Chapter Thirty-Two Taissa #2
“It just feels wrong,” he finally manages.
“It feels fucking wrong to go play ‘happy couple’ when everything’s falling to complete shit.
And it feels like all we are to them is a-a cash cow, and what we’re feeling doesn’t bloody matter to them as long as we do the Bahoochie Formation just right and kiss each other the way they want us to—” Kion cuts off, shaking his head.
Dark waves fall into his eyes. “I don’t want to kiss you like that, Taissa. ”
For a moment, her heart gives a familiar pinch of hurt: the sting of a small bumblebee, tender yet sharp, the attack of a creature so beloved, so usually harmless. He doesn’t want to kiss her. Right. She was a fool thinking maybe she had a shot after all, for inviting him to—
Taissa shakes her head to clear it. His face is open, vulnerable in a way that he never was when their colossal misunderstanding had hung heavy over their heads like a summer storm.
“You don’t want to kiss me like…what?” she asks, prompted by a slight catch in his voice.
Oh, she knows Kion Locke. And she knows there’s something, something else, that’s he’s trying so hard to say.
Something she wants, more than anything, to hear.
In the lift, the air grows as warm and heavy as honey, and…wanting.
Kion swallows hard; she watches his throat bob.
“I don’t want to kiss you because it’s in our damn contract,” he says, his voice so guttural that it seems to scrape against his throat.
“I want to kiss you because you—you infuriate me, Taissa. More than dogwalkers who go around with more than two dogs at once. More than kids who smear their sticky, manky fingers everywhere.” When her surprised laughter rings out, he smiles, just a bit.
Their hands are still joined; it’s his turn to squeeze hers.
“I know. It doesn’t make any bloody sense. ”
“It makes perfect sense, actually,” she breathes.
Kion’s face gentles, and Taissa is intoxicated by it. The way he softens when he looks at her—that’s a new thing, it is. It’s strange, so different from the headstrong glares she’s used to. But she likes it (oh, yes, she likes it; she likes it a lot). “Does it?”
Her heart is working overtime. “My evil plan has finally come to fruition. It’s reverse psychology.”
His mouth twitches. “Is it?” he whispers gruffly. “I don’t think it is.”
Oh, but she can’t stop herself from tracing his lips with her eyes, can’t stop herself from wanting to feel the scrape of his light, shadow-stubbled beard against her face again.
She wonders if he sees it, her desire, but then she doesn’t have to wonder anymore because one of his hands is slipping from hers to trace her face, hesitantly cupping it, thumb stroking against her skin so tentatively she might as well break.
“Kiss me, Kion,” Taissa whispers. “Kiss me because I infuriate you.”
Something suddenly flashes in his eyes. Anxiety? Shame? Fear? Oh, he’s worried, worried that she’ll abandon him if he presses his lips against hers, but she never would.
She never would, and she’ll show him that.
Taissa stands on her tiptoes—in the trainers he bought her—to slant her lips against his, shuddering slightly when their mouths meet. He tastes a bit like whiskey, and she wonders if he’s been drinking in the infirmary, then finds she can’t think anymore when the kiss deliciously deepens.
It’s slow and lazy and gentle, this kiss, so different from the fevered clashing of their mouths during the boudoir shoot.
Yet even though they’re fully clothed, this time, there’s something so much more erotic about the way his hands grip her arse through her jeans as he lifts her onto him, backing against the wall with a low groan.
“I meant it,” Kion gasps, breaking the kiss, his arms tightening around her. “You’ll get tired of me, Taissa, you will, it always happens t—”
And although her lips are swollen from his kiss, and although her heart feels like it might grow wings and escape from the cage of her ribs, Taissa’s eyes prick unexpectedly with tears as she stares at him, at Kion Locke, who is so utterly convinced that she’ll toss him aside like the others have.
In her mind’s eye, she sees his scars, a little boy begging to be loved and the world laughing in his face.
Before he can finish his sentence, she presses a finger to his lips, and shakes her head.
“Kion. I could never get sick of this. I could never get sick of you.”
There’s a somberness in his eyes. “You don’t know that.”
Rolling her eyes, she smacks his shoulder.
“Are you seriously picking a fight with me right now, Locke? While you’re holding me up against the wall and kissing me stupid?
” It’s such a Locke thing to do that she can’t help but bite back a laugh.
But when the somber look in his eyes remains, when his expression remains as raw as a geode crushed open to reveal glittering sharpness that could cut her if she let it, Taissa sighs.
“Maybe I will get sick of you,” she says quietly.
He flinches. “Or maybe you’ll get sick of me.
Or maybe we’ll fly off into the sunset on our stymphs and have a hell of an adventure.
Or maybe tomorrow, the entire world will end, and we’ll die not knowing.
Wouldn’t you like to know? I would.” She nudges his nose with her own. “I really want to know.”
His eyes crinkle in the corners. Is this what hope looks like on him? “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her voice is a little scratchy, and she wonders: Can he hear the fervent truth in her words? She’s adored him since she hung up that first poster in her room. Even when he broke her heart, she’d still idolized him.
Perhaps that’s how her hatred could have such depths to it.
But the man is even more intoxicating than the mask he shows the public. Kion is…She knows him now, knows he’s protective and kind and a pain in her arse…
And to prove her point, she kisses him again, and then he’s crossing the lift, and her back is against the wall, and he’s running his lips along her neck, his hands roaming, igniting little fires in their wake.
Her eyes flutter closed and she tries to bite down on a whimper but some leaks out, a little moan that has Kion making a harsh noise of wanting—
The lift’s intercom crackles on. “Er,” a voice says. “Uh. Sorry. I thought there was a maintenance issue?”
Too late, Taissa sees the small camera in the corner of the lift. Face flaming, she lets Kion slowly set her down. If Niamh finds this footage, she knows the elf will send it to every major outlet in existence.
The disembodied voice clears its throat. “Ready to get a move on, then?”
As Taissa mutters something in the affirmative, she sneaks another peek at Kion. His cheeks are flushed with color, his chest is rising and falling unevenly, and his lips…are curved upward.
In a smile.
A smile.
A small, barely there, but there all the same, smile.
The Diagnostic glyph burns black on James’s limp wrist, casting up what’s always reminded Taissa of a hologram, vital signs in glowing light hovering in the air.
She’s no healer (more likely to break bones than fix them, Estee always said), but even she can tell that there’s too much red blinking on James’s diagnostic.
“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” she asks as Kion stares down at his friend with an inscrutable expression.
Edward hesitates. “It’s too early to say, exactly, but…”
“It’s not somehow the Sleeping Death, is it?” Could the cursed illness somehow have shifted to James?
“No. It’s not that,” says Edward, but there’s a small crease between his two fair brows as he reads the flashing red symbols—and freezes. He’s found something; Taissa knows he has.
“What?” she demands, as Kion stiffens, those dark eyes snapping up toward Edward. “What is it?”
“The Fading Fever?” her captain demands, face paling. “I asked him—did his meds stop working? He’s elf-shot…”
“No.” Edward shakes his head, blinking hard. “It—no. Something else, and it doesn’t make sense.” The healer points to a small cluster of lines within what looks like a hexagon on the diagnostic. “That shouldn’t be there.”
“Why?” snarls Kion, evidently losing his patience. “Tell me what it means or I swear on Merlin—”
“Dark magic. He’s been exposed to dark magic. In, ah, heavy amounts.”
Maybe her brain is still fuzzy from the wonderful snogging in the lift (woozy, that’s what Kion’s made her, woozy), but Taissa doesn’t understand.
James—dark magic? No. No, the man is so straitlaced, so infuriatingly by-the-rulebook that it doesn’t seem…
possible. James Ridgeshaw, with his posh accent and disdainful, almost prissy, bossiness can’t dabble in the Dark Well.
No.
Unless…unless James Ridgeshaw had hired somebody to do the dark magic for him.
Could he have hired the púca? Hired Markus? Surely not. He was the one who had realized what the púca dust had meant, who’d helped them discover who was behind the curse in the first place.
But the thought still slips into her mind.
She can’t stop it. And once it’s there, it’s there.
At every turn, James hasn’t wanted to continue on with their rookie investigation: He’d been adamant that visiting the club was a terrible idea, and even seemed to be on the verge of refusing to journey to Ballyford.
And he knew about the púcas, about their ways, how to bargain with them, before anyone else.
He’d even slipped into Orla’s office alone the night prior, at Shrieking Pumpkin. Did he know her?
Her eyes slip to James’s pallid face, where his dark curls are streaked gray.
They hadn’t been leeched of color when she’d arrived to Pinion-upon-Keat.
She’s sure of it. But those colorless curls had appeared…
well, wasn’t it shortly after the Dust Bite?
Could they be the toll of a bargain with a púca?