“Believe me,” I hissed through my teeth. “I can be very creative when I want to be.”
Ares Necroline’s gaze iced over. His breath came in short, furious inhalations. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to hit me or screw me, though that disloyal little sliver of my mind hoped it was the latter. Could I piss him off enough to get him to fuck me right here on the folding table?
My thighs clenched together like a vise at the thought. Hollow and empty.I was hollow and empty. I forced my hands to stay down, to keep from grabbing him. My skin burned, craving his touch.
It was wrong.
It was all I wanted.
I had to do something to make this stop.
Luckily, Ares shook his head, turning from me, then pulled all his laundry from the machines. The wet fabric slapped against his round plastic laundry basket. Each piece of clothing that fell in—the dry and sopping wet bleeding into one another—was a barb to my heart, but I couldn’t tell why.
I didn’twantto tell why—that there was more to all this than the slick desire heating between my legs. Doing laundry with Ares Necroline had felt like the most blissfully average forty-eight minutes of the past twenty years, and I didn’t want to admit that it felt good to be comfortable with someone.
To trust that the things they said were true.
Because the one thing I knew for sure about Ares Necroline was that he chose his words carefully, and when he spoke, he spoke the truth. If he wanted to hide something, he simply didn’t say anything. The fact that he felt like the only person in Orphium I could trust, and I’d pissed him off enough that he was busily combining soapy, wet shirts with dry, fluffy towels felt like a metaphor.
The part of me that wanted something—anything, really—to feel true screamed at me to apologize. To grit my teeth and just bang out a sincere apology. But that wasn’t in my best interests, nor was it in Necroline’s. Neither of us could afford to trust anyone in this vipers’ nest of a city, especially not each other.
CHAPTER 11
ARES
“She wants to apologize,”the spirit said, as I pushed past Ember with my mess of a laundry basket. “She just doesn’t know how.”
I glared at the spirit, then noticed something familiar about her. Her eyes. They were the same shape and color as Ember’s. “Are yourelatedto her?” I whispered, hoping that Ember, with her preternatural Maere hearing, couldn't pick out the sound of my voice over the washing machine and dryer that were still going.
The spirit appeared to sigh, and nodded. I paused at the door to the laundromat, waiting as she spoke. I was curious to know the answer. “Distantly. She’s taken care of our family for centuries. I can’t understand why. From everything I could tell when I researched her history, my ancestors treated her terribly.”
I smiled at the spirit. The answer was easy. It was one I was quite familiar with. “Devotion.”
Not love. Love was not for people like Ember Verona and me. But devotion? Devotion was a concept we both knew all too well. I pushed the door open with my shoulder, turning to look back. Ember stood under the cascading foliage of a spiderplant, her hazel eyes wide and glassy, teeth sunk into her full bottom lip.
I could practically hear those molars grinding together from here. She should quit it with that or she was going to need one Hel of a dentist. The thought almost made me laugh.Almost.
But almost was enough to remind me why I came in the first place. Why I’d burned her ridiculous house down all those years ago, misguided as it was. The Maere were the parapsychs’ best hope, the only force in the three territories that could genuinely stand between us and the Authority’s horrors. In Aradios and Palladiere, the Maere had made things better—made the Trinity better there as well. The difference was the swords… And the fact that the Palladiere and Aradios Maere hadn’t been shattered to pieces. Guilt gnawed at me.
“I’ll call you if I find anything else out, Verona.” I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I believed she could make things better if she had her swords back. Maybe I wanted to accept the apology in her eyes. Or maybe I just didn’t want to leave mad. My guts were twisted up with unfamiliar emotions. Ones I couldn’t afford, but I wanted her to know she could trust me all the same. “What we talked about stays here.”
Her teeth sank deeper into her lip. If she drew blood, I might drop everything to try and fix it. I had to leave. Whatever this was flooding me, I had to get away from Ember Verona before she crept into my heart. I pushed out of the laundromat, infuriated that I’d let my feelings take me over.
Outside, rain poured down. I crossed the street, towards the metro tunnel, and as I made it to the other side, I made the mistake of looking back. Ember stood on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. She’d followed me out of the laundromat. It was raining hard enough that she was already soaked, and freezing from the looks of things.
Her sweater clung to her body, revealing the shape of her breasts. Desire raged through me, an inferno I had no business allowing to burn. Every base instinct in me told me to drop thebasket, cross the street, and kiss that look right off her face. Push her up against the brick building the laundromat was in and warm every bit of that cold, wet skin with my hands, my body, my mouth.
We stared at each other for far too long. Her lips parted, and hard as it was raining, I could see from here that her chest was heaving as hard as mine was with the labor of her breath. The labor it took to stay in place, when all it seemed either of us wanted to do was cross the street.
Years of eyeing each other silently had come to this. Less than an hour alone in a hole-in-the-wall laundromat, and I was tempted to throw all my principles away to get inside her. To feel that long, pliant body wrapped around mine. To be the person she trusted.
Fuck. What was wrong with me? I willed myself to move first, to take the power back and show her I didn’t want anything from her. Her mouth moved. She was saying something. Two words, over and over.I can’t.
Whether she spoke to herself, or meant for me to understand, it didn’t matter. She couldn’t, and neither could I. We had people to worry about, two factions that weren’t exactly opposed, but also had never bothered to work together. That’s not how the Trinity worked, and it certainly wasn’t how the Consulate worked.
Despite my pie in the sky dreams about a better future, the Maere were bought and paid for. They were Consulate creatures through and through, and the Consulate could not be trusted. That was the truth and it should be reason enough to walk away. But those words on her lips. They were the only ones that mattered to me.She couldn’t. Couldn’t turn away from what she felt.
I’d known Ember Verona for so long, it was hard to remember a time when I didn’t know her. And though we weren’t close, I knew her nature. Impulsive. Chaotic. Reckless.She was doing everything she could to rein that in right now. If I had a shred of decency left in me, I’d fix this for her.
