Page 12 of House of Malice
Galliermo placed his palm on her thigh, just below the hem on her flowery dress. “If you look at her like that once more, I’ll rip both your eyeballs out. One by one.”
Alatar barked a laugh and waved his hand. “Fine, Leveau. I’ll keep my eyes to myself. Anyway, I see her as my sister, nothing more. I was just surprised, that’s all.”
Rufus took a seat next to Alatar and smirked. “Oh, not interested in fucking sisters?”
“That depends,” Alatar said, chuckling. “Is she a younger sister or an older sister?”
“Fucking pervert,” Octavia said. She stood in front of them with her hands braced on her hips.
Alatar nudged Rufus with his elbow. “Don’t tell me you don’t like them fresh looking.”
Rufus tilted his chin up, his dark eyes focused solely on Octavia in front of him. He rubbed his chin, biting his lower lip. “I like mine…powerful and wild.”
“Is that so?” Octavia asked, arching an eyebrow.
Rufus looked ready to devour Octavia right then and there when he said, “Yes, my High Priestess.”
Lyra, perched on the arm of the armchair Reverie sat on, chuckled. It was the sound of wind chimes.
“I guess we finally know which one likes to be dominated,” she said.
Then Lyra extended her palm to her sister. With a stone-cold face, Reverie pulled a few notes from the inner pocket of her jacket and passed them to her sister.
“What the fuck is this?” Rufus asked. “Did you make a bet on our sex lives?”
Reverie shrugged. “We do that all the time.”
“We like to observe people and then make educated guesses,” Lyra added, stuffing her cash into her bra.
Demitria laughed, and Galliermo wanted to laugh with her.
“Okay, let’s talk business,” Octavia said. “We have yet to come up with a plan for this year’s Game, and we better be quick about it.”
“We have an idea,” Alatar said, glancing at Galliermo. “And almost a plan.”
“Well, you better share that idea of yours,” Octavia urged.
Alatar jerked his chin at Galliermo. “You wanna do the honors, or should I?”
“Go ahead,” Galliermo said.
“Alright,” Alatar said. “So, Galliermo and I were looking for new, exciting ways to shake things up during this year’s Game. And we found this interesting spell in our Book. It’s a curse, a very powerful and nasty one.”
“It’s good to hear that you can read, Black,” Reverie said, inspecting her nails. “How does a curse help us get the Book from one of the other Houses?”
“Appreciate your ever-present support, Frone,” Alatar said with a smirk. “It’s rather simple. We cast a curse on the House of our choosing and then let them know about it. Only the witch that cursed you can remove the curse—we checked. So they’ll hand us their Book to get the curse removed, and we’ll win the Game.”
“That’s actually not a half bad plan,” Rufus said. “Easy and simple.”
“The curse will require some work,” Galliermo said. “As Alatar said, it’s a nasty one and requires ritual murders to harness enough power.”
“That’s an interesting one,” Reverie said. She narrowed her eyes. “How many murders?”
“Who are we going to kill?” Lyra asked. “It will raise suspicion if we start killing off random witches on campus.”
“Yeah, and it’s not very classy,” Octavia said.
“We thought about it already,” Alatar said.
