Chapter 12 #3
“How?” March said, inviting my eyes to his again when he moved, dragged himself closer and closer until he was right in front of me.
Again, he pulled one leg up, tucked the other beneath it.
The tip of his boot touched mine, and when he rested his arm over his knee, our fingertips nearly touched, too.
Electricity charges went up my arm at the almost-contact.
“How were you going to accept that, even if the magic of the Labyrinth would have let you leave?”
The magic of the Labyrinth, he said, and it did make a lot of sense. Why nobody had stopped me. Why there weren’t guards everywhere. If unwinning these trials was as important as the White Queen said, they would have made sure that we stayed put, wouldn’t they?
Unless they knew they didn’t have to. Unless the magic of the Labyrinth did it for them.
“Answer me, Ora. How?”
This is the first time you’ve said my name. And I could have sworn I’d heard it before—from those lips, that tongue, that very same voice.
I met his eyes. “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t…I didn’t want to believe it was real.”
Something in his expression shifted, but I wasn’t sure what. “I don’t trust you.”
Not a surprise. “You don’t trust anyone.” He hadn’t trusted the White Queen, nor the others in the forest, nor Elida the Royal Timekeeper.
This didn’t surprise him, either. “I trust what I see.”
“Then how do you not see how wrong this whole thing is?”
Close. He was so close. His eyes were on my face, on my forehead and nose and lips. He didn’t move, didn’t come closer, and I wanted him to, just so maybe I could understand.
March didn’t answer.
“How many freckles are on my face?” Words, slipping, falling right out of my mouth in my own voice, when I hadn’t even planned to speak again.
He didn’t hesitate this time. “Forty-eight.”
I had the urge to run to a mirror and count just to see if he was right, but I didn’t really need to. He didn’t trust me, he said as much, but I trusted him for whatever reason.
“I see you, too,” I said, and the night must have been holding its breath because I could have sworn time wasn’t passing just now.
He arched that brow so subtly. “You see me?”
I raised a finger to my temple. “In here.” He was in my head, too. “You’re making something with glass. It’s…it’s on this rod, and it’s spinning, and there’s a fire burning in a furnace. You’re…happy.” But more than that— “You’re proud.”
Countless seconds ticked by before March even blinked.
“And you’re sad,” he then said, and it was like a knife to my gut. “You’re alone, angry. You’re screaming.”
Alone. Angry. Screaming.
It all fit so well with the idea of myself that it terrified me. And the fear made me angry in return. The idea that he really did see me the way I saw him made me want to set fire to this whole place. The idea that he felt me the way I felt him.
No, no, no, no—because that side of me was for me only. Nobody knew. Nobody would ever know—that’s how it was supposed to be. And now this stranger was sitting here, telling me that he saw everything I worked hard to hide?
Time’s Teeth, I was so angry so suddenly that I regretted having told him anything. Having spoken a single word to him, no matter what he felt like.
And which time had he seen?
How-how-how?
“That wasn’t me.”
The words stumbled out of my lips and I jumped to my feet. This conversation was over and it was never going to start again.
Except when I turned to leave, run all the way back to the palace to be alone and to regroup, March grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back toward himself so hard I nearly fell against his chest.
He was standing, too. Close. Way too close.
“Oh, it was you, all right. You were screaming in the woods.” He flinched, like whatever expression I had on my face disgusted him. “You were screaming at nothing, and you were crying, too.”
Impossible, said the voices in my head. He couldn’t have known. He couldn’t have seen.
“Sobbing, all by yourself.”
Shut up-shut up-shut up—
“It hurt right here.” A finger pressed to my gut, right under my breasts.
I lost control of my body so fast I was surprised, too, when my knee jerked up and hit him right in his crotch.
The look in his eyes would have been priceless if I could just force myself to breathe normally for a second, but no.
My heart was running wild, and my thoughts were all over the place, and I knew he wasn’t lying.
Not just because I’d seen him in my mind, too, and I’d felt exactly what he’d felt, but because what he described was real.
It had been real, and it had happened—more than once.
He didn’t have the right to know, damn it. He didn’t have the right to know where it hurt.
March doubled over, his hand on my shoulder, the other over his balls. A muffled moan escaped his lips and his head lowered and his entire body became rigid for seconds.
My father always told me that fighting men was easy—their most vulnerable part was out and easily accessible. All I had to do was make sure to be underestimated and strike first.
He was going to be happy to know that he was absolutely right, and his advice had gifted me with an incredibly satisfying moment.
Every part of me rejoiced in his pain and the way his body was still shaking—and yes, I was smiling.
It felt great. Because I’d wanted to be nice.
I’d tried to be polite, and even friendly, had told him how he’d felt happy and proud—and what had he done?
He’d tried to humiliate me.
That was it—I was never going to say another word to him again, nor was I going to help him even if his face was being eaten by a clockbeast.
Stepping back, I jerked his hand from my shoulder and turned around to leave again, sure that he wasn’t going to be able to catch his breath long enough to stop me.
I was wrong.
I’d only stepped between the trees when I felt his presence behind me. I spun around, planned to scream my guts out at him, but his hand was already around my jaw. When I moved back on instinct, he moved with me until my back hit a trunk.
Nowhere to go.
March towered over me, eyes bloodshot and teeth gritted, his chest rising and falling fast. When he squeezed my cheeks like that again, my skin was on fire, and then my chest was rising and falling just as fast as his.
This stupid boy.
My stupid, stupid body.
I said, “Get off me.”
“No.”
My knee jerked up again—pure instinct, and it had worked the first time, but this time it didn’t. This time he was prepared, and he blocked my leg with his easily.
“That…hurt,” he said through gritted teeth, squeezed my face harder, leaned closer.
And I thought for sure he was going to strangle me right then and there.
“Did it? Because it was very satisfying for me,” I said as well as I could manage—and I knew exactly how to get him off me, didn’t I? I knew where to hit him, I knew how to use my body to free myself.
The problem was that said body didn’t seem to want to be freed.
He was so damn close, and all my instincts were calming down instead of flaring up, and I was grabbing both his arms because logic said I should push him off me, yet I was holding him and even pulling him closer without even meaning to.
The warmth of his breath against my parted lips. The heat of his body. The size of him, and the way I knew how well I fit against him.
“Don’t play games with me, Spade,” he hissed, and it was full of hatred. I felt it all, raw, to my very bones.
I had plenty of hatred for him, too. “But you’re so easy to play with.”
A growl.
An honest growl came from deep in his throat, and for the Time in me I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t afraid. He was a damn animal, yet here I was, knees shaking, stomach in a thousand knots, and I was wet between my legs, too.
My hands moved from his arms—on their own, I swear it—and up to his shoulders, and the collar of his shirt. I grabbed the fabric in my fists tightly, and it was not to push him away easier.
“Yes, that’s right. You might be my favorite plaything here so far, Heartling,” I spit, and I should have stopped, but didn’t. “Maybe I’ll stick around a little longer to play. Maybe I—”
He squeezed my jaws hard enough to hurt, and even that didn’t make me afraid. A whimper left me all of a sudden instead—a whimper, and I was melting under the heat of him no matter what my words said.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, insisted that voice in my head, yet my body had a mind of its own, and it insisted that this was absolutely, undoubtedly, twelve-hours right.
“I will kill you,” March said in that low voice that vibrated on my skin, to my center, all the way between my thighs. “Don’t tempt me, Spade.”
“You’re the one holding me against the tree,” I said, and I realized my mistake too late when he paused, raised a brow, smiled only half a smile that looked good enough to eat on his face.
Because my back wasn’t against the tree anymore.
In fact, he’d stepped back—when?!—and I’d followed, and I was still holding onto his shirt, and my body was still flush against his.
Then his other hand moved up to my neck, to the back of my head, wrapped around it.
Time’s Teacups, what is happening here?
He held me there for a beat, only a beat.
Then he let go. With both hands.
The smell of him, of roses and of rain, overwhelmed me.
“See that? You’re free to go.”
I was.
Sheer panic took over me when our eyes locked. All the alarms in my head rang at the same time. No, no, no, they insisted. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to even move back an inch.
Which was absurd.
Which was madness.
Whatever this place was doing—or had done to me, I was right to want to leave all along. I had to find another way before I did something stupid that I would regret forever.