This shouldn’t be happening.
Cinderella traces a long, slender finger up the side of her body, caressing its shape. “You don’t remember me then?” She pouts, but I can tell it’s feigned, meant to send my mind whirring in all sorts of lewd places it is certainly not at the moment. “But we had such fun together.” She traces her full lips with her fingers, as if remembering a specific taste, and I shudder.
“What are you talking about?” I’m sure it’s nonsense, but my mind is busy elsewhere, calculating and recalculating the concentration of Blaise’s blood in the potion, the ratio of Rivrean flax to foxglove…
Cinderella flits her hand, like she’s imitating a female courtier’s offense, but it comes across more like she’s tossing the line of a lure, dangling an apple in front of my face. “I’m speaking of the time you kissed me, Nox, upon this very dais,” she says, stepping casually over the runes as she traces the dais’s surface with her fingers.
I stiffen, and my immediate reaction is to deny it, to remind this parasite that she’s delusional, but there’s something about the lilt of her tone that tugs at a memory. Not even a memory so much as a dream. A dream—one of many—that I’d been kissing Blaise. A dream in which she’d asked me to partake of her blood and…
My throat tightens; my stomach clenches; and I feel the blood drain from my pallor.
“It was you.” The words are empty, carved hollow by the dread that infects my gut, rotting my insides.
“You knew that at the time, yet you still kissed me,” Cinderella says absentmindedly. “Tell me, was it because you wanted me or because you wanted her, and feared you’d never have her if the decision was left in her hands?”
The moment doesn’t get the chance to pass before I’m upon her, before I’ve wrapped my fingers—knuckles bulging—around the neck of this wretched creature. The thought of someone else using Blaise’s body like that, of using me when I believed myself asleep, fans a slumbering rage within me.
Cinderella only tsks and presses herself up to me, and I back away.
“You can’t hurt me, you know. Not without hurting her,” she says, and I can tell by the triumph on her haughty expression that she feels she’s won.
Something went wrong: a measurement, a calculation, a—
“You’ve been a naughty male, Nox,” Cinderella drawls—and Fates—even her voice has me fantasizing about ripping her larynx from her neck with my teeth. “Though I suppose it’s my own fault. I suppose I should have told you not to feel for the girl, not to fall captive to her allurements.” She says the word like she’s trying to banish a bitter aftertaste. “Though I never suspected a girl as plain as that one would have such an influence over you. The queen really has kept you locked up too long if you think Blaise is the sort a male like you ought to be bedding.”
Cinderella reaches out to me, and before I can flinch away from her touch, she whispers, “Don’t move.”
So I don’t.
Not an inch, not a quaver, as she runs her long fingers through my hair, tangling her grip at the nape of my neck. The touch has me wanting to gag, to grab her by the hair and crack her head against the corner of the dais.
It has every muscle in my body demanding I put as much distance as possible between myself and this monster, but I don’t.
I can’t.
My feet are stuck in place, my hands by my side.
“It was a mistake to tell you to forget,” she says, her voice a bedtime whisper, “to make you believe it was simply a dream. What I should have done was tell you to love me, to be so devoted to me you’d be happy to do all I asked. You’d have been counting down the days until I returned to you. How does that sound, Nox? Would you like me to free you of your feelings toward the girl? Make you love someone who could please you infinitely more?”
My heart races, and I still can’t move. That’s fine. My heart can burst from my chest as long as the shrapnel from my ribs punctures this horrible creature’s heart.
“Say something,” she commands.
“Why can’t I move?”
She cocks her head to the side, her perfectly symmetrical features an assault to my senses. Her vibrant blue eyes go wide, her eyelashes flutter. “Because I told you not to, silly.”
I grit my teeth and let out a labored exhale as she twirls a strand of my hair around her finger. “And why does that have such an effect on me? Why do I not have the choice of whether to move?”
“Maybe this will remind you,” she says, trailing the path of my shoulder to my wrist with her grip, and bringing it to her lips. She presses a kiss into the patch of skin where my veins web. My body betrays me with in involuntary shudder.
In the dream, Blaise and I shared each other’s blood.
My heart races at the memory, at the intimacy of the moment I believed could not have been real, not even when I’d held it close, tried my best to grasp onto it as reality rose with the sun and pulled me far away from what my heart so intensely desired.
“I was once with a male like you,” Cinderella says, her breath hot and damp against my wrist. “He told me a great many things about vampires, about your kind.”
“My kind?” I ask, my heart faltering, even as my mind grapples with a single word. Vampire.
The edge of her full mouth twitches as she gazes up at me and lets my hand fall.
It hits the edge of the dais with a sting before settling limply by my side.
“You asked me that question before. I’m surprised you didn’t research it, didn’t go looking for others of the same”—her tongue flits between her teeth, like she’s tasting the air for the correct word—“heritage.”
“My condition was not born,” I say tersely.
“No, but I’m not speaking of the physical sort of heritage. I’m speaking of the magical sort. Did you really think you were the only modern magister to dabble with liquid moonlight?”
“Where are these others?”
“So many questions,” she mocks before hopping up against the dais, so close the bulge of her thigh presses against my hips. “But never the right ones.”
“I asked why you can control me and you didn’t deign to answer.”
“All in good time, my love,” she says. “I was getting to it when you became distracted by the whereabouts of your kin.”
I snarl at her, and it only seems to inspire her to lean her head against my shoulder, allowing her moon-soaked hair to fall across my shoulder and down my front.
