30. The Fourth Game #2
Suddenly, he leans into it, dropping closer and closer, the gap growing narrower and narrower until he’s virtually touching it.
I realize his lips are pursed. “Garrick!” I call out but Silver presses a finger to my lips.
“Shh Scar,” he murmurs. “Let him try to fight it on his own.”
“And if he can’t?” I ask, because the angels know, I couldn’t fight it when our bodies and lips had been locked and ready to ride even the most treacherous storm.
Had it been the silver pool and not the man… I could easily be Garrick right now.
“Then he isn’t worthy of joining the Iron Choir. He’d be a liability to the Sisters.”
“How?”
Silver shrugs like it’s obvious. “He might be sent to Luxuria, captured and questioned by a succubus. If he can’t fight his desire for whatever he sees in this Hellscape, how will he fight it in real life?”
“He won’t be able to,” I mumble.
“Exactly.”
Garrick’s lips brush the surface of the pool. And keep going.
His head disappears first, then his hands, elbows, shoulders, until his entire upper torso has sunk into it.
That’s when his legs start to kick, frantic and urgent.
“It’s killing him,” I say, suddenly claustrophobic.
Silver doesn’t say anything, just nods.
Khali sits back and the surface of her pool shatters. She glances at Az, concern in every line of her face.
As though he can sense her, he climbs to his feet, gives her a playful wink and his pool does the same.
“Now your turn,” Silver says, before walking away.
I swallow, then drop to my hands and knees and stare into the pool’s reflection.
Silver looks up at me, but I know he’s not real. Not this one. I felt the real one, experienced the real thing. No matter how fleeting, it’s not something you can forget or mimic or fake.
Still, he calls to me, and I inhale slowly.
Heat and desire rise again, wrapping around me, sinking into my skin and pushing the humiliation aside.
I tear my gaze away to my friends.
Aside from Garrick, their pools are all losing their shine, solidifying, and one by one, beginning to shatter.
I look over the words glowing in the marble.
Desire reveals.
I look at the pool’s version of Silver looking up at me.
I do desire him. If that hadn’t been obvious to me from the feel of his hands healing me, or how I could stare at him with his wings on full display all night long while he’s trying to talk me into jumping from his turret roof, then that kiss sure revealed it.
I read the next line and when I look back, I swear the silver of the pool has dimmed a little.
Indulgence kills.
I force my eyes to where Garrick had been. All that’s left is a blazing pool of molten silver.
Denial destroys.
Silver’s denial felt like it could destroy me for a moment, but I was raised by the coldest, most calculating seraphim angel in Industria and his even colder children.
I have spent over a decade being denied any kind of love or attention that wasn’t for personal gain, and it hasn’t destroyed me yet so I don’t plan to start now.
The pool becomes brushed iron.
I don’t know how the others fought it, but this seems to be working. Az and Khali obviously recognized real from fake and didn’t fall for it. Or into it, as poor Garrick did.
The final line.
Mastery frees.
Reaching a hand into the pool, I grab hold of fake Silver’s jaw and force his gaze to mine.
“I embarrassed myself,” I admit, because the truth tastes better than pretending anymore.
“You did? How so?” He asks, quirking a dark eyebrow, lust obvious in his bright eyes. “Why don’t you show me.”
He puckers his lips in a way that the real Silver never would, and I shake my head once.
My gaze snaps to the real Silver, to be certain this is not that. He’s watching me and if I’m not mistaken, there’s something like concern in his eyes, certainly not the lust of the reflection.
He doesn’t think I can resist him.
The thought makes me bark out a laugh, and I pull my arm from the pool.
It puts up a fight but decides to release me, and I’m surprised to find my arm is completely clean as it comes away.
Then, I push up from my knees to stand, looking down at the puddle at my feet.
“I won’t deny that I want you, no matter how much I’ve embarrassed myself here today. But I’m not desperate or weak or about to surrender to you.”
It’s not about lust or chastity, I realize.
It’s about respect.
My mother always taught me that whoever loves the least in any relationship is in charge.
I don’t need to love Overlord Silver to know I’m certainly not going to let him be in charge of whatever this between us is.
It was mutual, I’m more sure of that now than I was even while he was kissing me back. It’s in the fear I can see in his eyes that I might suffer the same fate as my bunk mate, Garrick.
The music falters and the heat begins to recede.
The pool stills and dulls completely. My pulse does not.
Silver watches me from across the courtyard, and I watch the tension lift from his shoulders as I hear rather than see my pool shatter.
The writing on the marble shifts.
“They who acknowledge desire yet not kneel before it, may pass.”
As though a trance is broken, the cadets all look to one another, assessing the damage. One death too many. But everyone is obviously relieved to have lived to fight another game.
Three to go.
I’m last to make it over to Silver and the bright, swirling hellgate he’s already formed.
When I go to step through the gate, his hand wraps around my wrist, stopping me. The gate disappears and I suck in a breath.
Our gazes lock.
“You didn’t embarrass yourself, Scar,” he says quietly, then runs his tongue over his lips as though remembering. “I don’t fuck cadets. It’s my only rule and I don’t intend to break it. Not even for you.”
“It was just a kiss,” I try to sound nonchalant.
He scoffs.
“Sure,” he says, pulling me a fraction closer.
His lips brush the shell of my ear again in a way that makes goosebumps prickle along my neck and down my arms. His breath somehow travels all the way down my spine making me shiver in the most addictive way.
“But if you’d kept kissing me like that, Little Nephilim, I’d be so deep inside you right now, it would be impossible to remember why I made such a stupid fucking rule up for myself in the first place. ”
My stomach does a full flip, and then another, but before I can say anything, his hand drops and he steps back, and the hellgate ignites once more.