Page 93 of The Stone Secret
“Oh, you guys told him. I guess he must have had questions. Okay, good then—”
“No, Cam, he knows about Serath.”
My pulse skipped. “What?”
“He figured it out,” Touron said. “Serath came to get you and…well, you two together, with you in that state…”
“Pheromones,” Palia said, her tone grave.
“Then Selas questioned him and…well, she asked us to fill him in.”
“We can trust him,” Sharniza said.
Yes…yes, we could. He’d proven that, but I’d wanted to keep him out of this. I’d hoped to keep his conscience clear, but now…
I pushed back my chair. “I’ll meet you guys at class.”
* * *
Curi letme into his room without a word. His blue hair was loose and fell around his face in messy waves that highlighted the slight puffiness around his eyes that said he hadn’t slept well.
The drapes were still closed, so the room was gloomy and gray. The bed was rumpled and unmade, and when I inhaled, I got a lungful of Curi’s scent and something else…Me. This room smelled like me.
My stomach hollowed. “Hey.”
“You feeling better?” His voice was gruff and gravelly from sleep.
“Yeah. I wanted to thank you.”
He snorted softly, the sound almost angry. “For what? Not fucking you when you begged me to?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t easy.”
He scraped back his hair and used a tie from around his thick wrist to pull it into a knot at his nape, the motions jerky and yep, angry. He was pissed at me.
We’d gotten close the past two weeks. Become friends, and he probably felt betrayed that I’d kept this from him. “I wanted to tell you about…everything, but I didn’t want to bring you into this mess if I could avoid it.”
“Oh, I get it. You needed a decoy. Someone who’d play the part well. Be believable.” His lip curled self-deprecatingly. “I understand, Cameron. Trust me, I get it. That isn’t the issue.”
“Then why are you so mad?”
He let out a harsh laugh. “You really are oblivious, aren’t you?” He moved closer, his body pressing up against my personal space but not invading it. “You have no idea the things I’ve been fantasizing about doing to you, and if last night I could have convinced myself that you wanted me for real, I would have acted out every single one of those fantasies.”
My mouth went dry. “What?”
His throat bobbed. “But you belong to someone else, and I’m not into pining over things I can’t have. Things that can never belong to me.”
Pining? He… “Curi, what the fuck?”
His dark eyes were bright. “I was falling for you.”
My stomach dropped. “Curi…I—”
“Don’t. It’s fine. I’m glad this happened, and I found out.”
My eyes heated. I’d hurt him. “I’m so sorry, Curi. I…I care about you, and maybe…if things were different—”
