She was wearing Laila’s face.
When their eyes met, she smiled one of Laila’s smiles, but it looked all wrong on her. It was too sly.
“I had to sate my curiosity somehow,” she said.
The girl was wearing Eva’s dress… but spoke with Laila’s voice. And around her pinky finger, Laila spied the sharp-taloned silver ring. The same ring that had punctured her skin and drawn blood. Laila advanced toward her. Eva’s fright flickered across her own face as she scrambled backward on the bed. Séverin lifted his head, looking between the false Laila on the bed and the true Laila. Shock widened his eyes. He touched his mouth, disbelief slowly giving way to a look of blank horror.
Eva leapt to the floor, clutching her ring and circling Laila.
“Leave,” said Laila.
“You should feel flattered,” said Eva quickly.
“And you should feel my heel in your ribs,” said Laila.
Eva stumbled back. She tried to grab her shoes, but Laila grabbed a candelabra from the top of a nearby dresser. Eva’s eyes widened.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Just because you wear my face doesn’t mean you know me,” she growled.
Eva looked at her shoes and necklace, then back at Laila.
“Go,” said Laila one last time.
Eva skittered around her, pressed against the wall before she raced out of the room. Laila slammed the door shut behind her. Fury vibrated through her. Fury and—though it felt like a cruel twist—want. That was supposed to be her on that bed, braced between his arms.
“How could you think that was me?” she demanded.
Or worse… had he known all along it was never her? Séverin looked at her, and the expression there, as if he’d been laid bare,banished her doubt. His shirt was undone, pulled from his trousers, and the topmost buttons exposed the bronze of his throat. He had the look of someone gloriously defiant even in his defeat, like a seraph freshly flung out of heaven.
“I saw what I wanted to see,” he said, hoarse. “Only a desperate man trusts a mirage in the desert and I am desperate, Laila. Everything I came here for… it was nothing. And because it was nothing, I had no excuses left.”
“Excuses?” repeated Laila. “Excuses for what?”
She moved closer, noticing the smudged line of blood on his neck and the blush tinge at his mouth. Dimly, she remembered the two goblets on the floor, and the server’s words:To consume one’s own blood allows one to submit to their innermost desires.
“Excuses to stay away from you,” he said, the words rushing out of him. “Excuses to tell you that you’re a poison I’ve come to crave. Excuses to tell you that you terrify me out of my senses, and how I’m fairly certain you’ll be the death of me, Laila, and yet I can’t bring myself to mind.”
The words shuddered through her, and Laila felt a flicker of power in her veins. It was that same thrum of energy that she had once felt in the dance theatre of House Kore when he had watched her… his posture like that of a bored emperor, his stare like that of someone starved. She stared at Séverin now, propped against the pillows, his expression desperate and raw. The more she looked at him, the more a dangerous molten heat spread through her.
Laila turned her ring—and all its dwindling days—toward her palm, hiding it from herself. She hardly knew what she was doing, only that she couldn’t stop herself. She climbed onto the bed, her pulse going jagged the second his eyes widened.
“How do you know I’m not a mirage… how do you knowI’m real this time, Séverin?” asked Laila. “You said so yourself I wasn’t.”
As she spoke, she straddled him, her hips above his. Séverin’s mouth twisted up, dark and lupine.
“Perhaps,” he said, his voice low. He trailed his hand up her thigh. “All goddesses are just beliefs draped on the scaffolding of ideas. I can’t touch what’s not real.” Séverin looked up at her. His pupils were blown out. “But I can worship it all the same.”
Laila’s hands went to his shoulders… his neck.
“Can I, Laila?” he asked. His eyes burned. “Will you let me?”
Laila dug her fingers in his hair, tugging backwards so he couldn’t look away from her. He winced slightly, the corner of his mouth twisting into a smile when she finally let herself say, “Yes.”
Barely a second after she’d spoken, his hands went to her waist, dragging her swiftly off his lap so she fell to the bed. There was a moment when the perpetual twilight outside snuck across her vision… but it disappeared when Séverin moved over her and became her night.
LAILA WOKE UP WITHan unfamiliar ache in her chest. She brought her fingers to her throat, checking her pulse:one, two… one, two… one, two…
