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For once, Mei’s expression is illegible, and not because it’s a distortion of human emotions. She truly is still as stone.
“Did I say something wrong?”
She drags a hand over her face, stretching her skin down. “No, I just… no. You didn’t.”
For a minute, I wait for her to elaborate. When it becomes painfully clear she won’t, I sigh. “I should get to Tei. I think this whole ordeal may have unlocked the meaning of another trinket.”
Before I can circumvent her, Mei reaches for me. I step out of her reach, and she jolts her hand away quick as a snake. “Sorry.” She pauses and chews on her lip. “Do me a favor, though, will you?”
“Of course.”
Her head jerks to my hand still holding the marble. “Keep that from Tei. For now, at least.”
“Why do I need to do that?”
“There’s things he’s not ready to hear yet. As a friend, I just need you to trust me on this one.”
I should press, but something tells me this is all I’m going to get. Mei has been nothing but helpful to me through this, and with a sick sense of pride, I realize I do consider her a friend; maybe the only one I have, actually, save for Sara. It should bother me more that my only friend is a ghost, but honestly, it feels suiting. So instead of challenging her, I nod and slip the marble back in my bag.
I’m fairly confident I can talk to Tei without revealing what happened to Bernie and what he left behind, but I don’t quite grasp why I should. What kind of things is he not ready for, and what does being ready even look like?
The feeling I can’t fully trust Tei snakes into the pit of my stomach, heavy and dark. We’ve made strides forward, I’ll give him that, and I believe he wants me to win, but I’m also not naive enough to think he has anything but his own gain in mind when helping me. At the end of the day, Tei might care about my success in this game, but he doesn’t care about me. He wouldn’t hesitate to dispose of me, if it helped him in his cause.
With that thought souring my once easy mood, I take the stairs two at a time, and head for his bedroom.
Tei stands in front of his in-suite bathroom door, a white fluffy towel strung low across his navel and another one drying off his hair. The longer strands that usually frame his face in perfect swoops dangle in waves in front of his eyes, and rivulets of water drip from the ends down his neck and naked chest.
Seeing him with no shirt on, I notice how the odd circle-like tattoos continue over his torso, all with slightly different lines filling them in. In total, he has five or six scattered across his body.
Heat flares in my cheeks, and I bring my palms to cover them. Why does he have to be gorgeous? It’d be a lot easier to focus on his Machiavellian ways if he didn’t distract me with his Michelangelian looks.
When he sees me, a slow grin spreads across his lips. “If you were hoping to catch some shower peeping action, you’re a few minutes too late.”
I roll my eyes at his arrogance — only crown princeling Tei would be so full of himself as to think I’d come here just in hopes of catching him naked. A little voice in the back of my head points out that that’s exactly the mental image I painted when Mei mentioned a shower, but I smother it down until it suffocates. “Can you be serious for one minute? I came to ask a legitimate question.”
Tei places the towel he was drying his hair with in a large black wicker basket before strolling to the bed and dropping down, hands pressed to the mattress behind him and legs spread just enough that one of his defined quads peeks out of his waist towel, but not enough to become indecent.
I want to fan myself all the same.
He must pick up on my nervousness, because he grins, the asshole. “I don’t bite.“
“You’re basically naked.”
He stretches lazily. “Sounds like a good time to me.”
I have half a mind of just walking out, slamming the door behind me for good measure, but what I want to discuss with him is actually important, so I swallow my pride — and butterflies — and sit on the farthest edge of the bed, barely hanging on, fingers fisted on the fabric of my skirt. Before I speak, I take a deep breath in. “Show me your horns.”
That gets Tei to straighten, back stiff as a rod. All semblances of playfulness are gone. “How do you know I have horns?”
“Does it matter?”
He stares at me so intently it feels like he might burn a hole through my forehead to peek at my thoughts. Mei’s words hammer in my mind, and maybe they made me paranoid, but I can see the gears spinning in Tei’s brain, the machinations he’s about to deploy.
“You can tell me, or you can leave. There aren’t any other options here.” His tone is pure ice.
It finally strikes me that the issue here is not so much that I can’t trust Tei — because at least as long as our goals align, my safety is in his best interest — but that he doesn’t trust me. If possible, that feels even more dangerous. If he’s guarding against me, for whatever reason, what hope do I have of discovering all the information I need to find the missing piece?
With a sigh, I say, “I spoke with a ghost this morning. He mentioned horned monsters guarding the Beyond.”
