Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)

Midas is dangerous when he feels cornered.

Ravinger looks around the room, noting the bed, the fireplace, the balcony—all of it with bored disinterest. “Perhaps you’re wrong. Perhaps I truly did mistake these for my own chambers, and I rotted your guards because I thought you were attempting to ambush me.”

A sound like a growl erupts from Midas’s chest.

“Or...” Ravinger goes on. “Perhaps I simply wanted to see how the acting monarch of Fifth Kingdom lives.” Green eyes slip over to me. “Interesting how one keeps a king’s favored,” he muses with a twist of his lips. “What does it say, do you think, about a male who keeps a woman in a cage?”

The breath in my throat catches. I can feel my heart pounding with the tension in the room. It’s as thick as ropes, ready to coil around my neck and yank me off my feet.

Ravinger watches Midas, and Midas watches Ravinger.

I watch them both.

Ravinger wants to poke and prod, be a thorn in Midas’s back. Midas, however, looks like he wants to pummel Ravinger to the ground.

But...he can’t.

Of course, usually I’m the only person who knows that. Midas plays his part very, very well. He’s had a decade of practice, after all. A sleight of hand here, purposely placing me there, bringing in gilded items after the fact...he knows how to act like he’s the one with power.

But Ravinger knows the truth now. Midas is ignorant of that—and I want to keep it that way. Yet maybe that’s all about to be ruined, right here and now. Maybe Ravinger is about to call his bluff. Or maybe he’ll simply rot Midas where he stands.

My nerves constrict, like a corset pulled too tight.

Midas’s guards fidget on their feet. Maybe they feel the threat as easily as I can. The last thing they probably want to do is have to go up against Ravinger again. It didn’t go so well for them the first time. But as guards, they don’t really have much of a choice.

The silence in the room only makes the tension worse, and even my ribbons, as sore as they are, stiffen along my spine, like they expect a fight to break out. If there is a fight, it’s one that Midas can’t win. You can only get so far with threats.

He must come to the same conclusion as me, because I see it the moment Midas decides to back down. It takes effort, but his features smooth out, his fingers relax, and he forces his expression to go blank with a courtly visage, scrapping all traces of his true emotion.

Midas is no fool. He knows how to study his opponents, and right now, he sees that he doesn’t have the upper hand. When you can’t play to win with your power, then you play politics instead.

Which is why I’m not surprised when he clears his throat and says, “We are indeed allies, as you say. So I will forgive this mistake.”

Ravinger tilts his head, mouth playing with a smirk. “Much obliged.” His eyes slide to me again, and he tosses a wink in my direction before strolling out of the room.

As soon as the rotten king is gone, my eyes drag over to Midas, but he’s busy watching the guards.

“You failed me,” he tells them.

The men go tense, and some of them flinch when he strides past them into the hall, speaking words too low for me to hear. As soon as he pulls back in, ten new soldiers file inside, and they immediately grab hold of the guards who were charged with watching me.

The men don’t fight as they’re hauled away, and I know with sinking realization that Midas is going to have them killed for witnessing what I did to the door.

“Don’t kill them.” The plea sprouts up from my mouth like a reaching plant, though I know it will be fruitless. So many of my requests to Midas are.

“It’s done,” he replies, eyes pinched. “They sealed their own fate by seeing what they were not allowed to see.”

My throat clogs with irrevocable guilt. Not only did I lose control and gild the woman who acted as my stand-in, but now these men are going to die because of my power too. Maybe not by my hand, but the end result is the same.

Like I told Ravinger, I’ve seen plenty of death.

Maybe the guards would have been better off as rotted heaps on the floor. Who knows what the kinder fate would have been? Which king’s retribution would they have preferred?

I swallow hard, but this time, the nausea that rises in my stomach has nothing to do with Ravinger’s power. Instead, it has everything to do with my own regret, and the man standing next to me.

Chapter 3

AUREN