Page 55 of The Bargain

After tonight, everything will go back to normal, right?

What even is normal anyway?

Is it normal to think about someone like Elias Lennox, who sells his dignity and morals for trinkets like a merchant at an all-day fair? To think about his mouth and his dark unreadable eyes, his bare chest and his scars and his rough knuckles?

Is it normal to make a deal with him that will doom him, and let him drag me down with him?

Or is that all just part of his blurred line strategy?

Elias pulls away, ending our kiss with a gentle bite to my bottom lip, tugging wet flesh. He pushes his mask back down, but not before I glimpse the curving of his satisfied smile.

Without thinking, I reach up and press a last kiss to the plastic smirk of his ghost mask. The plastic is warm beneath my wet, sensitive lips. Behind the mask, Elias’s breath hitches.

“For fuck’s sake, you two,” a rough voice barks behind me. “Save it for the bedroom.”

Dimitri, topless in a fur cloak and covered in blood I’m not sure is fake, appears with his arm slung over the shoulder of a girl in a shiny red catsuit. A girl who is definitely not his fiancée.

“Point us to a bedroom,” Elias fires back, hand still pressed to the low of my back, where my costume doesn’t cover my skin, and where I can feel the push of his fingertips against the edge of my waist. “And we will.”

“The bedrooms are off-limits,” a haughty voice intones.

We all turn to look at Benjamin Montgomery. With his pale brown hair, which sometimes bleaches almost to blond in the sun, his pale face and wire-framed glasses, Benjamin looks like academic innocence incarnate.

A deceptive illusion—Benjamin might be soft-spoken and mild-mannered, but he’s the most ruthless person I know.

Well, the second most ruthless person. The main difference between Elias and Benjamin is that Elias’s ruthlessness is warm and dangerous, like an oil fire that spreads quickly and burns hot enough to curl the edges of you. Whereas Benjamin’s ruthlessness is cold and deadly, like the kind of frost that destroys crops and starves entire populations to death.

“Bedrooms are off-limits?” Dimitri says with a sly grin. He’s in a weird mood tonight, which tells me Natalya, his fiancée, is definitely also at this party. “Where we supposed to fuck, then?”

His big hand slides down over the curve of his companion’s ass, which he squeezes roughly, making her squeal and blush.

“You’re not,” Benjamin snaps. “If it’s just sex you’re after, Kavinski, you can go into the woods and rut yourself to contentment at a safe distance from my home and eyesight.” He turns to me, the long black coat he’s wearing billowing around him. Based on the long-beaked mask he’s holding in one hand, he’s dressed like a plague doctor. Moving his eyes pointedly from me to Elias, then back, he says, “I expected better of you, Sutton-Knight.”

I shrug. “Too bad.”

Elias laughs quietly at my side. His hand moves up my back, fingertips tracing my exposed spine, and a shudder goes through me so intense my nipples tighten. Benjamin’s gaze drops down to my chest, then back to my eyes, a grimace of disgust twisting his mouth.

“Revolting,” he says.

“Let her have some fun, for Christ’s sake.” A new voice stabs into the conversation with all the softness and sweetness of a poisoned knife. “Isn’t the whole point of this party to show everyone you’re not some loser uptight virgin?”

Benjamin’s entire body goes rigid. He wheels slowly around, his eyes narrowing to pale grey slits.

Emerald, to her credit, looks breathtaking: her dress is pale and flowing, the material so thin she might as well be wrapped in mist. Her red hair is long and loose over her shoulders, not straightened pin-straight for once but falling in hectic waves from beneath a crown of ivy.

Benjamin looks her up and down slowly, eyes roving from the top of her leaf-crowned head to the tips of her bare toes, and sneers.

“And what are you supposed to be, exactly: some sort of a swamp monster?”

“A dryad, actually—which you’d know if you were as well-read as you pretend to be.”

“The sex fantasies of ancient civilisations hold no interest to me,” Benjamin intones bleakly.

“Yes, because you’re a bland, depressing bore.” Emerald gestures. “Which is exactly why you’re spending your time trying to get people to stop making out instead of making out with someone of your own.”

“Some of us have better things to do than—” Here, Benjamin pauses, gaze crawling slowly and deliberate down the length of Emerald’s body before he finishes his sentence. “Run around half-naked.”

Emerald smirks triumphantly. “You wish I was running around your house half-naked.”