Page 99 of The Reveal
I can still taste the layers of his blood on my tongue. The complexities of his kiss.
I am bright with shame and disaster.
“I have to go,” I tell him when he raises his gaze, very slowly, from that medallion to me. “There are things that have to be done, and we don’t have much time.”
“You sound like her,” he says, in a very measured tone that I find I don’t like at all. “I tried to tell her that she had all the time in the world, that being the curse of eternity. But she could never hear it.”
I drop my hand from the medallion. I decide that, actually, I don’t want to imagine Ariel with that bird-faced goddess. I certainly don’t want him to fill me in on how things went for them, way back when.
I might have more masochistic tendencies than I thought I did, and I certainly proved that last night, but it turns out I have a line after all.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I tell him, and I try my best to match that measured tone he seems to use so easily. “I live with a werewolf,in case you missed that. I don’t need to smell more like you than I already do.”
That’s not even getting into whatever the sorceress and the other oracle—Gran—might know, simply by looking at me. Or reading my aura. Or whatever it is either one of them does.
Something is changed now. I can feel his power all around me, as always, but it’s like I’m inside of it now. Not like it’s pressing into me, but like it’s part of me. Or I’m a part of it.
It’s different, and it feels intimate.
Too intimate.
If I think about it too closely, I can feel that tide start to rise inside of me again, and it’s already too big, too unwieldy. Too fucking intimate to bear.
But if I think about naming it—really looking at it and calling it what it is—I think it might take me down to my knees. So hard I won’t get up again.
I can’t let that happen.
I walk across his bedroom, let myself into his bathroom, and stay in his marvelously expansive shower until I’m a pickle.
When I get out, I use one of his absurdly fancy towels that feels like a cloud against my skin. I look at myself in the clearly unnecessary mirror—here in a vampire’s lair—and turn so I can see my ass and a swath of my back.
Obviously I don’tactuallyexpect to see anything.
But I do.
His mark is all over me. It looks like gold.
Like he has made me something precious, and the gold not only gleams, it holds me. Like he gave me a place to rest and—
“You have to stop,” I order myself in a voice that’s barely above a whisper.
I come out of the bathroom expecting to have to fight him some more, but he’s not in the bedroom. My clothes are, though—washedclean of blood and dirt and laid out on his nicely made bed, and I spend a lot longer than necessary thinking through his domestic arrangements.
Do vampires do their own laundry? Is this just that magic he seems to use as he pleases? Does he actuallymake his own bed—but if not, does that mean there are invisible servants scuttling around in here?
Obviously, I’m putting off having to face him.
When he was kind enough to lay out all my weapons, too, arranged next to my clothes in a way that makes it clear he knows exactly where and how I wear them all.
Even though I never wear them here.
For no reason at all that I choose to entertain or acknowledge, that makes me want to cry.
Instead of indulging such a strange and dangerously soft urge, I dress quickly and make myself walk out into his living room, where I find the vampire king lounging in a chair in a gloomy room with only a small lamp switched on beside him and a book in his hands that I can’t identify. When he sets it aside to look at me, I see that it’s in a foreign language. It makes me wonder how many he speaks, but I don’t ask.
I remind myself that I’m not building a relationship here. I’m notgetting to knowhim.
I’m negotiating my brother’s release and, apparently, I’m neck-deep in saving the world that I don’t even like that much from a beaked bitch who wants to make it even worse.
