“Are you trying to trick me into confessing what we did? Trick the trickster?” He laughs out loud and damn, I find myself staring at him.
He’s a pretty one, this fae. They generally are quite pretty, but he’s as if… distilled from crystals and darkness, starlight and shiny blades. Hard and delicate at once, just like we demons like them. Broken and mended again, with a diamond core of pain.
Which is why I don’t get why this girl has gotten under my goddamn skin. She’s not like Sindri. She’s soft and curvy, she’s billowing and smooth. She’s warm and dark where he’s cold and slippery like glass.
It’s all fucking confusing and therefore damn annoying.
Why am I even looking for her?
Fuck.
A couple of girls squeal and rush out of our way as we stride down Mia’s corridor. “Which one is her damn door?”
“You like swearing,” Sindri observes with that unnerving calm of his.
“How goddamn fucking observant of you.”
“Demons.” He might have rolled his eyes a little but I’m too busy searching for her door.
“Is it this one?” I open a door and yet another girl squeals as if I’m gutting her. “Why do they have to squeal? They remind me of piglets.”
“What do you know of piglets?”
“I used to have one when I was a kid,” I mutter. “Uncle killed it, served it to me for dinner. Then told me that it was a friend of mine he’d transformed into a pig. Ha. And that was one of the good nights. I…” I suck on the stud in my tongue and grimace. Why the hell am I having a heart-to-heart with the fae princeling? “Doesn’t matter. Where the fuck is Mia’s room?”
At least Sindri has stopped laughing. He gives me a long look, then he walks a few doors further and taps on a door. “This one, I think.”
“You could have said so sooner.”
“What would be the fun in that?” He turns the handle and the door swings open. “Mia’s not here.”
“Shit.” I walk into her room anyway, glance around. “Why are we still calling her that? What’s her real name?”
Sindri parks his ass on her desk and blinks ridiculously long black lashes. “I thought that was her name. Madeline Mina, she said. Hence Mia.”
“Huh.”
“And we onlykissedin my room.” He brushes a hand over the desk surface. “And talked.”
Something eases in my chest. “What about?”
“Her. Her childhood.”
Now a different kind of jealousy grips me. “She told you about that?”
He shrugs broad shoulders. “I invoked the favor she owed me.”
“Bastard.”
His mouth twists. “Yeah, that I am.”
I’d expected a more flippant reply. A reply in kind. But he’s looking oddly subdued, brows drawn together. He’s staring down at his hand, flat on Mia’s desk.
A moody fae prince. What a surprise.
“How can she help us?” I go stand in front of him, and up-close he smells of crushed leaves, wet grass and storms. “You said she can.”
“Why don’t you go ask Ashton? He’s the well-read one.”