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The attending guard moved swiftly to open the door. It opened without sound on its well-oiled hinges, revealing Red and another Nymph conversing with large smiles stretching across their cheeks. Seeing a smile on Red was as rare as seeing a shooting star. It hardly ever happened, and if it did you likely missed it, and if you did happen to catch it, it was the most spectacular thing you ever saw.
The flash of her teeth quickly died away as she saw me, but it didn’t stop me from staring at her. There was life in her gray eyes that had grown since the last time I saw her. The hope in her gaze had always been there in some way or another, but now…now she glowed with it. Her skin was clean enough that I could see the subtle blush in her cheeks. Her black hair had grown to brush her cleavage that was hidden by the uniform that covered the majority of her skin.
“What is he doing here?” She paused in the doorway, staring King Windre down like she might sprint across the room to slap him. I wouldn’t doubt that she would.
“It’s nice to see you, too.” My sarcasm covered the pain of her rejection. I turned away, shame worming through my belly at the way I wanted to stare. Red had thin lips, a crooked nose, and small squinty eyes. Hardly what I would call attractive. Yet, I still found myself wanting to gawk. Red wasn’t pretty in any sense, but somehow she was still beautiful.
“I’ve invited him to eat dinner at a proper table seeing as we are going to be working together,” King Windre replied plainly.
“You can’t work with him.”
“And why not?”
“Yes, Red, why not?” I muttered, finally glancing up to watch her take the farthest seat away from me. The girl who had come in with her, the one who had freed Red the day I was imprisoned, looked at the seats between Red and King Windre trying to calculate where best to sit. Sit with the king, sit with the Nymph, or sit somewhere in the middle of what surely was about to be a warzone. After a moment, she lowered herself into the seat next to Red.
Red, sitting straight as a board, kept her attention focused in front of her. “Because he has no alliance with anyone in this realm. He works for a faraway queen. Which makes him a liability. You should have had his head for that!”
“You want him to die?” King Windre cooed. Either the man knew what he was doing or he enjoyed getting a rise out of people.
“Yes,” she hissed.
My bones told me otherwise. Lie, my magic said. That’s a lie, my mind echoed. Uncontrolled, a smile spread easily across my cheeks. The smile grew until my face ached. Then a kernel of hope grew inside my chest. I felt it bloom with emotions I would have rather pushed down. It was involuntary and almost painful the way I couldn’t control the desire for Red to like me.
“Nevertheless,” King Windre said, “of everyone, he is the one with the most knowledge about the token.”
“Now, we don’t really know that,” the other Nymph girl said, a hint of jealousy buried in her tone.
“I suppose you’re right, Hattie. Maybe I was getting ahead of myself. We should question him more.” He looked down the long table at Red. “He is useful to our cause.”
“Question him, then get rid of him,” Red’s callous voice said sternly.
“You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried yourself.” I banged the metal on my wrists against the table loudly, drawing her attention finally.
A mocking laugh bubbled at her lips. She raised her slender fingers, her nails sharpened to points that caught the light as she pinched them together. Wind picked up my hair from my forehead, the breeze wild but cooling. Until it was gone as fast as it came. I tried to take a deep breath in, but the air around me didn’t move. My lungs fought to inhale, but the air was stagnant and frozen.
She was powerful, perfect, amazing and I wished she’d kill me then.
“That's enough,” King Windre barked. “We do not use our powers like that here.”
Red’s hand fell back into her lap. She smirked at me as I sucked in air, clutching my hand to my chest. My throat felt raw and I swore I could feel the impression of invisible hands on my neck.
“You bitch,” I coughed.
“You shouldn’t try me, Milo. I’m not weak anymore.”
“Maybe we should change the subject?” Hattie said. Her hands busied themselves by running along the table to swipe away nonexistent crumbs. “We should be discussing getting the token from King Ganglin. So that we can have both tokens.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” I blurted.
Hattie raised a slender eyebrow. She tilted her chin and glanced down at Red who was slumping back in her chair, clearly unhappy with the way dinner was going already.
Swinging wide, the door to the kitchen opened—the door that didn’t look like a door. The very door that I had first seen Randsin come through. As the wood of the wall shifted, my body tightened, like Randsin was going to pop out of the kitchen again and again. Only servants emerged, with large bowls of soup and sliced bread for starters. I sighed, letting my body relax as much as it could, given the tension that filled the room.
“Why is that?” the girl pushed.
“We need to destroy them, that’s why. Nobody needs that sort of power. Not evenyou.” A chain link clinked against the porcelain my food rested on as I plucked the bread from the small plate. My teeth ripped through the fluffy loaf like it was spun sugar.
Meals in the dungeon, while typically warm, filling, and quite nutritious, were never fresh out of the kitchen. Luke-warm wasn’t always satisfying.
