And the fact that it was a rarity was painful to me.
“You piece of shit! What you pulled today… I can’t even… how fucking dare you?”
“So, you finally saw the painting.”
He growled like an animal, wrenched me off the wall by my throat, only to slam me into it again—so hard that I heard the wood crack, and I knew this place to be reinforced against supernatural strength to an extent.
“Not just any painting! A fucking enchanted painting that you spelled into my room—of me! One that puts all my shit on display for everyone to see.”
“Everyone to see? It’s in your dorm room.”
“My dorm room that experiences a lot of foot traffic.” I grimaced at what he was obviously getting at, and he sneered. “Does that upset you, Win? Me fucking around? Pretty much non-stop? Even though I’m single and free? Huh? Does it? Go on, say it! Fucking admit that’s why you did this! It’s why youbroke through my ward, invaded my privacy and then conjured that fucking thing—something that I can’t remove, by the way.”
“It’s not why.”
He didn’t register my words, raging on instead, exasperation melding with it now as well. “I mean, you’re not even there yet… the year hasn’t officially started… this was just your moving-in day… and already you’re pulling this shit. It's bad enough you’re gonna be there all the goddamn time as it is!”
“Bad enough?”
“Yes! Of course!”
I swallowed down the white-hot lance of his words through my chest.
He stilled, finally actually hearing himself.
Then he released me and abruptly stepped back, snuffing out his magic, then shoving his hand through his hair, making it wilder than ever.
“I didn’t conjure that painting to hurt you, nor to punish you.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, then looked up at me, while fiddling with his worry stone bracelet on his left wrist, the band made of spherical onyx stones, with a large oval fuchsia stone at its center.
“I know,” he admitted. “I know you’re not capable of that.”
“What did it convey?”
“What?”
“What did it show you that sent you into this rage?”
He grunted at me, then pulled out his phone. In the next moment, he was shoving it in my face.
As he held it there, I took in a video of the oil painting of him sitting on a golden stool in the very outfit he was wearing now. And there was a chain around his throat glowing, his eyes were hooded with clear sexual need, and his lips were parted in a very obvious offering. There was an amber mist rolling through it too—the mark of my magic. But it wasn’t my magic imbued in the making of the painting, it was the message that I’d spelled it to communicate.
The default was just him sitting on the stool.
Any additions like the chain and the shift in his expression was the enchantment at work, an enchantment that brought his repressed emotions and needs to life through the visual nature of the painting.
“I see,” I said.
He’d wantedme.
Yeah, that would definitely send him into a rage.
“That’s not all it’s spelled to demonstrate,” I assured him.
“I get it. It’s all repressed bullshit. Bullshit I don’t want thrust in my face, Win!”
“It hurts you, sweetheart.”
