30. The Fourth Game
THE FOURTH GAME
Seraphina
The Meet tilts, folding inward, my stomach drops and then marble meets my boots. Yuvi was right, traveling through the circles of Hell by hellgate does get easier. A thought I should not be comforted by but am regardless.
The marble is a swirl of white, black and gray, and the air is perfumed. Thick with honey and something darker, like incense that’s both blooming and burning all at once.
Khali shifts beside me, visibly uncomfortable. Az mutters a curse. Reiva locks eyes with Lilliana and they both go still.
Reiva looks away first and turns visibly green. Whatever thoughts flashed through his mind about Lilliana, he neither wanted or appreciated it.
Lilliana tilts her chin skyward. It’s neither day or night but an endless blush of molten rose. Bone colored pillars rise and curve like ribs from the marble courtyard floor.
Between the pillars lie small, shallow pools of liquid silver, their surfaces smooth as mirrors and still as stone.
The marble pulses once beneath my boots and the silver puddle ripples.
Our Overlord appears, stepping out of the hellgate and closing it behind him.
I lick my lips.
Yuvi and Zaheer aren’t here. Neither is Ravi. Or any Aes or Stannum cadets for that matter.
It’s the last ten Ferrum cadets, our leader, and some kind of sin filling our senses.
I know it’s a sin, because it smells so good.
Desire is so thick in the air, I can taste it. It clings to my skin. I inhale again and taste more of its sweetness edged with danger. Then it coats my lungs.
My eyes land on Silver again, to find he’s already watching me. He opens his mouth to speak, swallows and clears his throat. Clearly he’s not immune to this game’s influence like he had been the last time.
“Welcome to the fourth game,” he finally manages. “The floor will take it from here.”
We all frown, looking between each other like someone must be able to make sense of him.
Then words ignite on the marble beneath us.
“Desire reveals.
Indulgence kills.
Denial destroys.
Mastery frees.”
“Told you it would be lust,” Garrick chokes out, his beady, too close together eyes looking anywhere but at any one cadet in particular.
“No… fucking… shit,” Az grits out, forcing himself to put some distance between him and Khali.
He’s stepping toward the nearest silver pool, as if something caught hold of his spine and steered him.
“Careful, Az.” By the angels, was that low, smokey voice even mine?
Khali inhales sharply and heads toward another of the silver pools.
I refuse to move.
Or so I think.
But when I look down, the silver surface of a puddle is at my feet.
It ripples, and my throat tightens. It’s not my reflection staring back.
It’s his.
He’s watching.
I look away, trying to focus on the other cadets as they are drawn or pulled by an invisible force toward a pool each.
Silver tilts his head, and I don’t know if it’s in the reflection or real life.
Whether the former or latter, can he see me staring at him?
I force my gaze down.
Then straight ahead.
And he’s standing ten paces away.
Not reflection.
Real.
The air between us shifts.
He looks as he always does, unreasonably handsome. But the silver veins over his body are not dull, they light up his skin like he’s burning from the inside out as intensely as I am, brighter than I have ever seen them.
His jaw is set tight and his hands flex once, subtle but telling.
I burn too, I want to tell him. Then clamp a hand over my mouth, panicked that I’ve said it out loud.
No, I didn’t, but he feels it too. And that knowledge is worse than the heat.
As though Hell has taken every buried hunger and wants to turn up the volume some more, music begins to play somewhere unseen, low and slow.
The rhythm slides beneath my skin and syncs with my pulse. The warmth coils lower in my body, heavy and insistent.
He says my name.
“Scar.”
It sounds different here.
A growl but earthier, richer.
I’m moving toward him before I consciously decide to.
One step.
Then another.
The silver puddle beneath my boots flares brighter, as though approving.
“You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he says quietly.
My lips part. “Like what?”
His gaze drags down my throat and back up again, slow enough that heat blooms across my skin.
“That.”
The accusation should chill me. Instead, something reckless unfurls.
I close the distance between us.
He doesn’t retreat.
My fingers rise and press against his chest. I can feel his heartbeat, powerful but about as steady as my own.
“You don’t get to tell me how to look at you,” I murmur.
His breath hitches. Barely. “This isn’t you.”
“It is.” Gabriella help me, it feels like it is. The words escape before I can cage them.
“Careful,” he warns.
“Or what?”
His thumb presses lightly against the inside of my wrist, right over my pulse.
My heart betrays me by racing.
“Or I stop being careful.”
The words land between us like a drawn blade.
I bite down on my lip. “When you do that, maybe I’ll stop pretending…”
“Pretending what?”
I have never offered anything so unguarded. Never chosen to admit weakness so plainly. Not here, not on the Iron Isle and certainly not back in my turret in Virtus.
“That I don’t want to do this.”
I rise onto my toes and kiss him.
For one suspended heartbeat, the world holds its breath.
His lips are warm. Not soft, not tentative, but completely Silver in a way that steals the air from my lungs.
For a second, he doesn’t respond, and that pause feels infinite. Like I’m hanging off a cliff’s edge and only he can save me.
Then his hand moves. It finds my waist, neither gentle or too rough, but with a certainty which makes me think he’s imagined this before.
He pulls me closer, and heat surges through me, blazing like the furnace of silver flames lighting up his veins.
My fingers curl into the fabric at his chest, anchoring myself to something solid before I dissolve or melt into him entirely.
That’s when he kisses me back.
Not with reckless hunger, but with a restraint that feels on the edge of breaking at any moment.
I want it to break.
His mouth moves against mine slowly at first, as if memorizing the shape of it. Testing and coaxing.
My breath catches, and he takes it. He doesn’t steal or demand, he claims.
The marbles fades away, the rose gold sky, silver pools and Ferrum cadets too.
Even the music fades into nothingness.
There is only this.
Us.
The Overlord and the Assassin.
The steady strength of his body braced against mine. The faint taste of smoke and storm and something distinctly him. And when his lips part slightly against mine, the sensation is devastating.
My pulse slams against my ribs and my knees weaken.
I feel it everywhere. I feel him everywhere. In my throat, my fingertips, the hollow space low in my stomach that tightens and flips and blooms all at once.
I’ve been trained to endure pain. No one warned me about pleasure.
No one trained me for this.
For how consuming it feels to be wanted.
For how terrifying it is to want back.
For one impossible, breathless second, I forget every rule I have ever lived by.
I forget sin.
I forget virtue.
I forget that the angels are watching and melt into the Devil’s kiss.
All I know is that he is real and here and that he is kissing me back.
That he’s holding himself back even now. A fact that makes the kiss burn hotter somehow.
His other hand slides to the small of my back, fingers splaying as though he needs to feel that I am real too.
My fist tightens in the fabric at his chest, and the movement pulls me flush against him, the contact sending a tremor through me so sharp it borders on frightening.
I’ve never been kissed like this.
If Elias had been temptation, then Silver is Asmodeus himself.
As if hearing my thoughts and accepting a challenge, Silver loosens the hold on his control a crack more, and the kiss becomes a collision of two storms that have spent too long circling each other.
He breaks first, and his mouth stills against mine.
Then, with visible effort, he pulls away.
The loss is immediate.
Cold rushes in where the intense warmth had been.
His forehead rests against mine for one fleeting second, our breaths tangled in the space between us. His fingers are still at my waist. Still holding me. As though letting go requires control he hasn’t regained yet.
When he finally opens his eyes, there is heat there. No gray at all, leaving pure fluorescent silver.
“This isn’t real,” he says, voice rough.
But I know, with humiliating clarity, that at least my part of it is.
And that is far more terrifying than any mark or Sister or game.
His hand slides from my waist until there is no contact between us at all any more.
For a few perfect, terrifying moments, I was not a weapon. Not a pawn. Not being forged for someone else’s war.
I was wanted.
His words and rejection hurt me more than the heat ever could.
I need to get away from him, but Silver’s hand captures my wrists before I can walk away.
“This isn’t real. It’s magnified,” he says. “Not entirely a lie but not honest either.”
My cheeks burn hotter than the air around us. “You definitely kissed me back.”
“Yes.” The word is rough, matter of fact, no denial. “But the air you are breathing is tainted, it’s influencing you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise. To give in to desires you wouldn’t ordinarily give in to. Can’t you feel it burning your lungs and pressing on your spine?”
His hand presses softly against my chest, over my traitorous heart that’s still racing.
When it drops, the only thing I can feel is humiliation.
It’s instant and merciless.
I step back and it’s like the world around me turns back on all at once.
Khali is on her hands and knees arguing with the silver pool, Az, Reiva, Lilliana and most other cadets are doing the same, all with varying degrees of success if the different shades of silver puddles, from burning bright to brushed steel are any indication.
Garrick’s is glowing brightest of them all though.
Whatever is happening between him and whatever he sees and hears in that reflection, he’s losing.