“They’re kissing you now?” he asked.
“Apparently, but I’m not sure why you care.” I slowly lowered myself onto the white velvet couch, my legs screaming in protest from the beating they’d taken during my training with Nixie.
His eyes blazed, and he walked to me.“Are you hurt?”
“No, no.” I waved him off. “I was just lifting weights with Nixie and … Never mind.”
He eyed the stairs at first, then me, and then sat beside me. Which I wasn’t prepared for after the other day. Even worse, my heart skipped in my chest.
No. I couldn’t fall into this trap again. He had someone else. I moved over, giving him room on the couch.
“I think I have an answer to …” I looked around the room, searching for the phrasing that wouldn’t tip off the sirens when they swam through his mind, then spotted the virginal. “Fixing theactionof the instrument.”
He slowly nodded a yes in understanding.
“Yes, theaction, and what is your solution?” he questioned.
“Instead of the other way offixingit …” I puffed out my cheeks and plugged my nose, pretending to hold my breath underwater and swim to the surface.
He cocked his head to the side in confusion and gave me that perfect, taunting smile that made my heart falter. “What are you doing?”
I rolled my eyes. “Never mind. It seems there is a shortcut I’ve learned of from a book in this library.” He looked around the room.
“They just left the answer, lying around this place? It has to be a trap.” He pursed his lips.
That was actually an incredible point. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
But maybe they didn’t know it was here. There were hundreds of books in this library. It clearly took generations to amass such a collection. What were the odds I would find this one? That when I was near it, for whatever reason, it would glow?
“Well, I guess tell me what this shortcut is. We can weigh our options from there,” he said.
“The thing is, I know what it is.” It was some magical portal, painting, thing. But I couldn’t tell him that. “But I’m not sure exactly where it is and—”
He stood on his feet, taking his warmth with him.
“So, you have nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It sounds like a very importantsomething.”
He returned to the virginal with a huff, loosening the strings.
“How many days have we been down here?”
I went quickly to his side, drawn to him despite the scorching pain in my thighs and ass.
“It will be a week today,” I answered. Had it really been so long already?
He shook his head to himself. “It feels like years.”
I leaned a hip against the virginal and watched him. “What do you mean?”
“That state they put me in.” He shuddered. “It’s just reliving my memories again and again. It’smaddening.”
“That can’t be all that bad, can it?” I asked.
“There are some things I’d rather forget, and those seem to be the ones that repeat the most often.” He fell silent, golden eyes losing their luster as they narrowed on the work before him.
I reached out and touched his shoulder, momentarily pulling him from whatever haunted his memories. “We’ll find a way,” I reassured him, “to fix the action.”
