Page 33 of Enchantra (Wicked Games #2)

32

REFLECTIONS

The chimes of Enchantra’s gilded clock had quickly become synonymous with Hell in Genevieve’s mind.

Rowin’s jaw was still clenched by the time they made it downstairs to the choosing ceremony. Which was barely in the nick of time.

Knox blinked into the room.

“I heard it was someone’s birthday,” the Devil said and grinned over at Genevieve. “I hope you made a wish, Mrs. Silver.”

“Well, my wish was to never have to see your face again, so this is quite disappointing,” Genevieve said.

Knox’s smile tightened as Sevin and Covin laughed. Rowin, however, was refusing to look at her.

Ellin cleared her throat. “I have a token to redeem, Knox.”

Knox flicked his eyes from Ellin to Rowin and back, but he said nothing as Ellin pulled out the crimson fish. The one Genevieve and Umbra had almost died to retrieve. Only now it was no longer a fish. It had transformed into some sort of palm-size gemstone in the shape of a fish.

Ellin tossed the token over to Knox, who plucked it out of the air.

“Ellin has immunity this round,” he announced. “Now, for the rest of you…”

He lifted the Hunting Blade into the air as per the ceremony she’d grown accustomed to, and this time the blade went straight toward Sevin, who grinned.

Knox waved him on. “Game?”

“Solitary confinement,” Sevin answered before looking over to Genevieve with a wink. “Consider this my birthday gift, Vivi. You’re welcome.”

“Well, I’ll see you assholes later.” Ellin yawned as she strolled away. “I’m going to take a very long bubble bath. So don’t even think about barging into my room.”

Everyone made to leave, apart from Sevin, who had to wait ten minutes before pursuing them. Rowin led Genevieve silently toward the stairs. At the top, Umbra was waiting for them.

“Solitary confinement?” she finally asked. “That means we have to choose one room and stay there, right?”

It was one of the different game types that he had explained to her before their wedding. Now, as he guided her down the corridor of doors, he didn’t bother to answer.

“You’re being a baby,” she muttered under her breath as he went to open a door to their left.

Before he could, however, she slid between him and the entrance and said, “I am not going in there until you speak to me.”

“Genevieve, we have eight minutes to choose a place to hide,” he warned.

“Wow. You give up on the silent treatment very easily,” she commented. “You should have seen how long my mother could go on with it.”

He glowered at her before grasping onto her hand and pulling her down the hallway, into the upstairs powder room where he’d found her and Cedric during the masquerade.

As he closed the door, she asked, “Does this mean we’re going to have to be stuck in here for this entire round?”

“The magic doesn’t lock us in until our lead time is up,” he told her, using a hand towel to cover the mirror over the vanity. He turned to her and crossed his arms. “You went through my things.”

“Well, yes, I told you that before,” she reminded him.

“You went through them again ,” he clarified.

“Maybe,” she admitted, twisting his signet around her finger.

“Those letters weren’t for you to see,” he admonished, though the hint of guilt in his own eyes took any heat out of his words. “Have you known about the hex this entire time?”

The hex. Did he mean…

“Wait, wait, wait,” she said, a bit breathless now. “You’re talking about the hex on the invitation that brought me here ? Those fucking crows were your doing?”

She remembered a fleeting thought she’d had when she first found the letters to his siblings, how the handwriting there seemed oddly familiar…

The invitation.

“ You’re the one who invited me here?” she realized.

“I said that you were my burden to bear,” he reasoned. “Because of the way you came here. I never meant for this to happen. My father was never going to read the letters, Genevieve, and even if he did, he would have recognized that the handwriting wasn’t your mother’s. It was the first thing I checked as well. But I’ve been trying for so long to find people who could help me find the cure. And even if I realized it wasn’t Tessie writing to me, I thought maybe Ophelia…”

The world tilted around Genevieve, and she stumbled back a step from him. “Ophelia?”

“I assumed?—”

“ Of course that invitation was intended for Ophelia.” Genevieve laughed. “Of course. Because not even a curse could have been meant for me.”

“Genevieve, I didn’t know you existed ,” he argued. “Do you have any idea how grateful I am that it was you that walked through that door and?—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Don’t do that. Don’t lie to me. You wanted me to go. You were pissed that I disobeyed your demands to leave.”

“Yes, I was,” he agreed. “Until I met you. You’re stubborn, and hardheaded, and determined, and you really might be my one shot of getting free from this game. I sent that invitation because I’m trying to save my family. I can’t apologize for that.”

“Then you should at least apologize for keeping it a secret,” she told him. “ You’re the one who talks about building trust, and yet you continue to keep secrets from me.”

“I know,” he said. “But for so long I have been living in this Hell. Either completely alone or with my family trying to kill me. And clearly that has hindered my ability to just start trusting someone no matter how much I’m trying to. You might find it easy to talk to me about anything but?—”

“It only seems easy because, somehow, I’ve started to like you, Rowin!” she told him. “Do you know how much of a travesty that is? When the last time I opened my heart to someone he…he…”

“ I am not him ,” Rowin snarled. “I want to find him and flay all the flesh from his body and set him on fire for what he did to you. Don’t ever compare me to him.”

She swallowed at the conviction in his voice, the truth. Still, she said, “You’re not him. But when I fell in love with him, do you think he seemed like the person he turned out to be? You told me not to trust my heart here so all I have is to trust your actions, what you say to me—what you omit. I’ve given you trust, my marriage vows, my loyalty in this game. What have you given me in return? And don’t you dare say anything to do with sex.”

The look he gave her was quite exasperated, but he only said, “You’re right.”

She wasn’t expecting that.

“I should have found time to tell you that I wrote the invitation. I probably should have tried harder to make you leave in the first place. But I need you to keep trying to trust me. Another chance?”

She swallowed. He sounded sincere.

“We need to get back to the enchanted rooms,” he reminded her now. “Come on.”

He led her back to the corridor and over to the same room he had been ready to choose earlier. And when he pulled the door open and ushered her inside, her jaw dropped at the scene around them.

A gloomy forest, made entirely of twisting black trees and…mirrors.

Fantastic.

The looking glasses were everywhere she glanced, reflecting back twenty different versions of her. None of them quite right . The trees had tangled branches that drooped all the way to the ground. Their limbs, holding gray and ebony leaves the size of her head, reminded her of the live oaks back home. Easy to climb, dripping with spongy Spanish moss.

Rowin closed the door behind them as she padded across the carpet of leaves to approach a particularly large mirror straight ahead. The version of her that watched from its reflection was eerie. In the mirror, she wore the same white gown, had her exact same coloring, face, and hair, but her eyes…were entirely black. No irises or pupils or whites to be seen. Just depthless darkness.

Rowin approached behind her, and she saw his gaze had become the same. An unblinking abyss. She shuddered.

“What do you think these are all about?” she whispered to him just as Umbra appeared between their feet, tilting her head at the mirror as if she couldn’t figure out what it was.

If it were possible, she found the fox’s gaze even more unsettling than theirs. Probably because the black of her reflected eyes blended in with her shadowy coat a little too well.

Umbra chirped and skittered away from the oculus. Genevieve followed, moving deeper into the forest, passing reflections on every side. They reminded her of the Ghosts she’d seen in Phantasma. Solid but clearly unnatural. There was a small oval mirror embedded in one of the tree trunks that showed her with white hair and a black gown. A square one wedged in the crook of a branch that made her eyes golden like Rowin’s. One showed her with horns crowning her head.

But the one that made her stop in her tracks showed a reflection that changed her eyes to an icy, all-too-familiar color. Grimm Blue.

She approached the mirror, her fingertips reaching up to her face and gently brushing beneath her haunting eyes. She had never realized how much she looked like her sister, not even when Ophelia’s gaze had been the same shade of cerulean as her own, but she saw it now. How alike they really were. The future she might have had if she had been the eldest instead of Ophie.

Genevieve was hit by a wave of gratitude toward her sister—for being the model daughter she never could have been. She wondered sometimes whether the pressure Ophelia had been under would have simply crushed her.

I ought to get Ophie a very nice present if I see her again.

If? No. When. Because she was going to get out of here. Even if Rowin was a cagey pain in the ass, she was going to drag him to the finish line like he dragged her down the aisle.

The sound of a twig snapping underfoot made her flinch, but when she spun, she saw it was only Rowin.

“How do you think we find a token here?” she wondered as he strode closer.

He shrugged. “I’d say look for something out of place in one of the mirrors, but there must be a thousand here.”

“And they all contain something strange,” she pointed out.

He nodded. “I told Umbra to watch the entrance. She’ll let me know if Sevin shows up. We might as well settle in. We’ve got twelve hours to kill.”

Their eyes locked at that statement, Sevin’s you’re welcome echoing in the back of her mind as Rowin’s gaze heated. It made her want to tell him to forget their fight, to ask him to kiss her again and distract her from all the complicated feelings she couldn’t seem to stop from bubbling to the surface every other minute. On the other hand she still couldn’t decide where they stood, if she trusted him, if it even mattered whether she did or not, because at the end of the day they were stuck playing together either way.

She sighed and moved to sit against the trunk of a tree. Her thoughts were an absolute mess.

Rowin remained standing, shifting on his feet, as if he were waiting for her to tell him that it was okay for him to come closer.

“Rowin?”

“Yes?”

“Did you mean it? When you said that you wanted me to give you another chance to trust you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. No hesitation.

“Then tell me everything there is to know about Crimson Rot,” she said, patting the spot next to her. “I want to understand how it has affected your mother.”

He had refused to talk about anything to do with his mother before, but if he wanted her trust, he’d have to start somewhere.

He nodded. “Alright.”

Sitting next to her, his side pressed along hers, he began. She eyed the reflection in the mirror across from them. It was the largest one she’d seen yet. Stretching up nearly six feet and framed with baroque molding that reminded her of Enchantra’s gates. The differences in their reflections were instantly apparent, and Genevieve rolled her eyes at the clear game Knox’s enchantment was playing. They were dressed in their exact attire from the masquerade ball. Rowin as a dark fox, she a gilded rabbit.

And perhaps it should have been the most harrowing reflection of all. The sly fox sitting right next to the wide-eyed hare. The hare so trusting in his presence.

But Genevieve couldn’t help but think that a real fox would give pursuit. Instead of setting a glittering trap and luring her in, then burning everything she was starting to believe to ashes.