Chapter 9 #2
My jaw dropped. “You—”
He chuckled and winked. My ire evaporated like the steam from the pot—coiling and disappearing into the air. When he used his wiles, he was tantalizing. With that purely happy look on his face, he was devastating.
“You do realize that I will have my revenge?” I cleaned the knife.
“I could hope for no less.” He flashed a grin, and I gripped the sink’s edge to keep from swaying closer. “The anticipation of your revenge is something I look forward to every night.”
Just the thought of a tavern or alley was enough to make my body warm. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, your highness.” Which would we visit tonight?
“Your majesty, if you will.”
“But of course, your majesty. Can I bring you anything?”
“A bottle and glass of the ambervale would be lovely.” He pointed to a cabinet.
I retrieved a bottle and two glasses.
We were on our second glass by the time Gabriel placed the fillets in a shallow serving dish and sprinkled them with fresh parsley.
The meal was excellent. Moan-inducing. The fish melted in my mouth—the sauce just the perfect balance for letting the flavor come through while hinting at something more, something deeper—teasing me to take one bite and then another.
I sipped the ambervale, which heightened the feeling. Gabriel lifted a brow, but the pleasure in his eyes pleased me in return. “Where did you learn to cook?”
“I learned from one of the best flavor weavers that gilded power can buy.”
“You hired a master to teach you?”
“What master chef would teach outside of his school or family?” He lifted his glass and watched me over the rim.
“You attended the Gilded Spoon?” The academy would explain his kitchen skills, but not his current occupation.
“They have nothing to teach me.”
I raised a brow. “Some fancy gilded lady forced her chef to teach you in exchange for pleasure?”
I immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say, even in teasing, as his fingers tightened around the stem.
His smile spread, slow and sensual, and though it pulled at something low in my stomach, his eyes were emerald hard. “Of course. Isn’t that what would make sense, after all? Very perceptive of you, Marietta.”
Unlike his earlier playful compliment, this one held contempt.
“No. I meant to tease you in return.” I looked at my plate.
With his ease in gaining favor from women and his tricks to manipulate them, the comment had been too easy.
But the language in his eyes always told a different story in those interactions, and I had chosen to ignore that in order to be witty.
“Isn’t it apparent why I am firmly headed for an unmarried shelf? ”
The silence stayed unbroken for twenty ticks of the mantel clock.
“I’ve always liked the kitchens.” His voice was more reserved, and I already missed the extra note of affection he had begun to use with me. “They are warm and hidden. Owners and guests rarely enter. A chef took me under his wing when I used to run about underfoot. Put me to work.”
I bit my lip as he continued.
“It was a good place for me. I thought about pursuing that path, but events led to other things.”
“What types of other things?”
“This and that. Favors exchanged. New favors to use.” His gaze washed over me. His voice warmed. “I do believe I won our bet. Unfortunately for you, you did not specify the terms.”
The look in his eyes made the constant butterflies he churned take wing.
“The loser cleans the dishes, of course,” I said lightly, pushing the fluttering down.
He raised a brow, heat still sparking from his eyes beneath. “I will make sure to set the terms myself next time, but for just this once, I’ll comply.”
He moved to clear the dishes and cutlery and I moved to the basin. I washed each item and stuck it into a rack to drain. He pulled a cloth out to dry and we worked in a charged but comfortable silence until I placed the last dish in the rack.
“Where are we headed tonight?” I drew a finger down the edge of the rack in anticipation of his answer. Of what we might find. Or what we might need to do. Of what position I might find myself in.
“One would think you enjoy exploring the underbelly of the city.”
“Hardly the underbelly—we’ve barely stepped foot in the east.”
“For someone of your station, any area beyond Ember Square qualifies.”
“Says the man with the enormous house in Ember Square.”
“Says the man who didn’t always have that house. You, on the other hand, are used to the genteel aspects of life.”
If only. “I worked the spell line in secret and have needed to travel to various unsavory parts of the city to pay our bills.” I lifted my chin.
“I know.” His gaze gentled. “But there is a difference between gilded disgrace and true poverty.”
“Yes.” I looked down. “But the latter is where we are headed.”
He nudged me aside and washed a stray cup he had picked up from somewhere in the kitchen—one of his many coffee cups, to be sure—and placed it on the rack to dry. “The spell line is one of the many equality advancements in this new age. What did you do?”
I would bet he already knew. But it was a secret I had never been able to share, and it spilled from my lips.
“I sewed for a line going to the Silvered Strand. Middle stitches and end embroidery. It doesn’t take much spellwork, mostly finger craft and time.
Nothing like what Vivienne can do. I did some knitting and assembly for others that don’t ask for names, only stitch work. Picked up and dropped off anonymously.”
“Industrious of you.”
I gave him a look that said how much I appreciated being called a battle-axe once again. I picked up the drying towel and his cup from the rack—the last item inside. “I liked being part of a line—adding something in a garment’s journey from cloth to end.”
“Being valued.”
Want ached deep inside. “Yes. I haven’t had much success in that. I’m quite a terrible mage.”
He took the drying towel from me and set it down, regarding me with a look that saw far too much. He pulled a walnut from his pocket and placed it beside his wine glass.
“Lift it into the air.”
I reached out and gripped the knobbly shell between my first finger and thumb. My fingers closed on air as the walnut shot away, rolling across the wood, snatched from my grasp.
The whole time his arms stayed folded across his chest. An easy display of control. “Marietta.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “I haven’t the cultivation for parlor tricks, Gabriel.” Not that I couldn’t recite the technique perfectly, demonstrate the hand positions, explain the theory. I just couldn’t make it work.
“Try it anyway. Move it—without using your fingers. Show me how you were taught.”
The Coolridge Middling Academy had said to visualize an object’s movement—to picture it clearly, then to push the thought toward the object with focused intent.
I stared at the nut. It was knobbled and ordinary, casting a small shadow against the wood. I pictured it rolling—saw the exact arc it would take across the table, the way it would catch the light as it spun. I pushed the thought toward it, firmly, the way I’d been taught.
The walnut remained, round and indifferent, catching the lamplight exactly as it had before.
I exhaled. “See?”
Even Coolridge, a third-rate school, had been a reach for me. Once a mage was identified as gifted or weak, the designation was hard to shake. The academies weeded out the weak early, and few had the patience to teach struggling mages who lacked the backing of a strong estate.
“Focus and intent?”
“Of course.” As strictly taught. “I just haven’t the—”
“Hide it.”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Make the walnut disappear from view.” He rested against the counter. “Don’t move it. Don’t lift it. Just make it disappear.”
“I just showed you I lack the skill—”
“You lack the appropriate training,” he said. “There is a difference. They taught you to visualize. To picture and push. I know they did. And that works for some people. But not for you.”
The ache grew. “Then what does?” Any other method had been lost to me—our family grimoires sold by the time I reached the age to turn their pages. My parents had been too busy keeping their heads above water—then succumbing to the current within—to help.
“Feeling the intent,” he said simply. “Not pushing at it. Not forcing it. Connecting to it emotionally.” He tilted his head, watching me the way he watched everything—as if the answer were already in the room and he was simply waiting for me to find it.
“You already know how to do it, Marietta. You do it every time you walk into a space where you don’t want to be noticed.
Where you are scared or risk scorn.” A pause.
“You’ve been practicing that your entire life, I’ll bet. ”
I looked at the walnut. Safer than looking at him. The kitchen was very quiet, save for the settling of embers in the grate.
Make it disappear? Why would a nut want to disappear? How would it feel to lie unnoticed, uncracked on the table—slipping away from the one who would crack and destroy it?
The part of me that did not enjoy being watched while I failed went very quiet.
The quiet that settled over me in hallways when a servant was about to turn a corner. The kind that draped me in a crowd when I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes. The sort I had never once in my life thought of as practice—just survival.
I tugged at the feeling. The way I felt a shift in a crowded room. The weight of attention. The pull of eyes. How to slip between them, unnoticed.
I looked at the walnut again. Better to disappear.
There was no walnut on the table.
Gabriel smiled, reached out—and rolled an invisible nut across the wood with a lightly scraping sound.
It was there—my gaze sliding right over it the way it did something unremarkable. Something not worth seeing.
Something invisible.
He held my gaze with a long, steady look that contained something I couldn’t quite name, then he snapped his fingers and the walnut appeared.