He was moving her.
He had her by the waist, and he used it to pull her through the maze of mannequins everyone had become. Fast, so fast she couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t think how to even start to get out of this. And of course, all the while his words sank her in deeper.
“Come with me, come with me, my love, let me take you, letme hold you the way I long to,” he said, voice now almost a burr of something soft, against her cheek, her throat, the insides of her head.Stop, she wanted to say, but it was like drifting into a dream. Like before, when he had told her the story of Lilibet.
Only stronger. So much stronger.
Oh, this was undoubtedly something more.
Whatever that had been, it wasn’t thralling. Becausethiswas thralling—this sense of walking without moving her own feet, of being drowned even as she did her best to swim. She was never going to break the surface of this, never. It was impossible to, even when he pulled her into some dusky darkness, behind a curtain that concealed a room beyond.
To savage her, she assumed.
But she was a fool to, and she knew it. Being savaged was a thing he could just do, if he wanted to. But persuading her to do something soft—well. That was something else. That was the real prize, the true proof of his power. If he could make that happen, he had her in his thrall, unquestionably.
Yet somehow, it still shocked her when he said it.
“Kiss me,” he murmured, the moment they were alone. Syrup soft, like all the rest of the words he’d used to put her under his spell—but with a strange current of something else. Hunger and desperation, all tangled together. Impossible, and yet it was there in his eyes, too. It was in his face.
He looked down at her through a kind of fog, as lost in this thrall as she seemed. Eyes heavy, one hand coming up to almost touch her face again. And when it did, she came so close to doing it she actually felt his breath fan against her face. She saw the flecks of black in his brown eyes. Felt her own hand on thenape of his neck, pulling him down to her, in a way she knew he couldn’t possibly want.
This was just about tormenting her.
He wanted to claw through her soul, to turn her upside down and inside out. And yet it still didn’t look like it. She saw it clear through the fog of whatever this was—his face changing, when her lips were within an inch of his. Those eyes filled with a strange sort of despairing softness, like someone resigned to losing their life. Then they seemed to drop to her parted lips, as he leaned in.
And itwashim who leaned, in that moment.
She didn’t pull him. She didn’t move at all.
Somehow, she had stopped—as if his influence had suddenly dissolved.
Even though she knew it hadn’t. She could still feel it, as strong as ever. But it seemed easier to resist, for some reason. She pushed, and it drew back. And when his lips almost grazed hers, it pulled back so far, she couldn’t even say it was controlling her at all. She was just nearly kissing him, and he was nearly kissing her, as if they were suddenly two different people entirely.
And she knew why.
The girl in the long grass, she thought.
The one with the ribbon around her throat.
Once, that girlhadkissed someone like him. She even got a flash of it, then—sitting in a deck chair, as dusk settled in. The smell of mown grass in the air, the sense of someone sitting next to her. He had long legs, like Harker. Dark hair, like Harker. That interesting dimple in his chin.
But the hand he had in his lap was nervy, always fidgeting.
He constantly cracked the knuckle of his forefinger over his thumb.
And he didn’t turn to the girl sitting beside him in a confident way. He snuck a glance, eyes as big as moons.Lili, she thought she heard him murmur.Lili, about the other day. I wasn’t feeling like myself. I don’t know what came over me. Sometimes it feels like something gets hold of my body and makes me do awful things.
Like a shadow has a hand on your shoulder, Mina thought.
But she couldn’t follow that idea. Because a moment after she had it, Lili replied to the boy in the deepening dusk.I don’t think something can be awful if I welcome it, she murmured back. And then she leaned forward, slower than sinking into syrup. And she pressed her lips against his parted ones. She kissed him—and oh. Oh. Oh.
It was simply too sweet to resist.
No clashing teeth, no rough fist in her hair.
Just exquisite tenderness, and a sense of overwhelming heat. As if this moment was so much more than just a kiss. It had meaning behind it, of a kind she didn’t understand, she couldn’t know.
All shedidknow was thatthenandnowmingled so deeply, for a moment, that she almost went ahead and kissed Harker. She came so close it almost seemed like she tasted that sharp mint scent on his breath. That the sensation pouring through her was because of him, and not that sultry and strange memory.
