“And what if I just take him?”
“Then I will find you and retrieve what is rightfully mine. The Council will support me. After all, I have the paperwork to prove that he’s mine. As a member of the Council, I am within my right to detain any creature in the realms, including mortals. I also have the authority to cross them between realms, and as you know, permission-based acquisitions have always been permitted, and I have just that. As Contract Administrator for the Council, I can assure you I made sure everything is in order. You might even be arrested for interfering with my affairs.”
“Then what if I kill you so you can’t ever have him?” he asked, raising his sword.
She giggled. “Treycore, if you could have killed me, surely I wouldn’t be standing here today. Now come on. If he truly loves you, then what will it matter?”
He thought it would have been wise to strike Vera’s offer down, to refuse her ridiculous bargain. And yet, a part of him knew that he wouldn’t be happy without Kid—couldn’t be happy without him. This was his only chance to get him back, and he had to take it. Kid had sacrificed his life for him, and now it was his turn to do the same for Kid. And if Kid never truly loved him, what was the point of going on?
“The catch?” Treycore asked, knowing perfectly well that his Vera wasn’t about to make a deal that didn’t somehow land in her favor.
Vera smiled, seemingly pleased to see that her Treycore knew her so well. “If he doesn’t confess his love to you, then you stay here… with me… for all eternity. Considering it now, I see? I figured you might.”
“What are the terms?” he asked.
“You have three Earth days to get him to confess these feelings for you. If you can’t, then you are mine. Simple enough?”
“Three days?”
“If he really loves you, it shouldn’t even take that long.”
A part of him still warred against this surely suicidal mission, and yet he couldn’t resist. It seemed like the only way.
“Okay.”
Vera’s lips parted as her smile exposed her pearly white teeth.
She disappeared and reappeared with a stack of papers, which she lay on the table with a quill pen.
“I’ll give you time to read over it. You know it’s best to always make sure you know what you’re signing.”
Treycore sneered.
He sat at the table and read through the contract.
But the paperwork was just that… because he knew that regardless of the verbiage Vera had littered this document with to sound far more convoluted than it needed to be, he was going to sign. It was his chance to get Kid back. The chance to save him from her twisted grip.
Treycore spent the next few hours reading over Vera’s agreement before acknowledging he was certain that this was what he needed to do. He signed it, and when he finished, went searching for Kid.
***
After signing, Vera gave Treycore a chamber where he would be permitted to stay during his visit. She also agreed to accommodate him with clothes and food, granting him access to her lair at his convenience.
He showered off, wiping the soft, grooved bar of soap through his fingers, building suds before rubbing up and down the zigzag of muscles that stretched between his pecs to his obliques. Warm water poured from an overhead hole in the gray-stoned wall. As it collided with his hair, pressing it against his forehead, it slid down his cheeks and fell against his chest, crashing against it before making its way around his pecs and trailing across his sculpted abdomen. His thoughts returned to the bathhouses of Heaven, to days when he would bathe with friends just to see their glances, their admiration. Not only had they enjoyed his body, but like Eilee with herself, he would watch himself in the mirror, admiring, adoring his own physique.
Since he began working on Earth, stripping for mortals, he’d learned a shower was nothing more than wiping away dirt and grime. Something unseen, and far more damaging than the filth that fixed to flesh, couldn’t be washed away. It was deeper, harder to grab onto and rid from the body. The outerlands had similarly tainted his body, which he could never look at with such love and admiration again. He wondered if that was how Eilee felt… if that’s why she had turned to the makeup of mortals. Despite all her beauty, he wondered if even she felt like she had been ruined by her time away from paradise.
When he finished cleaning off and dressing, he requested Ficorn escort him to Kid.
Ficorn led him through corridor after corridor, until they reached the bowels of Vera’s lair.
Black sludge dripped through a crack in the ceiling and spilled across the floor.
Kid knelt beside a puddle of the sludge, collecting it into a pail.
Treycore hated seeing his precious mortal tending to Vera’s house like a slave.
“Kid,” he said as he approached.
