Page 29 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

“I’ve stood aside while you’ve treated us disrespectfully for years, but this ends now.

” He plants his hands on his hips. “You’re going to drop this victim act.

I need to know that once you graduate, you’ll be making something of yourself.

How much damage have you done to your career already?

You’re still working with Elethior Tourael? ”

Alarm has me stumbling closer to him. “Dad, stop —don’t—”

“If you’re willing to treat your own family so disdainfully, how are you behaving around him? Have you told him who you are?”

“Dad—”

“Like it or not, the Arcane Forces is a part of you. It’s a connection you can use to improve your partnership with Elethior. Your project—it’s that safety net spell, isn’t it?”

He knows about my project generally, the way I’d go on about it when I was younger. After I started at Camp Merethyl, but before I realized I couldn’t trust him anymore.

Gods, that ache is one of the many that never heals, and I rub at my chest as if that’ll stifle it.

There was a time when I thought he’d help me develop this safety net spell. When I thought he’d help me with everything. He loved spell work as much as I did and he was this powerful, decorated soldier—he’d help me fix this.

He’d help.

“Yes, but—”

“Good. Sebastian, use this . Tell Elethior where you got the idea. Connect it to Camp Merethyl.”

All the blood rushes from my head to my toes in a scalding tidal wave, leaving me swaying.

One of the training courses everyone undergoes there involves sharpening your focus in component control. That’s where he thinks the idea came from: a simple first-year training course.

Get out, get out, GET OUT.

“I’m not talking to him about that.” I speak through my teeth, hands in knotted fists, the fireball vial clenched so tight the lip bites into my palm. “I don’t need—”

“I wish I could say I’m surprised you haven’t brought it up, but this is precisely how I was afraid you’d been behaving. You’re limiting yourself, again. You’re sabotaging yourself, again. I can no longer stand aside and watch you—”

“No one’s asking you to watch. That job application must be ramping up, huh? You’re worried my new BFF might report to his family that Colonel Walsh’s son really is a screwup, and it’ll reflect badly on you .”

Dad’s used to people kowtowing to him—his soldiers, my siblings, my mom. Even me, usually. But every once in a while, I surprise him. Every once in a while, I remind him that I did inherit something from him: his anger.

“How dare you speak to me that way,” he bellows. “You ignore my calls and ignore your mother’s attempts to reach out, and I come to you, offering to extend a—”

He’s gone.

I blink, but his astral projection has vanished.

Movement yanks my focus, and I see Elethior, two steps down, his hand on his counterspell rune tattoo.

“Didn’t think you’d mind,” he says. “Figured I was returning the favor from you snapping back at Arasne.”

A pause stretches, and in it, he tries a cautious smile.

I freeze. Ice, from the tips of my hair, down the knobs of my spine; my fingertips go numb.

He heard.

He heard everything.

I shove the unused fireball vial into my pocket so I can clumsily go through the hand gestures of reactivating the security wards.

Stupid, stupid, why didn’t I reactivate them as soon as we got inside?

Because I didn’t think my father would be this determined to speak to me. Didn’t think he’d astral project to me . Didn’t think —

“He’s worried about a job,” I mumble. Excuses gush out of me. “That’s all he’s ever worried about, getting ahead, appearances. That’s all that was.”

“Sebastian.”

“ No .” I hate how my eyes burn. Hate even more the look of sympathy on Elethior’s face; I want to scrape it off. “Don’t say anything. Don’t fucking say—”

“You went to Camp Merethyl.”

A gut punch. Lungs deflate forcefully. Stomach crumbles and I arch forward, hands on my knees, unable to breathe.

I don’t want to know if his immediate family is involved in it. I don’t want to know how close he’s connected to that camp. I can’t know.

Elethior comes the rest of the way up the stairs until he’s on the landing in front of me, but I don’t straighten up, glaring at his dark jeans.

He makes a low, pained sound, the sound of details making sense. “And your father is—”

“Colonel Mason Walsh.” I speak the name to Elethior’s shoes, still bent in half. “US Arcane Forces. He’s in the running to take over Camp Merethyl.”

“And he thinks your connection to me will bolster his chances?”

I finally peel myself upright, watching his face carefully.

I nod.

“I don’t have anything to do with that camp,” Elethior says. He sounds like he’s pleading.

Breath whooshes out of me in a trembling gust and I want him to say it again.

But I also need him to stop talking and leave.

“My immediate relatives are part of research and development,” he continues. “Camp Merethyl is a different branch of the family, and I haven’t spoken to anyone about you or your father. I don’t plan to.”

“Stop,” I beg him. My eyes shut, lashes damp.

“I’ve never been there,” he keeps going.

It’s strung with his own tautness, winding through him the same way my anxiety is winding through me, tighter and tighter, gearing up to snap.

“My family has had its hands in it for generations, but none of them send their children there, and if that doesn’t say everything there is to say about how cruel and objectionable the methodology is—”

“Then don’t say anything else.” My fingers arch into claws and scratch, scratch at my arms. “Then shut up. ”

“My family is tied to a lot of fucked-up legacies, but that one? Gods, that one involves kids, and if you endured any of the atrocities they—”

“I said shut up !”

I’m on him, flinging my body at his, hands fisting in the collar of his shirt and heaving him around until his back slams into the wall beside my bedroom door.

He grabs onto my wrists but doesn’t fight me off, gaze locking with mine as I rattle in gasps and pretend my eyes aren’t welling, pretend my head isn’t spinning, pretend I’m not drowning .

His heart pummels against my knuckles pressed into his chest.

“Shut up,” I say again, pitifully, and I’m kissing him.

Three days. It’s only been three days since I kissed him—earlier tonight was barely a kiss, not like this—and the moment we connect, it’s oxygen after being submerged, it’s something I missed .

How could I have missed it? I’ve kissed plenty of people and never craved it as it was happening, never felt it trigger some otherworldly hunger that possesses me in a rage.

I release his shirt to clamp my fingers around his head and pull him down to me, our lips clashing, mine trying to devour tongue and teeth.

He meets me in the furor and isn’t that dangerous?

Shouldn’t one of us keep a handhold in reason?

But he sucks my tongue into his mouth as he shoots his hands up under the back of my shirt, arching my body to his, and freefalling together is safer than anything else I want to do.

Safer than anything else I would do, so I jump.

I bite across his jaw, the skin smooth and tasting faintly of sweat and shaving cream, until I get to his neck, to those black ink swirls. His hair hangs down and I rake my hand through it, twisting the strands around my thumb and fingers and jerking so his neck bows.

“Sebas— fuck, ” he cuts off when my teeth graze the highest line of ink, a spiked vine that swirls up to his ear.

I can feel the ridges of the tattoo under my tongue, slightly raised against his skin, and it’s another thing I add to this churning storm of need—I’ll need to do this again, and again, and—

His hands fumble my belt, faltering every time I lick and suck a new spot on his neck.

He thumps his head back against the wall with a frustrated groan, and in a whirl of forearms against my chest and weight shifting, I’m the one with my back slamming to the wall, I’m the one with his height towering over me, pinning me in place.

“Bedroom?” he asks, lips ramming against mine in more bite than kiss.

I scramble at the knob next to me and he’s hauling me in before it’s all the way open, my shoulder smacking off the edge of the door.

The blinds are cracked so streetlights haze the space yellow, but that’s the only light, and it’s enough; we don’t need to see much beyond the few inches in front of our faces.

Laundry and towels clutter the floor; I haven’t straightened up in a while, but the bed’s made, and we topple onto it.

Or I topple onto it, thrown by Elethior gripping my waist and tossing me in a rush of movement he doesn’t give me any time to absorb before he’s crawling up my body.

Shoes slip off, I get a few of the buttons on his shirt free, but he’s after my neck now, payback for the way I bit and sucked at him, and I lose all conscious thought beyond fuck yes, fuck yes as he laves his tongue up and down my throat.

I rock my hips into his, hardness rubbing on hardness and I’m disintegrating in lewd, frantic whimpers, the air between us damp with our exhales.

“More, need more.” I work at his shirt again. My fingers have lost all coordination and I’m ready to rip it off when he sits back on my hips and looks down at me, eyes taking me in, every inch.

“You’re so hot,” he moans like it hurts to say. “And seeing you all desperate for me—”

“I’m not desperate for you.”

He grins. “So I could leave now, no harm done?”

My hands scramble at him; I’m pretty sure I scratch him trying to hold him here. Not that I think he’ll leave, but I am desperate, and his smile goes triumphant.

He hangs there, one breath in, one out, watching me, and the pause has a cry twisting up in me. I don’t want to pause. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to think —

He puts his thumb on my lower lip. His face transforms, all teasing gone, and he looks at me like that again. “Can I suck you off?”