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He peered at me from the corner of his eye. “Your smirk is unnerving.” He sat up and pulled his knees close to his chest. “I know you less now than when I entered. Just that you’ve been playing me. Although, I do know how you taste.” He combed his fingers through his long hair, drawing it away from his neck. He’d leave soon, collect his clothes and walk out, and tomorrow, or the next day, we’d be enemies again. I didn’t want that. I never had.
I pushed up and placed a kiss on the back of his neck. “Stay,” I whispered, and skipped my fingers down his bare arm.
He peered over his shoulder, his face unsure, perhaps even surprised.
What was I asking? I didn’t want to be alone, and he was here, and warm, and I couldn’t resist touching him now I’d had a taste. I placed another kiss at the top of his spine and stroked over the tiny silvery scars, like distant stars on his skin. I didn’t know what had made them, just that they were a strange kind of beautiful, like him.
Another kiss.
He was Lark, the dancer, the player in my court, and this wasn’t supposed to happen. But it had. And I didn’t regret it.
“Arin—”
On my knees, I straightened behind him, gathered his hair in one hand, and nuzzled his neck, below his ear. “Fuck me again, Fool.”
“Arin,” he said in that deep, smooth way of his—how I loved to hear my name on his lips. “The Court of Pain plans to destroy your court and I’m the tool it’s used to do it. I am not a good person, I’m not nice. You hate me, as is right. You’ve used me, I’ve used you, used your people. We’ve lied, relentlessly, to each other, to ourselves. Lied so much I’m not sure what’s true anymore.”
I nipped at his shoulder, feeling the burn from his earlier bite in mine. He was right, in all of it. I hated him, who he was, what he’d done. But I also understood him, perhaps more than he understood himself. And the truth? He was my enemy, and I knew that. It really was that simple. The only thing I didn’t know waswhy.
“What am I doing here, in your bed?” he asked.
I slid my hand around his waist and grasped his lagging cock. A few eager strokes summoned it back to life. He leaned his head against my shoulder, giving himself to and to me. “Making magic,” I whispered in his ear.
He turned his head, and now his mouth was close to my cheek. His smile had vanished, and he stared at me as though I was a trick, one he hadn’t yet riddled out.
He swept my hand off his dick but collected my fingers in his, so it wasn’t a complete rebuttal, just a temporary one.
Didn’t he want this—me—again? Had I done something wrong? I’d watched enough couples fucking in the gardens to know what had happened couldn’t have been bad for him—
“Arin,” he said, cutting off my thoughts. He tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. “I do not know what to make of you, or this, and that is the truth.”
Then I’d succeeded in fooling my enemy? But it didn’t feel like victory. It felt like a betrayal. “Rest with me a while?”
“Just rest?” He arched an eyebrow. “In your bed?”
“Yes, in my bed. Right here. You and I.” I scooted down the bed, grabbed the sheets, and held them open, indicating the space beside me. If he didn’t want sexual pleasure, then perhaps I could offer company instead. I certainly needed it.
“Very well.” He lay back and I threw the sheet over him, and now we were together in my bed, resting. That was a thing two people could do, without sex.
I looked over and found him smirking. His pupils widened, darkening his eyes.
“Are you going to kill me while I sleep?” I asked, not entirely jesting.
He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve considered it. Not this night.”
Washejesting? “Oh, then… rest,” I said again, firmer.
“I’ve never slept in another’s bed—actuallyslept,” he said. Sex was another way for him to spin his little lies and gossip, another way to make people do what he wanted them to do. Once it was over, he probably left right after, as he’d been about to do with me. “I don’t know if I can.”
“We’ll see.” I shuffled onto my side and studied the man beside me while he stared at the bed’s canopy draped high over us. I’d watched him for so long from afar, it was a rare treat to be so close, to study how his smile melted away and the shallow lies faded from his eyes, leaving them softer. His eyelids fluttered, dark lashes shuttering. And then he was gone, asleep. He really did look innocent and vulnerable like this.
“I’m sorry, Lark…” I whispered. “For everything you’ve endured, and for the pain yet to come.”
CHAPTER13
Lark
I skippedthe fiddle’s bow across its strings and sang the song Mother had taught me. My voice sailed down rain-soaked streets, over the stream of marching passersby, all dressed in black. A few of them flicked coins into my upturned cap, but nobody stopped.
