Not like this.
I scanned the room, noting everything I might be able to use as a weapon. There wasn’t much. I considered shouting for the guards once more.
“You don’t want to pretend?” he asked. “Not even for a moment?”
Fuck you. The words rose like a battle cry in my chest, but I couldn’t seem to get them out.
“Well?”
“I don’t want to pretend anything with you.”
“Oh, but I think youdo.” His eyes flashed to an arresting shade of gold, like a sudden break of daylight amid clouds of smoke.
Aleksander’s gold.
I couldn’t help the small, distressed sound that escaped me as my chest tightened.
He chuckled. With a blink, his eyes shifted back to the burnt red shade I recognized as Lorien’s, even as his voice continued to sound like Aleksander’s. “Your emotions are painfully obvious, Nova. You should work on that. A queen who wears her heart on her sleeve is just asking for it to be broken.”
I gripped the cart so tightly I began to lose the feeling in my fingers.
“It’s interesting, being here like this.” He knelt and casually began picking up some of the papers that had flown from the cart. “I wondered how Aleks would react to being in the same room with you again, and now I know; does it comfort you to know that his desire for you is still here, under the surface? It’s nearly bleeding through, almost overcoming the enormous amount ofcontemptI feel for you.” He placed the stack back on the cart, watching me in a way that felt entirely too familiar—the same tilt of his head, the same slight smile that accentuated his dimples.
I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise, how similar their movements were.
But it was still unsettling.
No...terrifying.
So terrifying, it rooted me in place for an instant. Ice filled my veins, and I could only shudder as he moved closer and brought his hand up to my cheek.
I wanted to disappear as he caressed my skin. To close my eyes and pretend that it reallywasAleks standing before me, offering comfort. He’d been my refuge so often after my arrival in Rivenholt. A safe harbor amidst the stormy seas of dangerous politics and deadly enemies surrounding me.
I needed that now more than ever.
But I didn’t let his touch become my anchor, no matter how badly I wanted that.
Instead, I forced myself, again, to perceive the magical energy surrounding his stolen body. To peer through the lies, and then to knock his hand aside.
“Why are you here, Lorien?” I demanded.
He ignored the question at first, studying the hand I’d swatted as if he was truly surprised I’d struck him. Then he stepped away, circling the dimly-lit room, occasionally picking up books and trinkets and studying them, too.
Finally, he shifted his voice back to his own true sound—low, silken, serpentine—and he asked, “Did you really think our dealings were finished?”
“No. But ambushing me doesn’t seem like your style.”
“Well, I tried to send a cordial message to arrange a meeting. Twice, in fact. But they didn’t seem to reach you.”
Confusion and doubt twisted through me.
“A certain overprotective brother intervening, perhaps?”
My skin flushed. My mouth went dry. I didn’t want to believe he was telling the truth, but it sounded entirely too much like something Bastian would do in yetanothermisguided attempt to keep me safe.
Lorien let out a dark, quiet laugh, clearly believing he’d guessed right. “They underestimate you in this realm, don’t they? So strange, how you are the only one who could really save them—yet they doubt and question you at every turn. The respect our kind once commanded has dropped very far indeed. What are we to do about that, I wonder?”
“There is nowe,” I hissed. “And what do you know about the respect I command in this realm?”
