeth as he loads my arms with as many as I can carry. He takes the same himself and guides me out the opposite side of the kitchen, toward the ballroom.
When we are far enough from prying ears, I hiss at him, “What was that about?”
“You know, for someone so clever, you can be truly stupid sometimes,” he says. “If you so much as touch a Fae, do you know what they’ll do to you? For now, you come and go from the Aurevault as you please. Lay a finger on one of them and you’ll never see daylight again.”
My jaw locks. “I can’t stand the way they treat us. I despise them.”
“You don’t despise all of them,” he says casually.
My head snaps toward him. “What?”
His mouth quirks. “I think Lord Luceran might be the exception.”
“What are you talking about?”
He exhales slowly, tired and edged. “I might work the Aurevault twenty hours a day, but my head isn’t full of rocks, and I’m not blind.”
I step into his space before I can stop myself, startling him as I force him back against the wall. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to even imply something like that?”
He laughs then, short and humorless, and the sound makes my skin prickle.
“Do you know why I’m here, Neve?” he asks, a bite to his tone. “Why I’ll spend the rest of my life in those mines? Why I’ll die hauling Elarium out of those cursed tunnels?”
My throat tightens. It’s a question I’ve wondered about, but never dared to ask. Faced with the answer written in the intensity of his dark eyes, the tremor in his voice, I’m suddenly not sure I want to know.
“I know the danger. I’ve lived it.” His jaw tightens. “I fell in love. Madly. Hopelessly. Foolishly. With a Fae female.”
My breath catches.
“I was her secret. Just like you’re his.
But secrets are never meant to last.” He swallows.
“She was mine for barely a year before her husband found out. Before the female who swore she loved me stood before a jury of Fae and claimed I forced her. That I took her against her will while she begged me to stop.”
The blood drains from my face.
I stumble back, but he catches my wrist.
“You will listen,” he says. “The Fae are cruel, Neve, and when they punish, they do not stop at one life. My family paid for my love. Our home was burned to the ground. My brother and his wife were sold into service to House Maledannan. My mother was put on a ship and sent across the Untold Sea where humans do not survive.”
His mouth trembles.
“And my father. You would have met him if you’d arrived a few months earlier. He died of pneumonia. We could barely break the frozen earth to lay him deep enough.”
Anger bleeds through him now, raw and uncontained.
“All because I loved the one person I shouldn’t have. Because I trusted her, and she betrayed me.”
He leans close, his breath hot against my ear, and I turn my face away, eyes burning.
“You will meet the same fate,” he says. “Fae cannot be trusted.”
The ballroom doors suddenly fly open.
A male and female tumble out into the hall, shameless hands roaming over each other’s flawless bodies as their mouths devour one another without restraint. They pause only briefly when they spot Pax and me nearby, and we immediately step apart, chins dipping, eyes lowering in practiced submission.
“Excellent. More wine!” the female exclaims, rattling her empty goblet. “Come in!”
She throws the doors wide again. Her companion doesn’t even glance at us, far too occupied with his hand buried beneath her skirt and his mouth lavishing kisses along the swell of her breast above her strapless gown.
Pax and I pretend we see nothing.
We step into the ballroom with our arms full of wine.
Each Fae we pass lights up at the sight of us.
No, not us. The bottles. We are ushered forward eagerly, herded toward a long table where we set them down.
Slender fingers snatch at the glass, wine sloshing into goblets, spilling onto marble, poured straight into waiting mouths.
“Come on,” Pax murmurs beside me. “Let’s get out of here before things get out of hand.”
I don’t argue.
The air is thick, hot, humid, cloying. Something sticky and unsettling clings to my skin. The careful etiquette of the banquet has dissolved entirely, replaced by a tangle of bodies, and a rising chorus of breathless sounds soars above the string music.
The mirrored walls only intensify it, reflecting the excess back upon itself until the scene feels dizzying and endless.
Then a blur of movement in the mirror catches my eye as Pax and I near the doors. Stark ivory hair bound neatly at the nape of a Fae male’s neck. A midnight-blue suit cut to perfection.
Luceran.
He stands apart even here, even among his own kind, with silver dust circling his stunning eyes and a glossy shimmer upon his full, pale lips. In his arms is a woman with lush waves of auburn hair tumbling over bare shoulders, her low-backed gown a whisper of silk against perfect skin.
Lady Marlayna of House Taramethos.
My heart shatters.
Her hands roam freely on his jaw, his neck, sliding over the breadth of his shoulders and down the hard ripples of his chest. But it isn’t her touch that breaks me.
It’s the way she looks at him.
As if he is something rare. Something dazzling. Something that belongs to her.
I don’t realize I’ve stopped moving until Pax tugs at my arm. I stare at Luceran, willing, begging, for his expression to twist with disgust, for him to push her away.
He doesn’t.
One of his hands rests at the small of her bare back while the other entwines with her fingers, holding them to his chest as though they fit there perfectly.
There is no space between them. None at all.
Their bodies are so close I can’t tell where he ends and she begins, and the way he looks at her…
tears sting behind my eyes. I turn away as a breathless shiver tears through me.
“What are you doing?” Pax snaps, grabbing my elbow. “You can’t just stand there staring at them. Come on.”
He drags me toward the doors as the room grows hotter, louder, but before he pulls me from the room, I glance back one last time.
Just once.
Luceran’s gaze lifts.
It finds me in the chaos.
And in that heartbeat, his face goes paler than I’ve ever seen him, the smile vanishing as if it were never there at all. Maybe because I have caught him, maybe because he is ashamed. I don’t get to ask. Pax hauls me out of the ballroom and closes the doors behind us.
“See?” he growls, towing me along as my body follows numbly behind him. “They’re all the same.”
We move quickly through the halls, past the tall windows that overlook the rose garden and the frozen lake beyond it. Then Pax stops so suddenly I collide with his back.
“What did you say?” he snaps, the anger in his voice slipping into something closer to panic. “What did you call me?”
I frown, my heart still hammering. “I…I didn’t say anything.”
“Did you call me Pattenwald?” he demands. “Only my father ever called me that. To everyone else, I’m Pax. Even to you, Neve.”
“But I didn’t,” I insist, swallowing hard. “I said nothing. I swear.”
His hand goes to his hair, fingers digging in as he tugs at the roots, his expression flickering between confusion and fury. Slowly, carefully, I reach out and place my hand on his shoulder.
He flinches hard.
But I don’t pull away.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “For everything that’s happened to you. I’m grateful for your friendship, Pax, and you’re right.”
They hurt as I say them.
“Fae cannot be trusted.”
Something in him eases. His shoulders slump, the tension bleeding out of his frame just enough that he lets me hold him, only for a moment.
Then he straightens again, drawing in a steadying breath before releasing it. “This place,” he says, forcing a weak laugh. “It’ll be the end of us.”
I shake my head firmly. “I won’t let that happen. We’ll survive it. Together.”
He smiles then, though it’s strained, buried beneath guilt and regret and too many old wounds. “Together,” he echoes.
We move on, returning to the kitchen, to our stations, to our place in the world. But before we leave the hall, I glance once more through the tall windows overlooking the frozen lake.
The wind rises suddenly, sweeping snow across the ice in a blinding white curtain, and for a heartbeat, I am certain I see something there.
A dark figure standing alone at the center of the lake.
A shiver snakes up my spine.
I turn away quickly, hurrying after Pax, back into the heat and noise of the kitchen.