Chapter 18
Hope
Gabrielle guided them through the South House to their chambers. The House was a white, magnificent castle, and all the buildings distinguishable in small towns around it were equally white. From the immense windows and balconies, Hope saw multiple pools with light blue water filling the gardens.
The South Petal was covered in desert and sandy dunes, and the contrast of all the black sand with the white buildings was beautiful.
The built structures weren’t the only bright thing in the South Petal, though.
White, small petals continuously floated in the air, as if they were part of the breeze and weather.
They never touched the ground, they just floated around eerily.
“I’ve asked the House to provide, so I hope the chamber meets your requirements and you have a pleasant stay here,” Gabrielle said, opening the door to their room but not following them inside. “Rose, Ciaran, anything you need, send me your ink, and I’ll do my best to help you.”
“Thank you for your generosity, Gabrielle. We will aim to make our stay as brief as possible and leave without disrupting your House nor your Petal.”
When they closed the door and looked around their room, Hope almost collapsed on the floor.
“Two very small beds? Seriously?” Ciaran asked, his voice sounding as desperate as she felt right now.
“I didn’t want her to be suspicious, Ciaran. I don’t want anyone to think that hurting you is a way of hurting me.”
“Or vice versa,” he said.
“But let me tell you—I was not expecting this either.”
Hope had never been in a bigger room. If it weren’t for the four walls and the ceiling, it wouldn’t even be considered a room.
Its dimensions were those of a medium-sized lake.
It was clearly magically modified, as otherwise it wouldn’t fit inside the South House itself, and it went against any structural and architectural laws Terrha could have.
Right next to the entrance door, a very narrow, individual bed stood alone. The other bed couldn’t be seen anywhere close, and it was only after a while that Ciaran pointed at a small dot at the other end of the room.
“There. My bed.” He shook his head with his nostrils flaring. “This fucking House loves taking the piss.”
Hope laughed. “Taking the piss and everything else.”
The beds couldn’t be moved or Taken away. New beds could not be Given, and anything resembling a comfortable surface to rest disappeared—kindly Taken by the House—the moment after they made it appear.
Hope sat on the bed closest to them, and when she laid down, the mattress barely held her back within the edges, which meant Ciaran’s body would most definitely not fit on it.
He didn’t seem to care, as he put his knees around hers on the bed, his metallic and biological arms on each side of her head, his hands holding the edges of the mattress in a plank while he stared deeply at her from above.
And damn all Cardinals if that view didn’t do many sudden, potent things to very specific parts of her body.
He held his breath, taking her in, and then his powerful arms started bending as he slowly pushed his lips closer to hers, his firm chest leaning atop her breasts—until an invisible force threw him at least twenty-five feet away.
Hope gasped, flinching as she expected a loud noise when his body hit the floor, but there wasn’t any noise other than a very poetic array of curses, because the House had made him land on—
“A mattress?” Ciaran let out a loud, desperate growl.
For a moment, Hope wondered if he was going to show the House exactly who and what he was, and that with so much of a whisper of shadows, he could bring the whole thing down.
Instead, he said, “Llunal give me patience and bloody shade me now.” The moment he stood up, the mattress vanished.
Hope tried to contain her laughter out of pure compassion for Ciaran’s increasing desperation and annoyance at the House, but she couldn’t resist a smile tensing against her cheeks.
“Not one bit funny,” he said, pushing himself up.
“But it is,” Hope said with a grin. “And I must say, a part of me admires how insistent and persevering this House is. It knows what we want, and it wants us to ask Gabrielle to provide it for us. It also knows we don’t want to tell her we’re together, yet it wants to force us to confide and trust the House’s Ruler. ”
“Not happening,” he reiterated. “Why a room so big though?”
“Because I better figure out how to wield the Fifth Power, and I honestly don’t know exactly what to expect, but what I feel pressing against the core of my panom mark, this new magic pulsing in my veins… “big” doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Ciaran narrowed his blue eyes. “Don’t get yourself killed using it, will you do me that favor?”
Hope shook her head with a defiant smile.
“I’m hoping to kill a lot with it, but not myself.
Which reminds me…” She opened her hand to Give the Of Southern Petals and Wicked Greediness handwritten copy to him.
“Would you mind making a start on this? The sooner we find the Queen’s heart piece in the South Petal, the sooner—”
“The sooner we can share a fucking bed again,” he finished, his nostrils flaring as he clenched his jaw.
Hope pursed her lips, her core tightening at his desperate need. “Also that, even though I meant the sooner we can go to the West Petal and you can introduce me to…” She cleared her throat before continuing, “Your father.”
Ciaran lifted his eyebrows and swallowed.
“After centuries of thinking I was a lonely wolf, meeting you might be the biggest shock of his life.” He approached Hope and caressed her cheek, the metal cool and smooth against her skin.
“But you were the most magnificent, most beautiful shock of my life, too, so I completely understand.”
Extreme blushes right before experimenting with a deadly sacred power that hadn’t been used in centuries was most surely not the best recommendation. Not that Hope could do anything but precisely that.
After sound-proofing and destruction-proofing it, the gigantic room proved useful for Hope’s exact purpose: figuring out what to do with the Fifth Power, how to use it, and the consequences of its powerful reach.
She only allowed herself to try playing with an ounce of it, because the risk of destroying the room, the House, and the Cardinals-damned Petal was not out of the question.
It was deadlier than she could have imagined, and it was terrifying yet exciting to imagine such force against any being—against a Queen.
When the sun abandoned its position and the red moon and Llunal’s stars painted the sky, Ciaran and Hope ventured to the gardens of the South House.
The small, white petals continued floating in the air, as if they were another particle of nature, bringing some brightness to the night and the shadows that covered this part of the world.
The light blue waters of the different pools were magically illuminated, too, inviting any guests to dive in.
Perhaps they would have dived in, if they weren’t too busy whispering their discoveries and theories, planning their next steps, and deciding the next risks they were willing to take.
There was a lot to talk about, and their discussions carried them until morning light, but when Hope finally laid on her very small bed, Ciaran refused to sleep on his own on the other side of the room.
He didn’t attempt to lay on hers either.
She couldn’t blame him for not fancying the House throwing him across the room again.
Instead, he laid down on the floor next to her, and her hand hung from the mattress to hold his.
It took less than fifty seconds for her to join him on the hard ground. They fell asleep immediately after, in each other’s arms, his lips on her forehead, her slow breaths on the skin of his neck, on the floor of the Taking-the-piss South House.