“It’s nothing,” he replies with an easy smile.
I bristle. My ribbons sharpen like bared fangs.
It’s nothing.
Nothing.
My fingers clamp tightly around my spoon. So many times I’ve drained myself for this man, just for him to pretend that it’s his power and it’s nothing.
That angry creature prods my ribs, rapping to get out. Coils of ribbons slither down my legs like serpents searching to pierce a vein and tear into sinewy muscle, but I hold them back.
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that your power comes so easily to you,” Kaila replies. “Magic can be a fickle thing.”
“It can,” he readily agrees. “But I mastered it long ago.”
Mastered it.
It feels like my stomach turns to ash, burnt down by the flare of fire erupting from the throat of my cloying fury.
Mastered me, he means, this complete and utter piece of shit—
“So magnificent,” Queen Kaila says. “Could you show us?”
The hand on his goblet goes still, his eyes locking onto her. “Show you?”
The queen nods with excitement, her eyes glittering. “You wouldn’t mind, would you? I’ve heard so many stories of how awe-inspiring it is, and I would love a demonstration. I assumed since you’ve mastered it so completely, it isn’t such a terrible imposition? My brother and I would adore seeing it.”
Midas may look at her with that courtly smile still plastered on his face, but I see the tightness in his jaw. Feel the six taps of his heel on the floor.
In just a few short sentences, Kaila has trapped him. If he were to deny her, it would make him appear either weak or disagreeable. Neither of those things are what Midas is trying to prove.
After a silence that stretches on a few beats too long, he tips his head. “Of course, Queen Kaila. I would be happy to.”
She beams at him, looking so young and pretty, and yet there’s a thread of cunning that gleams in her gaze, as if this is a test.
“Auren, pass me your goblet, would you?” Midas turns to me, eyes flickering with pointed demand. We’ve played this game so many times. We’ve fooled so many people.
But right now, the fuming anger is in control, and the only person I want the fool to be is him.
With a saccharine smile on my face, I pick up the goblet and hold it out to him. In the past, I’d make sure to do a quick sleight of hand to make my skin touch the object at just the right moment as I passed it over, so that by the time my gold was spreading, it was firmly in his grasp.
But I do nothing.
Midas’s carob-pod eyes darken and deaden, falling off a branch to land down at my gloved hand. When he lifts that gaze again, we stay in limbo, both of us holding the cup, staring at each other in equal challenge.
His gaze is an order.
Mine is a threat.
In these loaded, heavy seconds, a tense silence stretches across the table, bound by the unwavering looks knotted between the Golden King and his gilded pet.
A tic appears in Midas’s jaw, and while his smile is still plastered on his handsome face, there’s a fury there buried in the depths, ready to dig me out and crush my defiance with a fist. I manage to keep the smile on my face with innocent levity, but my golden irises spark with the light of a fire.
He’s always towered over me to cast me in his shadow, and a shadow doesn’t like it when you burn it straight through. My chest leaps at the power I’m manipulating by not using my power at all. At everyone staring, waiting for him to perform.
And he can’t.
“Are you going to let go?” he asks lightly, as though it’s a joke, though it’s belied by the hardness in his jaw.