Chapter 18 #2
I approached the glass case. Inside, a nude blonde woman lay perfectly still, her beautiful face serene. She held a single red rose against her chest with both hands. The thorns hadn’t been removed. Tiny, dried trails of blood marked her porcelain skin from where the thorns had pierced her hands.
When something flew at my face, I leapt back into Wes’s chest. He steadied me.
“Are those butterflies?” I breathed, gaping at the hauntingly beautiful blue-winged creatures. “That’s cruel.”
A man in his late forties dressed like an ancient king broke off from a huddle of guests to approach us.
With his ample gut, pasty skin, and wax-statue-like features, it was clear he was the bank rather than the entertainment.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he said with a broad smile.
“They’re PETA-approved.” He lowered his voice as if telling a secret. “Robots.”
When I spotted another flying about, its glowing iridescent wings confirmed the man’s explanation.
“Oh. Security let those through?” I asked.
The man’s eyes sparkled with surprise as he laughed. “The designs were meticulously inspected before approved, like everything else in this place.”
My stomach flipped. Wes’s hand tensed on my waist. I didn’t remember when he’d placed it there in the first place—perhaps when this man had first approached us.
“My name is Elliot,” he said, though he said it teasingly. “And you are?”
I blinked. My facial recognition skills were notoriously faulty, even with people I saw all the time on TV. My friends always had to be the ones to spot celebrities in the city, because without seeing them in context, my brain just never processed the recognition.
But as soon as he’d said his name, shocked horror clicked into place.
“Your robots,” I whispered. I quickly cleared my throat. “Nova.”
His eyes lit up as if he recognized my name too, and that made my stomach churn more violently.
Elliot Sulton. One of the richest men in the world, the CEO of another major tech company, knew who I was.
“Wes,” Wes said, even though the man hadn’t asked him.
My knees felt weak. Women from the group Elliot had broken off from stared at me before turning to each other to whisper.
They all looked like models, still in gowns, as if they hadn’t changed into their party outfits yet.
They held a level of surgically precise beauty I rarely saw in the real world.
The look on Elliot’s face as he regarded Wes wasn’t something I expected.
My brows drew close as I looked between them.
Elliot smiled, as if Wes had just told him a joke.
And Wes looked scarily impassive, like he had boarded all of himself away.
The only hint of emotion was contained in the darkness of his eyes.
“Nova!” a voice called from above.
On the second level, Maisy waved to me from between two dangling bunches of artfully arranged plants and fairy lights. She beckoned me to join her.
Wes didn’t immediately let me go. It felt like the confusing invisible cord between us was only growing tauter, hurtling toward some great snap.
I wasn’t sure what exactly was going to happen when it finally broke.
“Nice to meet you,” I said to Elliot, not because it was true, but more because I promised Hudson I wouldn’t get disappeared tonight.
“You as well,” he said.
“See you… later?” I said lamely to Wes.
His sharp gaze knocked the air out of my lungs. His voice was low yet icy. “I’ll find you. Remember what I said.”
The shift in him startled me. The words weren’t gentle or caring. They were a hard order, final and inarguable.
And as my spine straightened and the space between my thighs pulsed as I took the staircase, I slowly realized the reason for Wes’s coldness. I glanced back at him, speaking in a low voice to Elliot.
The only language they speak is power, he’d said.
His show of dominance was protection. It was his way of communicating to Elliot a claim on me, even if it wasn’t real.
None of this is real. That was also something Wes had told me—weeks ago, at the first soirée.
The sound of a booming voice at the top of the stairs made me jump. “Welcome all to the land of gods, beasts, and every creature in between. We have entered the realm of myth.”
A dark-haired man in a stag mask, tight brown pants, and no shirt had positioned himself in the center of the banister, calling down below like some divine messenger.
The girls next to me laughed and clinked flutes of champagne.
Or, at least, they were making laughing sounds, but their immovable faces made their true emotions uncertain.
From above, I glanced back down at the woman in the glass case. The stag man bolted down the stairs, and a crowd gathered above and below to watch. Maisy linked her arm with mine.
“Oh my God, it’s the first performance of the night!”
The room, the staircases, and this generous upper level overlooking the foyer quickly filled with bodies, but the area around the glass case remained clear.
The shirtless stag made a show of slowly lifting the top of the case.
“In the original Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, the prince does not awaken the princess with a kiss,” the man said. He stepped out of his bottom layers, and my eyes popped as they homed in on his impressively large member, fully erect.
I was guessing he, too, was the entertainment.
Wes and I locked eyes for the briefest moment before returning our attention to the spectacle.
“No, no, no,” the man said, his voice carrying impressively through the vast space. I suspected a background in theater. “The lord finds the princess trapped in an enchanted slumber, and he impregnates her.”