Posey
“You’re lying to me about something,” Aris says. My back hits the wall of the alcove. He braces a hand against the wall beside my head, tsking, his hooded eyes meeting mine under the cover of his lashes. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, you know? You felt like you didn’t have any options when it came to the trajectory of your life, and I offered you an out.” The words brush over my temple.
“You offered to marry me, Aris.”
“And?”
“You don’t love me. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
He arches a brow. He smells like whiskey and smoke. Like he’s been resting in front of a fire staring into the flames for hours. “I’m fucking engaged to someone I’ve met once. You tell me.”
“You’re drunk,” I accuse him, and he smiles wryly, his brows arched.
“How’d you figure that one out?”
I lick my lips as his scent curls around my senses. Memories flash before me–a moment just like this, his body inches from mine, but his eyes had been dark with something other than hatred then. This is the side of Aris I don’t know, even when we were kids and he bullied and teased me. This is who he can be. Cold. Dominant. Hateful. This is the side he shows others, the side that makes him an Alpha.
It hurts so much.
“Why do you hate me?” I ask, my voice trembling.
The question seems to catch him off guard. He lowers his hand from the wall and takes a step back, but his eyes catch on the ring on my finger. He rolls his lower lip between his teeth and meets my gaze again. “I don’t hate you.”
“Then what is your problem with me? Give me a straight answer because I can’t take this.”
“You want an answer, Posey? An answer to what, exactly? Why I can’t stand to be in your presence? Why it feels like I need to rip out of my own fucking heart whenever I look at you?” The vitriol in his tone slices through me like the silver blades he joked about me making for him. Looking back, he wasn’t joking, was he? He doesn’t need the blades after all. His quicksilver eyes are doing just fine. “You did something to me this summer. Something about you–” He bares his teeth, struggling to put his mangled, drunken thoughts in order. He points at me, chuckling. “You know what, no. I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“Then leave me alone.”
“I live here!”
“Then, I will leave!” I go to step past him, but he blocks my exit, his hand braced on the railing overlooking the drop to the bottom floor of the library. “Move.”
“What are you hiding?”
My heart stops. Panic blurs my senses. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I offered you everything. You still said no. Still threw yourself into a life of solitude.”
“I like being alone!”
“Do you think I don’t know how you’re spending your time here? Arthur is a long-time family friend. I’ve been in those same archives dozens of times, Posey. But you go deep underground where the books go to rot. Why?”
“Because I need–I need them for my research–”
“My cousin Blake,” he seethes, “is a mystic. The King of Mystics. Anything you need to know about the spirit realm, you can ask him. I could call him here now.”
“Leave me alone,” I warn as prickles of unease whisper over my skin, but he grabs my hand and yanks the copper ring off my finger so swiftly I don’t realize it’s happened until the unmarred skin burns anew, and I shriek, pulling my hand back against my chest.
He catches me before I collapse to my knees, my bubbling, blistering skin reddened and throbbing. He kneels with me pressed to his chest, and I don’t fight it, not when it’s taking all of my energy to remain me. Fight or flight is clawing for dominance, and one wrong move, one wrong breath, and I’ll die, right here, in this beautiful library, and Aris will be the one to do it.
“It’s to stop you from using your alchemy gifts, isn’t it? I wondered when I saw it last night. You can’t bend metals when your body is constantly trying to heal itself.”
Tears sting my eyes. I’m transported back to those two nights at the hunting cabin, safe and warm in his arms. I try to stay there in those moments a little longer, but he continues, “If I catch you wearing it again…”
“What will you do, Aris? Kill me?”
“Worse. I’ll lock you up here. I’ll never let you leave.”
Something heavy settles in my chest. His words and actions… Goddess, it's ridiculous. It’s mean. I shouldn’t be leaning so heavily into him right now, but there’s only ever been one person who has come close to seeing through my bullshit, and it's him.
Which is why he’s so dangerous right now.
His free hand ghosts up my back to clasp the nape of my neck, his fingers drumming against my pulse. He’s counting my heartbeats, quietly holding me until my heart begins to calm, and my mind clears enough to…
“How would your fiancee feel about this?” I whisper and regret it immediately.
He doesn’t move, but I can feel his wicked smile against the top of my head. “This means nothing, Posey. You made that perfectly clear this summer.”
He abruptly lets go and rises like my touch is enough to burn his skin. The bottle of whiskey catches the light as he snatches it off the sidetable, glancing at what’s left of the amber liquid and tucking it under his arm. He looks down at me where I’m still kneeling on the ground as if praying to his altar, unwilling to move, and smirks, dropping my ring in his pocket.
He looks at his palm with a slightly surprised expression that fades as quickly as it came and angles his hand to show me the circular burn on his skin. “Apparently, copper doesn’t like me much, either.”
My chest quivers with confusion, but he turns and stalks into the shadows out of sight.
The next morning when I fail to rise to my usual 5:00 A.M. alarm, I find a thick bandage on my finger and a jar of healing salve beside my bed. It wasn’t the spirits. Aris’s scent is faint when I slide my legs out of bed and look around. The astronomy book I left in the library rests on the little table beneath the windows, where wintery, silver sunlight bleeds through the curtains, and a note is lodged between the aging pages.
“Do not go into the depths of the archives again without me.” Aris. I crumple the note and toss it in a little wastebasket in the bathroom and try to put last night behind me.
There’s obviously something incredibly unsteady between us that wasn’t there before. It yanks and pulls whenever he’s near, and it hurts. I don’t know how else to explain it.
I get ready for another day in the archives, disregarding Aris’s note completely, and while walking through the castle, try to call Willow again, but she doesn’t pick up. She’s asleep, most likely.
The female spirit is with me when I head toward the foyer. She bustles around me like a little bird I can’t see, but I have to say her presence is surprisingly calming. Like I’m alone but not totally. I don’t mind it.
“Do you want to come with me? To the archives?” I ask in a whisper, and she flutters, making my hair lift off my shoulders. But her presence is suddenly swept away when I reach the final narrow hallway leading to the foyer, and I look around for any physical evidence that she’s still here.
All I see is a door opened just a crack.
Muffled voices drift into the hallway. I crane my neck and hear Morgan speaking in low tones to her male companion, Talon, I believe is his name. He laughs under his breath and says, “Imagine what can be done here.”
“Here? It’s terrible. I feel like I’m catching a cold just from being here with all this dust.”
My nose crinkles. It’s not dusty in the slightest. The spirits keep this place so tidy.
“I feel like I haven’t seen the sun in days, Talon. It’s awful.”
“A few more weeks, and we can return home, and all will be well.”
“That’s so easy for you to say,” she coos. “You don’t have to seduce the man.”
He chuckles under his breath, followed by the sound of furniture shifting, like he’s moving closer to her on a couch or bed. “Once the marriage is finalized, you’ll be a wealthy woman, and you can do whatever you want. He can’t keep you here.”
I feel that same glimmer of unease from last night creeping back into existence. I take a single step down the hallway and stop, clutching the books I need to return to the archives. The back of my neck prickles. I slowly turn around.
“Are you spying on me, little church mouse?” Morgan steps out of the room in a glorious velvet robe that makes her look like she’s floating over the black tiles. She closes the door with a soft click.
I say nothing. I just look at her, taking her in, watching the way her dark, cat-like eyes scan my face. She clicks her tongue and folds her arms under her chest.
I turn from her and hurry down the hallway, wincing at her chuckle, but that uneasy feeling remains even after morning prayers at the temple and several hours spent in the archives, this time in the upper levels helping a priestess catalog books borrowed by the temple and putting them back in their places. Her name is Maria, and she’s several decades older than me. Old enough to be my grandmother, at least, and just as kind.
“I find it hard to believe you’re willingly going into the studies of the occult,” she says as we sort through several volumes related to old church doctrines.
“Someone has to do it. Mother Anabella made it sound like no one has chosen this course of study in a long time.”
“Well, she’s correct.” I can feel Maria’s diamond blue gaze scanning my profile. “I know I haven’t known you long, my dear, but I have a very hard time believing you’re choosing this for yourself.”
“I find study of the occult and spiritual realm fascinating. There’re so many unanswered questions about our world and why we are the way we are.”
“I’m talking about you, dear. You were a teacher before this. I did read your file when you were transferred from Moonrise.”
I flinch. “I was.”
“Did you not like it?”
“I loved it. I’ve always been good with children.” Every time I looked at my students, I saw a future I couldn’t have. It was crushing. It was a constant reminder of what I am. I blink, pulling myself back to the present.
“I’ve spoken to the head priestess of the temple in Lunaria. They’re interested in you. I believe, once you take your vows, you may be called to join the North Star Temple. Would that interest you?”
Thousands of miles north? In a land where the sun barely rises? So far away from Aris that the memory of his warmth against my skin might fade?
My chest convulses, but I nod, turning back to our task.
I’m sent away when the sun sets by Arthur himself, who chides me about being in the lower levels alone, warning me in vivid detail that he’s not sure whatever was imprisoned down there centuries ago has died yet, whatever that means, which is effective enough. Still, when I arrive at the castle and close myself in my room, the female spirit is already there. A gown of deep, glossy emerald flies out of the armoire I haven’t so much as opened and hangs itself on the canopy of my bed.
I stare at the dress, at the way the silk ripples.
“Why?” I ask, and only a flutter of air answers.