Chapter Twenty Nina #2
“I’ll bet,” John offered, eyeing Tamir’s robe dubiously. “Don’t think dressin’ her like a whore is gonna help the girl blend in, Tammy.”
Tamir frowned. “My outfits are of the finest quality, sir. She would not look out of place.”
I could feel Patrick’s stare. “Nina—”
“You won’t be alone,” Theo said. “I’ll accompany you.”
There was little else to be said. Patrick looked on the precipice of arguing, but instead, he lanced me with cold eyes and said nothing.
John clapped his hands together and said, “Ain’t nothin’ else for it.” Theo stood straighter than he had since we’d left Kenton Hill.
“Then it’s settled,” I said, something violent climbing my throat. “I’ll drug the Scribbler.”
The following evening, I was dressed in the kind of garb any Artisan in Belavere City would balk at, but not here in Morland, where the constraints of society were loosened after dusk.
Tamir had encased me in an emerald dress with ruffled off-shoulder sleeves, a corset that constricted my rib cage, and skirt that pleated elegantly at my hip bone, then fell to the floor.
The bust line was more daring than anything I’d ever worn, and when I glanced in the mirror, I blushed.
My hips and backside were too accentuated.
My cleavage was, quite frankly, indecent.
I tried to stuff it back into the garment.
But Tamir slapped at my hands. “You are a woman!” he told me. “You cannot be faulted for being exquisite.”
“It’s distracting. I don’t want to be ogled, I want to go unnoticed.”
“You ask for the moon,” he tsked, standing back to admire his work. “You cannot hide loveliness. Better to use it.” He winked. “Fools are blinded by jewels, you know, and you will be a diamond!”
I wore an unassuming chestnut wig that stopped at my shoulders, heavily shadowed eyelids, ruby-red lips, a powder that concealed my freckles, and a precisely drawn beauty spot on my cheek.
I felt like a trussed-up doll.
“You will devour them,” Tamir delighted, then sent me into the stairwell.
Patrick exited his own room at the same time, dressed in simple wear, and was struck dumb at the sight of me.
His eyes stuck first to my face, painted in what I considered to be a grotesque amount of rouge and haloed by hair not my own, and I thought he was taken by the strangeness of it.
But then his eyes traveled over the rest of me. Down the valley of my breasts, to the hills of my hips, and he said nothing. His hand seemed melded to the doorknob, as though it kept him upright.
I could hardly stand the heat of it. Blood rushed up and pulsed beneath my skin.
I cleared my throat. “Tamir said they all dress like this in the night quarter. The Artisan women, that is. I’ll blend in.”
“You won’t,” he said. He swallowed, something animalistic in it. “You never did. Ain’t any hope for it now.”
We were to congregate in the foyer, and Patrick and I walked the stairwell in torturous silence, limbs taut, a scent of wildness emanating from each of us—those desires not yet dispersing in the aftermath.
On the last landing, he gestured I go ahead of him. This was a mistake.
My body came too close to his as I passed. I felt his inhale, felt the planes of his chest expand. I paused there.
I thought of him and I in a different stairwell, the steps flexing beneath our feet as his fingers pressed into my hips, anchoring themselves there, his mouth skirting over the pulse at my neck, drinking in the rush of blood beneath my flesh.
Everything had changed. Nothing had changed.
I lifted my head slowly to look up at him, meeting the hunger in his eyes with my own.
“Don’t,” he said, but it came out as a groan. He stared down at me, that hunger intensifying. His eyelids lowered. “Just keep on walkin’.”
But I didn’t move—couldn’t, perhaps. Not when his mouth was inches from mine, close enough that I could rise on the tips of my toes and meet it.
Perhaps it was base to still feel this sort of spiraling desire with such wreckage in our wake and a gulf of trouble ahead.
But longing reigned, and it was nice to feel… something. Something good.
“You’d let me, wouldn’t you?” he said as his eyes roamed over me, and though his hands remained in his pockets, I felt his touch everywhere. “You wouldn’t slap my hands away if I pulled this skirt up,” he murmured, his gaze moving down to my hips, “and fucked you right here.”
I stopped breathing altogether, heat coalescing in my middle, spreading to my inner thighs, climbing my chest.
“Is that what you intended when you put it on?” he asked darkly, and he seemed impossibly close now. “To torture me?”
I shook my head slowly, barely aware of my surroundings, of anything but his scent.
He watched the shake of my head and lifted an eyebrow. “To torture every man in the room tonight, then.”
Lord, I wished he’d touch me. I’d have any excuse to touch him back.
“That’s what’ll happen when you cross that threshold,” he told me.
“You’ll turn ’em all into sweatin’, pantin’ oafs.
” His hands clenched in his pockets. I rose on my toes despite myself, but he didn’t grant me his lips.
“Ah, but they don’t know how you taste, do they?
They don’t know the sounds you make when you come. ”
His voice slid over me like smoke. My hands reached for the lapels of his coat, but still, he held himself away.
He was the one torturing me now.
“That’ll be my consolation, I think, knowin’ that you’ll never give them what you gave me. They’ll only ever imagine it, and even a fuckin’ swank don’t got imagination enough for that.”
“Patrick.”
“Off your toes, Scurry girl. Keep walkin’.”
Slowly, as though falling out of a trance, I dropped back onto my heels, though his face continued to swim around mine. I would have done anything he asked.
“You don’t belong to anyone, Nina,” he said. “Not a single fuckin’ one of ’em.”
I blinked, and he frowned. “Say it.”
“I don’t belong to them,” I repeated, heart stuttering.
His gaze held me captive. “They belong to you.” His fingers withdrew from his pocket and pressed something cool into mine.