Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)

“Only that you’re always so quick to judge me,” Rip replies with cool indifference. “Tell me, did you call Midas a liar as well?” he challenges, his spiked brow lowering over his eyes. “How long has he been claiming your power as his own? How long have you been lying to everyone about him?”

“We’re not talking about Midas.”

A cruel laugh snakes out of him, ready to bite, to hurt. “Of course not, right? Your golden king can do no wrong,” he says scathingly.

My nails dig into my bare palm so hard that I nearly break the skin. “You had no right to be angry when I chose to come back to him. Not when you’ve deceived me from the start.”

A terrible growl escapes his chest, like he tried to hold it back and failed. “He’s deceived you too!”

“Exactly!” I scream, and the sound of it, the utter emotion that comes barreling with it, makes him stagger back. “I am so damned tired of being deceived! The lies, the manipulations. You tried to pretend that you were so much better than him, but you’re exactly the same.”

Rip’s expression goes as dark as night, and my stomach clenches. “Am I?” His reply is a strike, but his eyes land the blow.

A hot, heavy quiet drops between us. The dead-weight of a corpse smoldering at our feet. The smoke of our discretions clouds our sights of one another.

“Thank you for explaining exactly what you think of me.” His aura slinks around him, and since I know now that it contains the repressed steam of his festering power, it makes me want to run and hide. “It’s a good reminder of just how skewed your perceptions are.”

I hate him. I hate him so much right now that my eyes burn. They burn until I can’t hold back the lick of flame anymore. A scorching tear leaks down my cheek, and his eyes follow it until it drips off my jaw.

“Maybe my perceptions wouldn’t be so skewed if the people I trusted didn’t constantly trick and twist and lie,” I retort, bashing away another stray tear.

Behind him, set in the shadows of the room, the broken cage mocks me. It’s a reminder. Of exactly what can happen when someone I trust misleads me.

“Auren...” There’s a sound there, in his voice, one that I can’t bear to hear.

I look down, focusing instead on the puddled shadows that have formed at our feet, a breath shaking through my chest. “You stood there and kissed me and tried to make me choose you, when I didn’t even know the real you at all,” I say, voice gone flat as I look back up at him. “You made me feel like the worst person in the world for choosing him, even though I warned you over and over again that I had to.”

Rip’s head jerks at that last part, eyes narrowing in the dark. “You had to?”

I regret my slip of the tongue immediately.

Keeping a stoic expression, I say, “I want you to leave.”

That dark, shadowy anger returns to his face, the lines of his power writhing against his bristled jaw. “No.”

My heart squeezes tighter than my fists. I hate that part of me still feels relieved that he’s here, as if I’m safe now, as if he’s still my ally.

He’s not.

I have no allies, and I need to remember that. Whatever I thought Rip was to me, that’s gone now. I have no one.

Uncurling my fingers, I raise a hand and drag it down my face. I’m so tired. So damn tired of the lies. His. Midas’s. Mine. I’m wrapped in deceit and molded in manipulation, stuffed full of everything I’ve done to survive.

I want it all to unravel. I want to come out of the tangles that have coiled around me before I become mummified with them.

The tension rolling off Rip’s shoulders is so tight that he’s practically vibrating with it, a cloud of thunder ready to roil. “So that’s it? I’m to bear the brunt of your anger, while you continue to fall at Midas’s feet?”

My eyes flash. “What I do is no concern of yours.”

“Dammit, Auren—”

I cut him off. “What do you want, Rip? Why are you here?”

He crosses his arms, spikes sinking beneath his skin in a fluid, effortless motion. “Me? I was just going for a walk.”

“Oh, good, another lie to add to the list,” I say sardonically. “Should I grab a quill and paper to keep track?”

Rip sighs and scrubs his hands down his face in a rare crack of his stony facade. “You’re overreacting.”