Chapter 14 #2
“No, no, you guys keep playing. Here—Dazmine will take my place.”
I was already at the staircases, prodding Dazmine toward the group. When Cilia clapped her hands and squealed, “Ooh, you’re actually going to hang out with us? Yay!” Dazmine threw a death glare over her shoulder at me.
But to her credit, she wafted toward them anyway.
Leaving me to trot down the boys’ staircase, through the dining hall that connected our two houses, and back up my own stairs to my house’s empty parlor.
Nobody saw me sneak out the front door and slip down Bascite Boulevard, undetectable in the thick fog that had settled over campus.
Willa, I knew, didn’t have stomach ulcers, and she wasn’t waiting on my bed for me to deliver apples.
But it was a reasonable enough excuse to explain my disappearance…
not to our room, as Emelle and the others had believed, but to one of the old Wild Whisperer storage buildings in the back of our sector, where Mr. Conine kept an assortment of animal enclosures he hadn’t touched in years.
I knew what was coming, but I still gasped when I creaked open the storage door and beheld the elaborate trap Dazmine had weaved throughout the spare tanks, hutches, and crates.
Potted sundew lined either side of the doorway, their stalks bowed over the room with twitching bristles. Nepenthes creepers stretched from one wall to the other, their cupped petals already brimming with poison, and flytraps dangled from the arched ceiling.
As soon as I stepped inside, the sundew jerked toward me, like cats ready to pounce—then jolted back just as suddenly. Probably realizing I wasn’t the chosen victim.
“Hello,” I told them nervously, then stepped carefully over the stretch of nepenthes creepers. The flytraps clamped their jaws threateningly, but didn’t attack as I moved beneath them and finally made it to the one empty space in the middle of the room.
Now, whether Steeler came in through the doorway or the opaque window on the other side of the building, he wouldn’t make it anywhere near me without something holding him back. All I needed was a couple of seconds to throw my knife, but…
What if his speed was so insane that he still managed to rip through the plants and get away? Or what if he’d already made himself invisible and was watching me from a corner of the room right now?
I slid my knife from its sheath and held it up, my heart pounding nails into my ribcage.
Maybe he wouldn’t show. Or maybe he’d already force-fed me that pill and erased my memory of it. Maybe Dazmine was secretly working with him and this was all a trap for me—
I couldn’t help myself from turning in violent circles, facing the door, then the window, then the door again, until…
The pressure in my head dissolved so suddenly, I knew he’d arrived even before his dark, sculpted figure bloomed into existence in the corner of the room.
Coen Steeler didn’t even get a chance to look me in the eyes before the sundew struck.
Those bristled stalks wrapped around both his arms and yanked tight. He tried to twist, shock flitting over his features, but the string of nepenthes bucked forward and splashed their poison onto him, sending him to his knees in a hiss of pain.
The flytraps lowered themselves until they were snapping just over his head, ensuring he didn’t get up again.
It was only when Steeler raised his gaze back to mine that I realized he was shirtless, every one of his muscles taut and flexing as Dazmine’s trap held him in place.
He was also… shaggier. I almost blinked in surprise at the shadow of facial hair and the longer locks of dark brown hair curling past his ears.
Whatever he’d been doing over this last week—stalking, murdering, or anything else his kind liked to do for fun—a razor sure as hell hadn’t been included in those activities.
Steeler finally ripped his eyes away from mine to survey the intricate tangle of carnivorous plants around the room.
Then his lips tilted into an absurd smile—revealing those canines again. I’d swear they were even sharper than last week.
“Clever,” he said finally.
Remembering myself, I stalked forward to fit the curved blade of my knife under his chin. On his knees like this, his head came right to my chest, and he had to lift that chin to meet my gaze again.
“Unfortunately,” I said, “I can’t take the credit.”
Steeler didn’t flinch. He didn’t do anything besides let his eyes devour every inch of my face until I couldn’t bear the weight of his attention anymore.
I shifted my focus downward, to that scarred engraving of a bulbed, encircled star on his shoulder. So raw and exposed without a shirt to cover it. One slice, and he’d be powerless. Defenseless.
Finally, I was the predator.
Finally, he was the prey.
But my stupid hands wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t move the knife away from Steeler’s throat to do the deed as he drawled, “You can’t take the credit, yet it was you who asked for help, wasn’t it?
” A brush of dark, fathomless energy against my mind told me he’d just discovered Dazmine’s involvement for himself.
Shit. “You shoved down all your pride to do what you thought was right.”
And why did he look proud of that fact? Why was there actual admiration gleaming in those cruel, smoky brown eyes?
I let my wall of ice surge forward a bit. Just enough to harden my eyes and calm the shake of my hand. “Pride has no place in a situation where innocent civilians are involved.”
A beat of silence. Then—“Innocent civilians?”
“You know.” I pressed the knife deeper into his neck, and a single bead of blood swelled from beneath the blade and rolled down to his bulging chest. Damn the sundew for making him strain.
For making him flex. “The innocent civilians you and your fellow pirates attacked a few months ago? The ones you’re still trying to attack as if you don’t get enough magical scraps from our annual offering of exiles?
” I pushed out as much sarcasm as I could in those words, hating Steeler, but hating Dyonisia just as much for giving him and his fellow pirates the people she deemed unworthy. “Or do you deny the attacks?”
Here I was, once again giving this man an opportunity to explain. To reject what the Good Council had told me.
But Steeler just said, without removing his eyes from my face, “I don’t deny the attacks, but they’re not what you think… I can explain more if you put your knife back in that neat little sheath of yours—” His eyes finally dipped to my waist, my thighs. “—and come with me.”
I gave a scowl so scathing that Wren would have been proud.
“Come with you? I’m not going anywhere with you. And I’m not taking any more of those damned pills or letting you wipe my memory ever again.”
One slice. One measly little slice over his brand, and—
“No,” Steeler agreed. “I don’t have to wipe your memory ever again. Because I’ve found an alternative. If you’ll just come with me…”
“You’ve found an alternative to drugging me?” I threw up an empty laugh. “An alternative to stealing bits of my literal mind? How charming of you. But I’m not interested in your Plan A or Plan B.”
Even on his knees, tied up and stretched taut with a blade beneath his chin, Steeler managed to cock his head.
“Then what are you interested in, Rayna?”
My name on his tongue did it for me. A dark thrill erupted in my belly at the soft, sensual way he said it.
“This,” I said.
And moved my knife in one slashing motion, swiping it across his brand. Cutting through that scarred circle of flesh that matched the scars on mine.
Steeler sucked in a breath. His lips curled up in a flicker of fury, revealing those fangs in full. Oh God, I’d actually, truly pissed him off for the first time since he’d started stalking me, it seemed. If Dyonisia was wrong…
But no. No dark, fathomless energy seized my mind when Steeler craned his neck to look back up at me, all traces of that smug playfulness drained away. Blood trickled like crimson tears from the cut on his shoulder.
“Well,” he rasped, “that wasn’t very nice of you, was it?”
I didn’t get a chance to respond. Didn’t get a chance, because one second, I was staring down at him, and the next he was—gone.
Just gone.
The sundew whipped this way and that, screeching their confusion. The flytraps shot downward, snapping at nothing but air. The nepenthes jiggled, suddenly howling with fury at their lost prey.
A pair of sturdy hands grabbed me from behind, ripping my knife from my grip and flinging it across the room.
“But I think this will be punishment enough,” Steeler whispered through my hair.
And ribbons of darkness seemed to tug on me from every direction as he dragged me into a rich, inky expanse of nothing.