I shriek his name while covering my boobs. “You did that on purpose.”
He shoots me a wink and spreads his arms out, making himself right at home in my damn hot spring. Bath. Whatever the hell it is.
My nipples harden unbearably against my palms when I focus on the others. They most certainly saw everything.
I attempt to clear my voice, but it gets stuck in my throat when my gaze collides with Creed’s. He isn’t even trying to hide the lust darkening his eyes.
Fuck.
I’ve got to confirm with him what I think happened and tell Kyzen and Amick what happened between us. And see how they feel about my power.
Shit.
“The High Chancellor is the one who orchestrated your kidnapping.”
“What?” I shout.
That completely breaks the building tension.
Amick nods. “The letter from, quote, Derivius was forged by him. He copied his signature off the denial letter of his formal request. It’s easy to piece it together now that it was him who made the Attendants purchase the sleep-paralysis drug that was used on you and Yemi.”
Sleep-paralysis drug. That makes disgusting sense.
So does the whisper he promised me in the Judgment Ring about how it wasn’t really Derivius.
I obviously didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I trusted his confidence completely. I really didn’t want to accept Derivius would betray me like that.
“How did you figure that out so fast?”
“I gather truth through touch. It’s my strongest ability, but it’s limited and takes a lot out of me. It doesn’t work on living beings, nor will it work just for the sake of it. Such as, I can’t touch our counter and know who spilled coffee. There has to be significance to what I see. Almost one hundred percent of the time, it’s because someone is trying to cover up the truth of something important and it’s revealed to me.”
My body slumps more into the water and I stare at Amick, baffled. “That’s absolutely incredible. If I’m understanding this right, that means you touched the parchment and saw that it was the High Chancellor who wrote this and not Derivius.”
“Correct.”
He goes on to explain everything they did in the time they were searching for me, including going to visit Riven’s secret Plentiful…friend.
All the pieces click in place and my anger beats at my ribcage. This was so calculated, purely from spite. I don’t think the High Chancellor was doing this on any orders from anyone, including the God of Obliteration, and the guys agree.
He simply hates my ass and was trying to forge his own workaround since Derivius denied his request that I stay here while they go on the trip.
“How are we going to handle this?” I ask.
I say we kill him.
“I say we go ahead and kill him and be done with it.”
I give Riven a sinister smirk. I’m glad we’re on the same page.
“Killing him isn’t an option right now, no matter how much that might be what we want. We all know our lines on what we can get away with have always been blurred, but killing a higher-up and respected Domain Gods is the one thing we know for certain would cause us to get our powers stripped. We’re going to have to pretend we don’t know he did anything. We honestly should…” Kyzen trails off and guilt replaces his anger.
“We should pretend nothing even happened. Act as though Yemi and I didn’t get kidnapped and taken to Hell.”
He lets out a deep sigh. “I hate that, but admitting anything would give away so much. Confronting him could possibly stir up questions we don’t want to answer, including Amick’s ability that’s a secret, the fact Yemi is a Binder to the God of Pain’s son, whom we broke out of Hell, and that you have the power to turn people to…ash. We don’t want him knowing any of this.”
I grit my teeth. It pisses me off that he’s right.
I don’t want the High Chancellor, any of the Chancellors really, even Ellian, to know I did that.
