Chapter 20
CHAPTER
“Do I really have to touch your hand to do this?”
Steeler had Walked Garvis back to the ship and I’d bid farewell to Felicity moments before she’d clambered up to the rafters in the kitchen and fallen asleep with her tail wrapped around herself.
Now, the two of us stood in the middle of the pebbled beach, the sharp sting of salty breath from the ocean playing with my curls.
With his hand outstretched, Steeler gave me that smile I’d grown accustomed to in the last day—wide and full of teeth.
“You can touch other parts of me if you want, Drey. Any part you’d like.”
Of course he’d say that. “No, thanks.”
Gritting my teeth, I placed my hand on top of his, and felt a yank of what seemed like electricity before the world dissolved and we were back in that darkness full of far-off lights and dense, inky blackness.
A space between stars. Between worlds.
I clung to Steeler’s hand, the sole warm, textured thing in this darkness, and only let go after we fell into a very familiar classroom still filled with crates and hutches and my fallen knife and…
The sundew snapped around Steeler’s arms as soon as we’d fully materialized, screeching with triumph.
At the same moment, the string of nepenthes bucked and splashed more poison at him, while the flytraps lowered themselves to a snapping stance over his head.
From the sounds of their shrieks and growls, it seemed like they’d been in a state of indignation all night, just waiting for their chosen victim to return so they could disable him again.
Well, Steeler had returned, alright. And in a matter of two seconds, he was back in the same exact position he’d been in merely twelve hours ago: on his knees, arms splayed wide by the stalks of sundew, completely at my mercy.
Even the low lighting made it seem like it could still be nighttime, what with the cluster of trees blocking any morning light from streaming through the opaque window.
But now… now Steeler’s shirt was covering every scar, his face and hair were groomed, and I wasn’t scared anymore.
I’d already scooped up my crescent knife from where Steeler had flung it to the ground by the door. I stalked forward and pointed the curved blade at his branded shoulder, just as we’d planned. As if we’d rewound time and started this whole scene over.
“Answer my questions, or I’ll mutilate your magic.”
Steeler’s eyes dipped to my knife hand, pretending to flare in fear.
“What is this?” I reached forward with my free hand and dug in his front shirt pocket to bring out the pill. “What does it do to me every week? Why do you make me take it?”
My blockade was up, but I still felt that dark, fathomless energy of his brush up against it as he said, in his Mind Manipulating tone, “Swallow it first, little hurricane, and then I’ll tell you.”
I pretended I’d fallen prey to his command. I sheathed my knife, pushed the pill between my lips, and forced it down.
One side of Steeler’s lip curled up. “Good. Now come closer, and listen very carefully.”
I stepped forward, supposedly on command, until my lower half was pressed against Steeler’s upper half. His eyes in line with my breasts.
“It’s a new stimulator I came up with,” he said finally, smirking up at me. “To control you from afar. To make you want me even when you’re the only damned woman who’s never wanted me before.”
A performance. This was all just a performance.
Because what Lexington wanted most, I was sure, was a way to force Dyonisia to love him back.
To control the most powerful being on this island who seemed immune to the normal influences of the five magics.
Steeler wasn’t truly talking to me this way right now. It was an act.
But I still felt a deep, curling shock when Steeler strained against the sundew stalks like he wanted to tackle me to the ground.
“A stimulator? Is that so?” I forced myself to ask.
Steeler nodded. “From the moment it kicks in until the moment it fades, you will think of me. And every time you think of me, you’ll crave the feel of my body against yours.”
As if to stop myself from leaning in, I pressed my blade harder against his shoulder, but he didn’t even wince.
“And every time you do feel my body pressed against yours,” he continued, the words slow and steady, as if he wanted to savor them on his tongue, “your legs will beg you to let them spread for me.”
No, no, no. They were getting to me, those words. A low, simmering sort of fire seemed to be building in my core. I—
“And every time you spread your legs, Rayna, even if you’re alone in your room trying to pleasure yourself, it’ll be my cock you think of. My cock you want buried so deep inside you that you’ll never be able to escape. Do you understand? Say you understand.”
“I understand,” I gasped.
I could have sworn Steeler’s nostrils flared, just for a second, as his eyes swept down my body and back up in a blink. Then—
“Okay, that should do it. You can ease up on the knife now.”
I stared at him, trying to clamp my legs together without him noticing, anything to smother the heat that made me want to slide a finger through the slit in my dress and give pressure to the ache.
“Drey?”
“Oh, right.”
I removed my knife from his shoulder and stepped back, surveying him still on his knees with his arms spread.
I had class in twenty minutes, and he should be Walking back to the lighthouse by now, but suddenly I was straining to keep certain images from flashing through my mind: me, unbuttoning Steeler’s pants, rediscovering just how big he really was underneath…
“How long?” I blurted in an attempt to distract my mind from the filthy direction it was heading. “How long do full-blooded faeries typically live for?”
Steeler’s nostrils flared again, and his pupils were spreading as his eyes grazed down me again. “More than a thousand years.”
“And… half-faeries?”
I’d purposely avoided thinking about the logistics of my supposed faerie heritage, but it was obvious that Fabian was human, that it would have had to be my mysterious, unknown mother who’d been one…
“It depends on the specific percentage, but… anywhere from six to seven hundred, I’d say.
” Steeler was still on his knees, still strung up, still entangled by growling plants leaching onto him, but he didn’t look like he’d rather be anywhere else as he cocked his head and whispered, “Any more questions, little hurricane?”
Oh, yes, a million of them. But I knew my Mind Manipulating wasn’t strong enough to hide the most earth-shattering answers from Lexington yet, so I’d have to choose carefully. Pick the questions that would matter the least to anyone but me.
“Why do you call me that?”
“What?
“Little hurricane.”
Something seemed to be happening to his body now—a kind of tense quivering, as if he truly did have to restrain himself from ripping through his makeshift chains and pouncing on me.
“Because of what you do to me… among other reasons.”
I stiffened and looked away, suddenly hearing the mist in my mind replaying certain scenes.
You took a midnight swim with that lover of yours, the octopus said with his tentacles.
You were just one of his oblivious pets that he liked to use and abuse, Lexington said with his oily smile.
I made a careless mistake in letting Kitterfol Lexington keep that particular memory, Steeler said with his mental voice. Not a day goes by where I don’t curse myself for forgetting he had it.
And what had he said back at the lighthouse? I promised myself I’d never plant a false memory in your head again.
My eyes opened again to find that Steeler, in the here and now, was surveying me with concern warring with raw, savage hunger in the smoky quartz of his eyes.
“Was that memory—the one with the chains…” I sucked in a gulp of air. “Was that something like this one?” Fake? Fabricated?
Steeler’s eyes didn’t move from my face.
“Yes.”
I looked away again, feeling my blockade of ice slip like a torn cloak.
I was starting to see hazy edges of the full picture form around me even without having obtained my old memories again.
And there was something in Steeler’s voice that told me the truth: he wanted me to hate him, needed me to hate him, until I could fully protect myself.
Because if any part of Lexington suspected I didn’t hate him…
Dazmine had been right. This was all just a way to test my loyalty to Dyonisia, and my loathing, my anger toward Steeler, kept me safe from any chance that she’d exile or even execute me as a traitor. I couldn’t love him, couldn’t want him, so he’d been playing the part this whole time.
But it didn’t change the fact that he’d lied to me.
It didn’t change the fact that he’d abandoned me.
It didn’t change the fact that he’d tried to protect me without my input, without my discretion, without my consent.
Coen Steeler had played the part too well.
So if he had given me the gift of Mind Manipulating as a peace offering or a way to get me to fall back in love with him, it was pointless. My body could burn for him all it wanted in a purely physical way—that didn’t mean my heart would ever melt for him again.
I turned toward the door without another word, intending to leave him to get himself out of the sundews’ prison.
Steeler reappeared in front of me, blocking my path in the one empty space of the room where none of the thrashing sundew or snapping flytraps or bucking nepenthes could reach him.
“You never said it last year, you know.”
I crossed my arms. “What?”
“You never said you loved me,” he half-whispered. “You never said those words. I’m not under any assumption that you’d ever say them after what I’ve done to you.”
I couldn’t help the flicker of surprise from crossing my face.
“Then why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?”
He leaned forward with his hand outstretched, sending a wave of unwanted warmth down my body again.
“Because I can’t help still being in love with you—and that’s not transactional.
Here,” he added before I could dredge up a response.
“You forgot this.” He opened his fingers, revealing the little black pearl that sat on his bed of callouses. “If you want it, of course.”
After a moment of consideration, I plucked it from his palm and slid it down my cleavage just like last time.
The smallest shiver of triumph passed through me at the way those dilated pupils tracked the progress down. At the way a hint of shock finally sliced through his usually smirking exterior.
“For my tally,” I said. “To keep track of how many reasons I still have to kill you at the end of this.”
Then I shoved past him and out the door.