Arcas pressed her further into the tree, his knee slipping between her legs. It was irony in her truest form—the heat of the Ice Queen, revealing that he had any semblance of control over her.
He whispered into her ear, “I wonder…” Arcas dragged a finger across her cheek. “Do you blush like that under his touch, or just mine?”
Lunelle froze.
“Excuse me?”
Arcas pulled his fingertip away from her face.
“I have eyes everywhere, Lunelle. There isn’t a room you enter I don’t know about.”
Lunelle shoved him away from her, the heat in the blood pumping through her chest fizzling at his implication.
“Nor do I mind,” Arcas said, shrugging. “You can spend whatever time you wish with the Mercurian.”
She could have cleared the accusation. She could have told him there was nothing—nothing—going on between them. Because the truth was that nothingcouldpass between them in the end.
But she liked the way his eyes flared when she smirked.
“I’ll be sure to ask him and report back.”
Arcas parted his lips but seemed to think better of his next insult. Instead, he leaned forward and brushed his lips to hers one more time, surprising her as she pulled away.
“Good evening, Lunelle.”
“Arcas—”
It was almost better that he darted into the trees before she could find anything else to say.
The moment he left her line of sight, the torture of the Tether resumed, burning a hole right through her and suffocating any attempts at justifying her actions.
She should have known it would be even louder upon its return. She should have predicted that yet another tryst with Arcas would only make her feel worse.
But she could not have fathomed the absolute crush of betrayal she felt as Mirquios’s movements faded back into her consciousness.
The Tether hummed and twisted as she wandered from the grove, aimless as the fog from the sheer range of her predicaments pulled at her mind. If she hadn’t been so overwhelmed, she might have felt the sudden slack on the cord as she rounded the corner outside of her quarters.
“Princess,” Mirquios said as she stopped short of him, her cheeks flushing.
Could he feel it? What she’d done? The same way she felt him sigh in pain or tense in irritation all day?
“I was just on my way to bed,” she muttered, unable to look at him.
Mirquios stepped closer, the sigh of the Tether too generous, too tempting.
“Lu—”
“Goodnight,” she rasped, fighting a downpour as a storm swelled in her chest.
She left him in the hall, where he stayed for much longer than she’d liked to have known.
“You should not be here,”Lunelle whispered as she looked up from her book.
They were not in the Plutonian Court in her dream. They were back home, tucked away into Lunelle’s favorite corner of the smallest library in the palace. Moonbeams shattered between shelves, warping and wavering in the astral.
She’d been curled up in the armchair she liked best, re-reading the same book of poetry she’d read dozens of times, running her fingers over the bleeding ink in the margins with her sister’s bold lettering.
Hiding. That’s what she’d really been doing. Though the sting of her guilt was quieter in this plane, it still poked at her as she tried to steady her breath.
