Chapter Thirteen Taissa #2
Taissa runs through every single available option in her mind (Crocheted noose?
Poison snuck into his water bottle during training?) as she sits squashed between Knox and Bronte on Kion’s black leather sofa, watching him (murderously) as he stands in front of his team and explains, in a low voice, just what’s going on between the two of them.
Kion Locke, she’s discovered, has an actual and probably diagnosable allergy to lies.
His neck had been a bright, itchy red all the way back to the Nexitory, and was only subsiding now that the truth was outing itself through his lips—which she is not staring at.
(And she is not thinking about how certain parts of him had…
hardened…underneath her a few nights ago. No. Taissa never thinks about that.)
(And she’s also not allergic to lies.)
Maybe part of Kion’s sudden veracity is his need to give his team something other than today’s destruction to focus on.
In comparison to the “Dust Bite,” the PR scheme between the pair of them is nothing at all.
Taissa had also seen how the other players had perked up in Taste of Delhi as the drama between James and Kion had stewed.
Maybe that’s why James had started it in the first place; to concentrate on something else, anything else, than the bodies in the bleachers.
But his words to Kion, so sharp and freezingly cold, still ring in her ears.
Not all of us are as deeply repressed as you.
“So you’re faking it,” Bronte says abruptly, interrupting Kion’s explanation, a look of glee slowly spreading across her face.
It’s a welcome change from the haggard, hollow mask she’s been wearing.
“Ohoho! You’re faking being in love for cold, hard cash.
Fuck me, I knew it! You’d best pay up, Tanaka. ”
Knox looks tormented. “I don’t know if I’ll ever believe in true love again,” he rasps as he rummages around in the pocket of his distressed jeans and passes Bronte a crumpled pound note.
Taissa grabs the money from Knox and stares down at it in disbelief. “You didn’t buy it, then?” she demands of Bronte, who snatches the cash back from her. The other snorts through her nose.
“Sorry, but nope. On no possible realm does Taissa Cho call Kion Locke her pookie. Plus, nobody is that loud during sex.”
óríon looks at Taissa. She holds her own underneath that steady blue glare, remembering his animosity from her first night there.
“Ah,” he says after a long moment, looking slightly relieved. “This is good. He does not really love you. You won’t distract him with passionate lovemaking and sweet nothings.” Ouch. How blunt. “This is better for the team. I see now what you are doing. It is clever.”
James, standing next to the couch, suddenly looks lost. “You lied to me?” Taissa hears him rasp to Kion as Bronte twists around to show off her winnings to Isla. Whatever Kion murmurs back is lost in return as Mahina’s hands dart through the air, Adriel translating.
“It’s a smart idea, fake-dating. I wonder if Adriel and I can try it…” Adriel’s eyes widen. “Wait, what?”
Mahina grins like a fiend and waggles her eyebrows.
Meanwhile, Isla is watching the proceedings with wide eyes filled with bewilderment. Taissa grimaces as the team descends further into bedlam, providing more proof that this—all of this—is a welcome distraction from the morning’s horrors.
Unable to take it anymore (visions of all her future money swirling down the drain), Taissa leaps to her feet and clears her throat. When literally nobody pays her any mind (insulting, honestly), Taissa clambers up onto the low coffee table in front of the dark sofa and pointedly stomps her foot.
Underneath her, the glass surface shatters into hundreds of little pieces.
Well, that gets everybody’s attention, doesn’t it?
“Er,” says Taissa eloquently, standing in the middle of a glass pile, ankles stinging above her bunny baffies, “nothing a quick Mending glyph won’t fix, hey?”
(This could possibly be a lie. The glass is so shattered that it would take an expert in advanced Mending glyphs—a handyman—to fix the destruction she’s unfortunately wreaked upon Locke’s beautiful little table.)
Kion’s dark eyes are searing into her flesh like a brand. “You are the bane of my fucking existence, Cho.”
Taissa shoots him her best murderous look. Given her current mood, it’s not too difficult at all. “Let’s not forget the time you broke my wrist. This? This is nothing.”
That particular incident had occurred the year that the Major League bracket came down to the Wyverns and the Stymphs vying for the championship.
Despite all of their warfare thus far, Taissa remembers how a part of her had still been clinging to the vestiges of her hope that she could somehow impress Locke, could win him over as a mentor, when he’d abandoned his position (illegally, mind you) to rush after her as she’d carried one of his team’s jewels over to her side.
He’d reached out with one of his ridiculously massive hands, closing it around her wrist, jerking it at an angle in which no bone should bend.
That was the exact moment she understood just how much of a monstrous numpty Locke is.
(Had she cried her little heart out in the locker room after the game, even after the medics had Panacea’d her wrist? That’s a secret she’ll never tell. Except perhaps on her deathbed. Or for lots of money.)
Now, she watches Locke frown. “That was an accident,” he grits out, but she doesn’t believe him. If it really was an accident, he would have apologized.
“Wow,” says Bronte, on the couch. “So the two of you still actually hate each other, I see.” Her golden eyes are glittering. “Got it.”
Taissa grits her teeth, shooting the other girl a scalding glare. “You can’t tell anybody. Not the press, not your friends, nobody. Or I…get kicked off the team.”
Kion meets her eyes and violently shakes his head.
Oops.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have disclosed that, she thinks as James makes a soft derisive sound behind her (he’d just love to see her kicked off, wouldn’t he?).
Panicking somewhat, Taissa whips out her qyl from its holster.
There’s one way to swear the team to secrecy.
“Nobody leaves this flat until Kion and I’ve marked you with an Untold. ”
Even at Level One, it’s an extraordinarily advanced glyph, a way to swear its wearer to secrecy. Bill Dodds probably doesn’t even know it, seeing as the secret between her and Kion is bound only by the threat to kick her off the team if it makes its way out into the open, and not by an Untold.
Frasier, though, he had known it. Probably had learned it for the specific purpose of trying to put it on her.
Taissa had almost been marked with an Untold by her ex-coach after The Scandal, and only by kneeing that sorry bastard in the balls did she manage to flee before he forced their qyl onto her again.
Fat lot of good it did. His threats to Sansa were as good as any Untold.
Taissa only knows the markings of the glyph because she’d made it up to Highly Advanced Glyphs at the Banallan Witchery and the Untold was one of the last glyphs they’d learned before the final exam.
It’s powerful: Level One is enough to keep anyone from running their gob about any secret.
Level Five is rumored to dissolve the wearer’s mouth.
Taissa had spent hours drawing just Level One, over and over, on her parchment in an attempt to memorize the motions.
By now, it’s muscle memory. She’s been dying to put it on Locke herself since the moment they signed that contract, but she knew there was no way he’d allow it.
And unlike Frasier, Taissa doesn’t force people into glyphs they don’t want.
The team is quiet, eyeing her with new gazes. She feels a bit smug about it, despite the fact that blood is running down her ankles and staining her baffies.
(That’s right—Taissa Cho is smart. If it hadn’t been for that entire Scandal, she could have gotten a job with the UKHC Glyph Masters’ Guild instead of at the lovely Scran Mart.)
“There is simply no possible way you know that glyph,” says James, who Taissa is positive will mope over this whole situation forever.
Taissa ignores him. “Who wants to go first?”
For a moment, nobody moves. Then Knox, groaning, rises from the sofa.
He shakes his head, tousled brown hair falling into his eyes.
“Me. I kinda like having you on the team,” he says, “even though you mostly ignore my magnificent presence. If it’ll make you feel better about knowing none of us will blab, you can mark me. ”
She can’t help but to smile hesitantly at that. Knox grins back, like getting her to smile is a huge achievement for which he will eventually receive an award.
(It won’t.)
Letting her features settle back into their usual grumpy positions, she gestures for Knox to give her the palm of his hand.
Not all glyphs require specific placement on the body, but some (like Panaceas and Marriage glyphs) do.
Untold is one of them; it must be inked on the wearer’s index finger—the finger that would usually press against the lips to say, Shhh.
It can only be nullified by the person who put it there in the first place.
Taissa’s shoulders stiffen as Kion moves forward to stand at her back, looking over her shoulder as she starts to draw the glyph.
In her mind, she holds the secret, that their relationship is utterly fake (and that really, she has planned his demise various times), letting that secret flow with her magic into the swirling glyph on Knox.