He folds his arms, his thick forearms crossing like stacked logs. “Boldness is admirable. Recklessness is not.”
“I didn’t tell her to be reckless,” I shoot back, clutching the cushion tighter.
“I am aware.”
Declan breaks from Tarek, striding toward us. His shoulders are squared, his dark eyes sharp with intent, and something low in my stomach flutters. He’s ready to throw a punch. Again. For me.
The thought makes me queasy and hot all at once. It’s brutish and gross and infuriating and, Lord help me, so fucking sexy.
Dav doesn’t notice Declan, or pretends not to, his gaze pinning me to the spot. “Until your next performance, you will keep to your tent unless escorted.”
“Because, despite everything, you still believe I’m a spy?”
His stare is granite. “Because you are a variable.”
Tarek lets out a snort that doesn’t lighten the tension. “He means you make things happen.”
“No,” Dav corrects, his eyes never leaving mine. “I mean she makes thingschange.”
A chill snakes under my skin despite the desert heat. My instinct is to flinch, but I square my shoulders instead. “I thought this kingdom liked spectacle.”
“It does…” Tarek says carefully.
“Until it doesn’t.” Dav doesn’t miss a beat. He turns on his heel and stalks off.
Tarek gives me a quick, apologetic shrug before jogging after him and motioning for us to follow.
“Whatever he said isn’t worth listening to.” Declan bends to pick up Cinder. “He’s pissed he can’t prove we’re spies.”
Fennel noses insistently at my hip. Without thinking, I dig into my pocket and slip him a carrot stub I took from the stall.
“Yeah, thanks.”
But my gaze lingers on Dav’s back, his words hanging in the air like smoke. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire, waiting for the chance to burn everything down.
Twelve
The sky is a white-hot sheet of sunlight when we finally manage to slip out of our tent without being spotted. It’s been five days since we landed in this kingdom. Five days of performing, pretending, and trying not to die. And this is the first time we’ve been allowed to wander unaccompanied, and byallowedandunaccompanied, I mean Dav is presumably off terrorizing some other poor soul with his trademark brand of aggressive chaperoning and unwavering eye contact.
“I give us fifteen minutes before he pops out from behind a barrel and makes good on one of his many threats to end you,” I say, squinting into the heat shimmer that blurs the path winding through camp.
Declan strolls beside me, hands tucked into the pockets of the harem pants he dug out of the bottom of the trunk back at our tent, radiating an obscene level of unbothered for a man trapped in a desert dimension with zero air-conditioning.
“Don’t worry about Dav,” he says, bumping his elbow lightly against my arm. “We’ll be back before he notices we’re gone. Actually, if your plan goes the way we want it to, we’ll be out of this world for good.”
He scratches at the stubble darkening his jaw, and heat flushes down my spine. My brain, traitorous as ever, supplies a flash of how it would scrape against my cheek, against my thighs, rasping sandpaper over soft skin—
“What’s the chance we end up in a different world that isn’t home but also isn’t this one?” he asks.
“About the same as hitting a bull’s-eye in the dark.”
Declan frowns.
“I have no idea how we got here, so I don’t know how to aim us back home. But Idoknow that the Wheel of Fortune card is our best lead, especially since Fortune hasn’t reappeared and your attempts to talk with the queens have gone nowhere. It’s the one consistent variable.”
“What I’m hearing is that we should take more time. Run an experiment, or five. Otherwise, best case scenario, we spend the rest of our lives dimension hopping.”
“This”—I hold up my emergency bag of witchy essentials—“isthe experiment.”
