Page 15 of Enchantra (Wicked Games #2)
14
THE RING
Genevieve and Umbra stared awkwardly at each other while Rowin fetched her trunks from down the hall. The fox was sitting on the black velvet comforter tucked neatly over Rowin’s bed, the tip of the creature’s fluffy black tail flicking from side to side.
“ What? ” she huffed at the Familiar.
Umbra only twitched her ears.
Peeling her eyes away from the shrewd creature, Genevieve glanced around Rowin’s bedroom, struck by how pristinely kept it was and thankful there was not a mirror in sight. There were also no windows, or displays of art, just fussed-up walls with elaborate picture frame molding over the rich golden wallpaper.
His closet was enormous—something from her dreams—and perfectly organized, its doors painted a glossy ebony and embossed with two running foxes whose snouts met at its middle seam. The only sources of light were from the taper candles in the sconces bookending the bed.
And Hell, the bed . It was the largest bed she’d ever seen. It looked large enough to fit at least five people comfortably, and Genevieve’s mind began to wander as she pondered whether it ever had. The headboard was just as intricately carved as the closet doors, the details carrying over to the four posts rising from each corner of the solid wood frame.
But it didn’t matter how grand the bed was, or how comfortable it looked. She was not sharing it with him.
Right on cue, Rowin returned with her bags, setting them on the dresser across from the bed and giving her a pointed look.
“How much stuff did you bring ?” he muttered.
“I don’t take criticism of my packing habits from my sister, and I’m surely not going to take yours,” she leveled at him as she went to unclasp both trunks and flip their lids open, propping the tops against the back wall. “You’re lucky I only brought these. If it hadn’t been for those damned birds, I’d have a proper wardrobe.”
“The hex wouldn’t have let the crows harm you,” he reasoned.
“And how was I to know that?” she said, as the scene outside the Colosseum came roaring back to her. “I think it’s time we lay to rest the discussion of what I should or should not have done before coming here. Unless you really feel like spending our honeymoon night fighting.” She batted her lashes at him.
“Stop that,” he ordered, his voice dropping in a way that made her raise her brows. “Turn around.”
She propped a hand on her hip. “Why?”
“So I can unlace your corset.”
She sputtered. “Are you mad? Absolutely not .”
“Must you be difficult about everything ?” he bit out.
“I am not going to fuck you just because we’re married,” she maintained.
He lifted a brow. “Tell me, trouble, what does you getting changed have to do with us fucking?”
She glared. “You’re trying to get me undressed.”
“I’m trying to get rid of the gown taking up all of the space in this room, yes,” he agreed.
She looked around. He was right. The skirts of the gown took up half the floor around them, not to mention how encumbered they made her movements.
“I’m not sure I have any nightgowns that would be appropriate to wear in front of you,” she finally said.
He snorted. “Whatever you have wouldn’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”
“I hate when people say that,” she told him. “It is something you’ve never seen before. Me. And I’m spectacular.”
He gave her a considering look but didn’t comment further.
Finally she huffed. “Fine. Unlace the ribbons, but if you even think about putting your hands anywhere else?—”
In a blink he was right in front of her, so close that she could feel the warmth of him over every inch of the exposed skin of her neck and shoulders.
“Let’s get one thing clear,” he warned, eyes darkening with each word he spoke. “I have zero interest in putting my hands on you unless it’s to keep you from harm or because you’ve asked me to. Understood?”
She glanced away as she gave a noncommittal grumble.
“Genevieve.”
She huffed and looked back at him.
“If we are going to be partners in this game together, that means we have to trust each other,” he emphasized.
She tilted her nose up. “Trust is earned . And what have you done thus far to earn it from me? Force me to marry you?”
“I let you marry me as a lifeline to help you survive this place,” he reminded. “That falls under keeping you from harm, as I said. As for the latter bit—I said that, and I meant it. Which should instill trust by the sheer fact that it was absolute truth, whether you liked to hear it or not. I will not ever lie to spare your feelings.”
“How romantic my husband is,” Genevieve drawled dramatically, but she hated to admit that he wasn’t wrong. The casual cruelness of honesty might be hard to hear, but the fact that he stood by his words was admirable, at least.
“We can win this,” he told her. “I’ve won the last fifteen consecutive years because, aside from Grave, my siblings have grown tired of the game. Right now they believe you might finally be the key to their success in breaking my winning streak. Don’t prove them right.”
“I was not planning to just roll over and die, if that’s what you think,” she told him.
“If you refuse to trust me, that’s exactly what you’d be doing,” he vowed. “From here on out everyone will try to pit us against each other, to isolate one of us in order to go in for the kill. Our trust has to be implicit. We are on each other’s side first and foremost, even if someone else suggests otherwise.”
Genevieve understood why this could be a detrimental pact for them to make.
“Unfortunately, the last time I trusted a man implicitly, he shattered my heart,” Genevieve told him. “I’m not very eager to do so again.”
“This game isn’t about hearts,” Rowin told her, a glint of something she couldn’t read in his eyes at her revelation. “Hearts can never truly be trusted, anyway.”
He gestured for her to turn around then, and his original request came back to her now. Her corset. Right. She faced away from him in silence, giving him access to the back of her dress.
As he began to slowly pull at the knots of the laces at her waist, he continued, “Hearts are not ruled by logic or loyalty. They can easily betray you.”
As if to prove his point, her heart began thundering in her chest as his fingertips grazed the skin over her spine and loosened her corset.
“And you won’t?” she wondered, looking over her shoulder at him. “Betray me? Even if your family asks you to?”
He stepped around her then, raising his hands between them to slide off one of the many rings he wore and hold it out before her in his left palm. She leaned in to get a better look at the onyx gemstone embedded into the thick, silver band, noting the unique swirling pattern carved in its polished surface. A signet.
“Consider this my wedding gift,” he said as he lifted her left hand and slid the band gently onto her ring finger. It was just the right amount of snug. “I tried to give it to you before. If anyone who means you harm is close by, it will alert you. The hotter it gets, the closer they are.”
Like the “hot and cold” game Ophie and I used to play.
“It’s ice cold at the moment,” she observed as she peered down at the shimmering, black stone.
A corner of his mouth lifted. “Precisely.”
“I’d never usually say no to a man gifting me jewelry”—she gestured at the ring—“but this is…ugly.”
“It isn’t meant to be fashionable .” He looked to the ceiling in exasperation. “It’s meant to be helpful. I’m offering you undeniable proof of my intentions and you’re concerned that it isn’t to your taste?”
She scoffed. “No, I’m concerned people will think I chose it.”
“How mortifying,” he deadpanned.
She swallowed now. “Fine. I’m willing to…work with you. We have the same goal, right? Keeping me alive?”
“Correct,” he agreed. “If we act up the romance from time to time, you might even win Favored. That way I’ll win my freedom at the end of this, and you’ll win a gift from Knox’s collection. You might as well walk away with something.”
“Unless he has something to erase unwanted memories in that collection, I couldn’t care less about some silly little consolation prize. But I’ll play along. You have my word.”
He inclined his head. “I suppose we’ll have to learn if your word is worth anything.”
“It’s worth much more than my heart,” she muttered.
He stared at her for a long, silent beat, and she again found herself frustrated by the fact that she could never really read him.
Eventually he cleared his throat and murmured, “You should probably get changed.”
She looked down at herself. “Oh. Right.”
Grabbing her nightgown from her trunk on the dresser, she made her way into the en suite. Once she was safely closed inside the enormous white marble room, she let her wedding dress shimmy down over her thick curves, kicking it away as she replaced it with cornflower-blue chiffon. The sleeves of the nightgown were long and billowy, tapering in at her wrists before flaring out at the ends. There was a pretty silk bow that sat just beneath her bosom, but the square neckline was just lowcut enough to be inappropriate to wear in front of a stranger, as she had said earlier.
Except he wasn’t a stranger anymore. He was her husband. A title that she needed to get herself used to by the time she saw Knox again.
When she returned to the bedroom, she stopped cold on the threshold, and a flush of heat rippled through her body after she saw that Rowin had also changed out of his wedding attire. Now, he was wearing a tight black undershirt, the material clinging around his biceps and torso like a second skin. She could see that there were inky black wisps, like swirling waves of smoke, covering every inch of his newly exposed arms and neck.
I want to trace them with my tongue.
She made a noise of shock at the thought before she could stop herself.
No, I most certainly do not.
Rowin gave her a puzzled frown, but Genevieve avoided his gaze as she asked, “Where should I put this?”
He jutted a chin toward the closet. “There. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
Once the dress was stowed away, Genevieve emerged from the closet to find that Rowin had separated the bed down the center with a pile of pillows. It seemed ridiculous, considering the bed’s size, but she certainly didn’t complain. When he extinguished the candle on his side of the bed, plunging them into near pitch-black, a sudden spike of adrenaline flooded through her veins.
“I can’t believe after everything you’ve somehow managed to get me into your bed,” she grumbled.
The corners of his lips curled up ever so slightly, though she was pretty sure he was trying to hide it.
“So, now we just…go to sleep?” she asked as he lifted the corner of the comforter on his side.
It went against every one of her instincts to crawl into bed with him. He could so easily harm her. She’d slept beside plenty of strangers before, but never without her magic. However, she felt safer here, in his bed, than she would anywhere else in this house of monsters.
Rowin’s gaze locked with hers. “Is there something else you wanted to do? Was today not eventful enough?”
“Well, there is one last thing we need to address tonight, isn’t there?” she prompted.
“Which is?” He tilted his head in anticipation.
And before she could stop the words from spilling out of her mouth, she blurted, “The matter of our consummation.”
A brief look of surprise flickered over his expression, quickly replaced by one that was infuriatingly smug. “I thought you said that just because we’re married doesn’t mean we’re going to?—”
“ I didn’t mean it like that ,” she rushed to correct. “I just meant—you heard Knox earlier. Do you think he’s keeping tabs on us tonight? Expecting any sort of evidence that we…”
“There are no looking glasses in our bedrooms. If he decides to spy on us, it would have to be in person. And I would sense it,” he assured as he threw back the covers, letting Umbra spring onto the bed and curl up atop one of his pillows.
Genevieve made a face at the idea of sharing a bed with the creature, and she swore Umbra glared back.
“Not to mention that proof is rather arbitrary since anyone can be fucking,” he continued as he stretched out next to the fox, reaching up to pillow his head back on his folded arms as he closed his eyes. “An emotional connection is what gives him the stakes for his game.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Genevieve said as she moved to blow out the final candle so she could tuck herself into her own side of the bed. “The emotional connection is a lot harder to fake.”
For once, the nightmare did not start with fire.
Genevieve was wearing her wedding gown in the middle of a frozen lake. As far as she could see, there was only darkness above her and ice beneath her feet.
“Would you like to dance?” a deep voice said from behind her.
Genevieve startled, whipping around toward the voice, the sound of crunching ice reverberating through the freezing clearing. Out of the corner of her eye she swore she saw a fissure crawling across the frozen surface, but the moment she spotted him, all thoughts of danger disappeared.
“We never had a proper first dance,” Rowin said as he held his hand out to her.
Without hesitation, she placed her palm in his, and he spun her into an effortless waltz across the ice. She pressed herself as close as she could to his body heat as he twirled her around, and she found herself impressed by how graceful he was. As their movements slowed to a steady sway, she closed her eyes and rested her face against his shoulder.
“I appreciate you trusting me,” he told her, the rumble of his deep voice vibrating against her cheek. “I know it can’t be easy after everything that happened with Farrow.”
She stiffened at the sound of Farrow’s name, but for some reason she couldn’t make herself pull away. When he began to speak again, something on her left hand began to grow strangely warm.
“Though you really ought to have been more careful when giving your heart away,” he continued.
The ring, she realized. She blinked her eyes open and glanced over at where her hand was clasped in his. The hideous silver band felt like it grew ten degrees hotter with every word he spoke.
When she tried to pull back, he picked up their tempo once again and spun her out from him. “Rowin ? —”
Except when she finally stopped turning, she saw that it wasn’t Rowin at all, and suddenly the frigid air around her turned absolutely scorching. The ice beneath their feet began to crack further, spiderwebbing out in every direction as he reeled her back toward him.
“You’re one of them , Genevieve,” Farrow said as he continued their dance. “You’re a fun time, but believing I, or anyone else from a good family, would ever marry someone like you is just delusional.”
“Let me go,” she hissed at him, digging her feet into place as she stopped their spinning.
She tried to yank herself out of his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go, laughing as she struggled against his hold.
“Let me go!” she cried again.
“I will, as soon as I take back what you promised me,” Farrow told her.
And then he plunged his hand into her chest.
A garbled shriek bubbled out of her mouth as he ripped her heart out of her body and held it between them. Bright-red blood began to bloom across her corset as she gaped down at the hole he had made inside her.
“Why? You don’t even want it,” she seethed as she tried to snatch back the beating organ in his hand.
“Of course not. But I won’t let you give it to anyone else either,” he told her, and then he shoved her away.
She fell backward, slipping on the ground and crashing through the ice as a furious scream ripped from her throat.
Genevieve shot up in bed. Her chest was heaving as she tried to catch her breath from the nightmare, her temples slick with sweat while she scrambled to tear away the sweltering covers tangled around her limbs. She looked around wildly in the dark, taking a moment to remember where she was.
She glanced over to Rowin’s side of the bed.
His back was facing her, his form as close to the edge as he could possibly get without falling off. His head was covered by one of the pillows, and she wondered whether he had unconsciously tried to block out whatever noise she had been making in her sleep.
At least he didn’t wake up , she thought.
The same could not be said for Umbra.
Genevieve jumped when she finally spotted the fox, fully awake and unblinking from where she was still curled up.
Genevieve turned her back to the Familiar and settled into her pillow, the covers still pushed down to her waist as she waited for her body to cool off.
Farrow had been wrong about one thing. Someone did marry her. But it had been nothing at all like the wedding she had imagined.
When she felt the corners of her eyes prick, she twisted her fists into the sheets, gritting her teeth until she staved off the traitorous tears. She would not cry. Not here.
She had a Devil’s game to play. And this time, she wouldn’t be leaving until she won.