Glint (The Plated Prisoner 2)

When I see something inside of the cage move, I startle. “What—” My words cut off when a person rises from the small bed. From the faint light, I see her—my decoy.

She has bed-mussed hair and paint-smeared skin. A quick glance to the blankets shows stains from where it’s rubbed off. Metallic gleam left behind on the sheets like the damning evidence of a secret lover.

The woman rises and looks between us. “My king?”

Her hair hangs around her shoulders, a little shorter than mine by a couple inches. She has round, light brown eyes, and a similar face shape to me. Her lips are plush, and her body is an hourglass wrapped up in a gold dress.

My gold dress.

And even though the paint covering her body and hair isn’t my exact shade, and even though I can see it creasing around her eyes and wiped off her palms, the sight of her sets me on edge.

/> Midas strolls over and places the candle on a table just outside of the cage door.

“Good news for you, my favored has arrived,” he tells the woman.

She smiles, creasing dimples into her cheeks. I can tell from the relief in her eyes that she can’t wait to get out. I wonder if she feels like a wing-clipped bird. I wonder if she can’t wait to wash the gold from her skin.

This was temporary for her, when it never is for me.

When she notices that I’m still staring at her, the smile on her face falters. I know it’s not her fault that she’s in there, that she’s painted and dressed to look like me, but emotions roil through me as erratic as a cyclone. I’m shocked, embarrassed, hurt.

To see that I can so easily be replicated, to see me, from the outside looking in...

Osrik was right—the woman I’m looking at right now? She’s nothing but a symbol for Midas. Not a person, not someone in charge of her own life, but a living and breathing image to showcase the Golden King’s might.

The sight of her makes me sick.

“I’m sure you’re relieved to be back where it’s safe,” Midas tells me. “Where no one can get to you.”

My eyes drag away from the cage and settle on his face. I grasp my skirts to stop my trembling hands.

“Ready?” he asks me.

Too fast, this is happening far too fast.

“Midas...” I choke out.

He crosses the room to come back to me, and takes my gloved hands into his. “I know I let you down, Auren. I promised to always keep you safe, and I failed you. But I won’t fail you again,” he promises, his expression focused with determined intent.

I swallow, trying to stop the whirling emotions so that I can be intelligible enough to talk. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I’m not afraid anymore. Not like I was,” I begin, swallowing past the acid that keeps climbing up my throat.

Midas frowns at me, and I fumble with what to say. This isn’t how I envisioned our reunion. Not at all.

He was supposed to hold me and not want to let me go. Our separation was meant to make him open to hearing me. I imagined being wrapped in his arms for hours while he listened to me talk.

Disappointment is a roughhewn boulder settling in my stomach. It rolls and scrapes, making me go raw with the realization that none of that is going to happen.

We’re picking right up where we left off.

I thought because I’ve changed, that he would change too. What a silly, naive thought.

The road that we were on has forked, and I went on a different path. I need to explain things to him now, need him to catch up to me.

“There’s so much that’s happened, Midas,” I tell him, trying to move that deadweight boulder, pushing it like I can push him to meet me on that forked road. “I know I need to prove it to you so that you believe me, but...I don’t need the cage. Not anymore. We don’t need it.”

He stares at me for a beat, his blond brows pulled together. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“This,” I say, my head cocked toward the cage, though my eyes can’t bear to look at it, can’t bear to meet the eye of the woman inside. “We don’t need it.”