He tilts his head, his cheek hovering so close to mine, but it somehow feels like an insurmountable distance away.
“Maybe the next time I chase you through a maze, my beloved,” he whispers near my ear, “you won’t be begging me to let you go.” The sound of his voice has my body breaking into goose bumps. His nose trails infinitesimally up my neck. “Next time I catch you, you’ll be begging for the hard pumps of my cock inside your greedy little cunt, begging for me to fill you withheirs.”
He says the last word with a small thrust of his hips, and I’m consumed with the image he just painted. I’m grateful that it’s dark enough that Gemini can’t see the flush crawling up my chest. Thankfully, I’m still holding on to the last fraying threads of my sanity, and I shove him off of me.
“That’s never going to happen.” My words are sharp, but the uncertainty in my voice is evident. I consider sinking under thewater to drown instead of having to watch Gemini silently gloat a few feet away.
I deliberate getting out of the pool and storming away, but I know how quick Gemini can be. He won’t let me go that easily.
He will never let me go.
It’s not the first time I’ve had that thought, but it’s the first time that statement holds a different kind of indecipherable weight to its meaning.
“What am I to you?” I blurt out.
“A pretty gift from the gods,” Gemini states plainly before turning on his back to float, his arms lazily swaying through the water.
“So that’s it?” I’m ashamed of the disappointment threading in between my words, but I continue nonetheless. “All I am to you is athingto possess?”
“You are far from being just athing, Veil Vulturine,” he replies impatiently.
“What then?”
“You are the future of this city.” He says it so casually, and the fight suddenly tumbles out of me like loose marbles. Turning his body in the water to face me, he pins me with his stare, hard eyes piercing right through me. “Did you ever stop to consider that the reason I’m keeping you a secret is for your own good?”
His words surprise me, the snarl in his tone even more. I open my mouth, hoping to push out an answer, but nothing comes out. In seconds, he has me boxed in again.
“They would eat you alive.”
I don’t need him to tell me whotheyare. The ruling heirs of Pravitia, Gemini’s equals—and mine, if I dare to allow myself to think it. But I balk at the very idea of being in the same room with them again. Untamable fear claws up my throat at the thought.
I stay perfectly still as Gemini’s face hovers inches from mine, his chest pressing into me.
“And as long as you hold on to your precious little morals, pet, you will never experience the kind of freedom you’re destined for.” His parted lips trail over my jaw, and I shudder at the sensation. Gnashing his teeth close to my ear, he adds, “Until then, you are mine to do with as I wish.”
I try to shove him away again, but he catches my wrists in his hands, a leering grin slicing across his face.
“I don’t believe you,” I hiss.
“You don’t believe what?” he says, the levity back in his voice.
“That there will ever be a day you’ll stop treating me like your prisoner and let me go.”
He hums with delight, his eyes shining much too bright for the gravity of the conversation.
“How can I make you understand this, doll? The day you decide to transform yourself into the person you’ve always been destined to become, you won’twantto leave. You’ll realize then that you’ve been exactly where you wanted to be all along.”
“And where’s that?”
This back-and-forth pulses with the echo of our previous conversation weeks ago. I know his answer but still burn to ask the question.
He gives me a knowing smile, as if he, too, is recalling that same conversation. “By my side,” he finally says.
I parrot back what I said that day, “Like your trophy?”
Gemini is quick to answer, his gaze darkening. “Like mywife.”
I study him, water clinging to his eyelashes. “You sound so sure about that.”
