Zofia crossed her arms. “I am too.”
“Of course you are,” soothed Laila. “You’re both brilliant.”
“Yes, but I’mmore—” huffed Enrique.
Séverin interrupted them with two sharp claps. “Now that wehave the piece, let’s examine it thoroughly. We make no plans beyond that. We make no speculation about what comes next. We don’t doanythinguntil it’s clear what we’re working with. Understood?”
The four of them nodded. Just like that, the meeting was concluded. They rose slowly. Enrique was the first to head to the door.
He paused in front of Séverin. “Remember…”
And then Enrique hooked his thumbs together and made a strange waving motion with his hands.
“You’re a bird?”
“A moth!”said Enrique. “A moth approaching a flame!”
“That’s a very alarming moth.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“It’s an alarming metaphor too.”
Enrique rolled his eyes. Behind him, Zofia smuggled more cookies on her plate before brushing past him.
“How are the Sphinx masks coming along?”
Zofia did not break her gait or even turn as she said, “Why?”
“Might need them sooner than later,” Enrique called after her.
“Mmf.”
When Séverin turned back to the room, he went still. Though the room was nearly dark, whatever light clung to its corners now raced to illuminate Laila. It seemed the world couldn’t help but want to be near her… every beam of light, pair of eyes, atom of air. Maybe that’s why sometimes he couldn’t breathe around her.
Or maybe it was memory that choked him in those seconds. Memories of one night they’d both sworn to put behind them. Laila had. It was fate that, of course, he couldn’t.
Laila practically stormed toward him. Usually, she had a habit of being relentlessly radiant. She hated seeing someone hold an empty plate and always thought everyone was hungry. She knew everyone’s secrets even without having to read their objects. At the Palais desRêves, she turned that radiance into an allure that earned her star billing and the name, L’Énigme.The Mystery. But this evening, she spared him no smile. Her dark eyes looked like chips of stone.
Uh-oh.
“No tea and sympathy for me?” he asked. He lifted his hand. “I am wounded, you know.”
“How thoughtful of you to delay the hour of your death so that I might witness it firsthand,” she said coldly. But the longer she looked at his wrist, the more her shoulders softened. “You could’ve been hurt.”
“It’s the price one pays for chasing wants,” he said lightly. “The problem is, I have too many of them.”
Laila shook her head. “You only want one thing.”
“Is that so?”
He meant it teasingly. But Laila’s posture changed almost immediately. More languid, somehow.
She moved closer, sliding her hand down the front of his jacket. “I will tell you what you want.”
Séverin held still. This close, he could count her eyelashes, the starlight gilding her face. He remembered the soft flutter of her eyelashes against his cheek when she’d brought him down to her long ago. The heat of her skin seeped through the linen of his shirt. What game was she playing? Laila’s fingers slipped into the inner breast pocket of his jacket. She pulled out his silver tin, popped the latch, and withdrew a clove. Eyes still locked on his, she dragged her thumb across his lower lip. The motion felt like the afterburn of sunshine on his retina. Two images lazily superimposed: Laila touching his mouth then, Laila touching his mouth now. It jarred him so much, he didn’t remember parting his lips. But he must have because a moment later, a sharp clove hit his tongue. Laila drew back. Cold rushed in to fill the space. All in all, it took no more than a fewseconds. The whole time her composure had stayed the same. Detached and sensual, like the performer she was. The performer she had always been. He could see her staging an identical routine at the Palais des Rêves—reaching into a patron’s jacket for his cigarette case, placing it on the man’s lips, and lighting it before she took it for herself.
“That’swhat you want,” she said darkly. “You want an excuse to go hunting. But you have mistaken the predator for prey.”
