Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)

Because he knows the answer. I can see it in his face.

“Midas,” he snarls, like a predator with its eyes trained on a trespassing hunter in the woods. He waits, looking at me to confirm, yet I don’t reply, don’t even nod my head.

But I don’t deny it either.

At my silent confirmation, Slade loses it.

All of a sudden, his eyes flare, going from startling green to a bleed of pure black. Spikes rip from his arms and pierce through the sleeves of his shirt, making a gasp fly out of my mouth.

I watch as he struggles, shifting back and forth between his forms with the click of his jaw, fury bunching his muscles. The lined power that marks his flesh writhes beneath his stubble, reaching, growing.

A cold sweat breaks out over me as I feel his power dominate the air. It thickens like syrup, and a wave of nauseating death ekes from his body.

“Slade...” The nervous plea falls from my lips as I move to back up, only to remember I can’t. I’m still pinned against the bookshelf, his presence blocking my front.

It’s a shock to see him like this, the way his body seems to be warring back and forth. But as his forms flicker, his essence does too—part corrupt magic, part comforting aura. Both of them beating like drums with a singular reaction.

Anger.

And just as quickly as the fear washed over me, it dissipates, like a burnt-up mist. Because his anger, it feels familiar.

The feathered creature in me, the one ruffling for a reckoning, she sits up and cocks her head. She pays attention.

Slade’s clash of manifestations stems from something dark and writhing. Something that’s cleaved the two halves of him, making him battle within himself. But that thing...it’s letting out a silent call, creating a palpable rhythm in the air. A strained song of discord that my bloomed anger can hear.

Breath buckling in an accordion bellow, I stare at him, not in fear, but in recognition as the beast in me rises up and answers to the beast inside him.

All twenty-four of my ribbons lurch to attention. They become charged with energy, as if they’ve felt the erratic spike of his magic and are answering in kind.

Yet instead of them lashing out at him like they did with Midas, they form a cocoon, like they’re creating another layer upon his aura that’s already surrounding us. These parts of ourselves feel so alive. So decadent.

“Look at me.” My voice is stoic, unafraid, even as his body struggles to hold its form.

His green and black flashing eyes latch onto me, hypnotic in their frenetic oscillation. I don’t know what would happen if he were to rupture, but power flows from him and pounds in the air. This time, it doesn’t make me want to vomit. Instead, it’s like a singing siren, and I want nothing but to be lured in.

“Can you feel that?” I whisper as my hand rises to his chest, my open palm connecting with the chiseled muscles over his racing heart.

The moment my touch settles against him, Slade’s eyes bleed back to a forest of green, like the needles of a pine appearing out of the dark. My breath catches, his heart beating beneath my palm in a rhythm that seems to match the push in my veins.

His touches I’ve savored have coalesced into the one I now press against him. And as innocent as it may seem, it’s somehow intimate.

“Your heartbeat…”

“What about it?” His tone is hoarse, breath gone ragged.

“It sounds like mine.”

Twin beats pulse, just as two tears rip down my cheeks in perforated anguish. Because I can hear it, this perfect harmony, like a hum of sun and soil, of depth and rise. But the moment is tainted, cheapened, because I had my head pressed to another’s chest, hearing a song that wasn’t singing for me. So how can I trust what I hear?

“Auren.”

My shining eyes rise up, and I fleetingly note the spikes sinking back beneath his skin and the scales disappearing from his cheeks. I start to pull my hand away, because I suddenly feel so undeserving of the touch. Yet before I can, his hand comes up to trap mine, and he holds it there as he watches me with an intensity that I can’t fathom.

“You’re warm,” he murmurs.

I nod, feeling the heat circling from my palm, dipping into the soft fabric of his shirt, sinking into the hard chest beneath. The drag of his calloused thumb against the back of my hand shouldn’t feel sensual, but it does.

Heat drips down from my navel, settling between my thighs and making my muscles go tight. His fingernail scrapes against my knuckle, an abraded edge of nearness that carries the hint of a need to dig in deep. Right then, I want to let him. To peel my layers open so he can get to what lies beneath.