“So?”
I tut at her.“You’re drunk because you’re hurting in there.”I point at her chest.
“Fuck off, Dahlia, you don’t know me.”She smacks my finger away.
“Really?So you’re not hurting?And you’re fine with feeling like you’re not a part of that?You don’t feel like an outsider?”
I cock my head at Morrigan’s table, where her group of friends laughs and smiles and knocks back drink after drink together like family.
Her face falls.
“I told you, I know you,” I say.
She folds her arms, glaring at me.“Takes one to know one.Miss my-family-don’t-hate-me-anymore.”
That stings.But she’s not wrong.I know her because I’ve been where she is.
“You think you’re the only one that knows anything.But you’re not, Dahlia.I see your bullshit too.You’re only guarding me to repair whatever shitty relationship you had with your sister.So don’t try and fucking play me at the who-knows-what game.I might not be a decent magician, but I’m fucking observant,” she snaps and struts back onto the dance floor grabbing the nearest magician.Some lanky prick with a beard and limbs like twigs.
For fuck’s sake, really?
Her eyes lock onto mine as she grinds up and down his crotch.My blood quietly simmers, frothing and boiling, and she knows it.She picks his hand up and makes them caress her waist, her hips, her arse.
She is exhausting.She is addictive.What kind of fucked up am I that the more she fights back, the more shit she gives me, the hungrier I get for her?
She lets out a little giggle that is far too close to a moan as she gyrates on him.My teeth grind against each other.I want to snap his neck.I want to rip his throat from his shoulders and watch his life force spurt over the dance floor.Who the hell is he to touch her?
A presence looms next to me.
“Dahlia,” my sister says.
“Octavia.”
“That’s not the whiff of jealousy I smell on the air, is it?”She follows my gaze to the princess.
“I legitimately have no idea what you’re talking about.I’m here to do a job.I’m here because I have your back and nothing else.”
“So you’re not fucking the princess, then?”
I stiffen.Even though I’m not looking at her, I can tell she’s smirking.
“So you are?”
“Obviously not.That wouldn’t aide the intercity politics, would it?”
“It certainly wouldn’t if you were to break a heart.And you are very good at that… need I point out the trail of women left in Sangui?”
I glare her.“She’s a grown woman.Whose face she decides to sit on is entirely up to her.”
“She sat on your face?”
“Octavia, dammit.”
She laughs.And I punch her in the arm.
She rubs the spot I landed a blow on.“Thank you.Maybe I didn’t say that clearly enough before, but I am grateful you’re taking one for the team.”
I shrug.“I figured five hundred years of bickering was enough.”
