Niya stomped past him, but he snagged her arm, stopping her.
“You want to do this?” asked Alōs, his body so close she caught his scent of midnight orchid and sea. “You wish to finally air out the truth of our past? Then let’s.” His eyes blazed as they drank her in. “But know it was never hate driving my actions. How could I hate someone I did not know?” He dropped his grip from her arm, but the brand still lingered along her skin. Niya breathed quickly. “I was after leverage when I first met you. I no longer had a home or a family. Everything was business to me, a transaction for a better standing in the pecking order. That first night I came to the palace, I searched for the most valuable thing in the room and saw you, Niya Bassette, dancer of the Mousai.” His gaze roamed the length of her, assessing, appreciating. A chill danced along Niya’s exposed flesh in its wake as Alōs’s magic began to seep from him unchecked, a green mist. “I sought what you hid so thoroughly, knowing the leverage it would bring me. I hurt you in the process. I know. But as we’ve seen, I came to require that bargaining chip. I am not sorry to have done it. I would do it again. Regret is for cowards too weak to make amends in the present.”
Niya’s heart beat loudly in her ears, her own red haze of power tangling with his. They stood trapped in a cocoon of their own creation. “Is this your attempt at making amends?” she asked, glaring daggers up at him. “An explanation for your behavior over an apology? Because I can tell you, it is not working.”
“You were raised in the Thief Kingdom,” Alōs snapped. “You are a part of the Mousai. Do not pretend to be innocent of cruelty and sin.”
Niya took a step back, attempting to sever herself from his pull. His pull that always curled deliciously, but with warning, around her. Too similar. They were too similar. Beast and monster clashing for dominance. For control. “I never have claimed to be innocent of such things,” she began. “But it is one thing to break someone’s heart, and it is another to continuously bully them so they can never forget. Yes, your charms worked on me. Yes, we shared a bed. Once. But I have had many lovers since you, pirate. So please, be done with me! For I am certainly done with you.”
Alōs’s stare danced like the center of the nearby flames. “If my memory serves,” he said, “you have been seeking me out since that night. Not the other way around. I made sure to avoid you at all costs after our . . . encounter, but I always knew when you were near. I feel your energy as you feel mine, fire dancer, as soon as either of us step into a room.”
“I sought you out because I had been trying to kill you!”
Alōs smiled sharply. “It sounds, then, like it is you who hates me.”
Niya groaned her frustration. “Of course! You held my life in your hands after that night. My family’s! Threatened us every day forth.”
“An outcome I did not force from you. You always had a choice that night. Do not hate me because you made the wrong one.”
Niya felt crazed, dizzy in her cacophony of emotions. She wanted to scream and cry and burn everything down because she knew deep in her heart Alōs was right. He might have played her for a fool, but she had not been raised to be an innocent; she should have known better.
The enemy Niya had hated for so long was herself.
Her magic burned like fire in her veins as she forced herself to ask, “Why, then, did you not leave the moment you saw me, knew my name? Why did you stay the night?”
They remained a touch apart, and Niya watched Alōs’s gaze drop to her lips. “Because”—his voice came out a husky rumble—“you offered yourself. And it wasn’t just your identity I had grown to want.”
Niya felt her body betraying her, felt it sway forward, closer to the beast whose cold magic made hers feel that much hotter. Memories of that night swam through her mind like a forbidden dream.
Alōs’s hands were cool against her cheeks as he studied every inch of her newly exposed face. “Niya.” His voice was rough as he said her name for the first time. “So beautiful,” he whispered before angling her lips to his. Niya had been kissed before, stolen ones by young gentlemen in Jabari. But none had been like this. Alōs’s mouth was soft, his form solid. Having a man who held such power yet could be so gentle with her was intoxicating.
Niya wrapped her arms around him, letting out a moan of greed, of desperation. She knew revealing herself was a risk, but after hiding herself away for so long in this palace, the forbiddenness of taking off her mask for another—the rebellious freedom in it—was too great. Especially with Alōs’s pining so devoted, his passion overwhelming, his words perfect. He never said he loved her, but how was this not love? Niya ran her fingers through his thick hair as she pulled back. “Take me to my bed,” she whispered. His blue eyes sparked at her words, his grip on her hardening as he bent to kiss her again, but he did not move them from being pressed into her dressing table, where they hid in her private rooms beneath the palace in the Thief Kingdom. “Alōs.” Niya rubbed impatiently against his thigh, her breast pressing against his chest. “I want to feel how much you cherish me. Take me to my bed and show me.”
“Are you sure?” Alōs asked.
Niya ran her hand down to where he was hard and strong.
He groaned.
“Is this answer enough?” she asked.
With that, Alōs easily lifted her and walked the short distance to her bed. That night their magic danced with gives and pulls, of lust that reduced every sensation to a breath, a moan, a rake of nails along a back, Alōs’s dark skin contrasting beautifully against her pale—
“And as I remember”—Alōs’s husky voice brought Niya back to the present, to the bedchamber within the mountain palace—“you were very glad that I did.”
Niya was shaking now, her shame and rage and current confused longing too much to handle.
She held Alōs’s consuming stare, felt his pressing power. He overwhelmed her. Always had. He was his own form of a gamble, she realized, for he made her feel more alive than any spill of dice or flip of cards. He made her feel as though she could burn as hot as she needed and he would merely stand there, soaking in her heat. But Niya was sick of always running hot, sick of forcing stakes high to feel alive. For this was where all that had gotten her. She was constantly running from lenders, currently separated from her family, and wrapped in a binding bet attached to another binding bet to the man she had been trying to escape yet had stalked for years.
She needed to end it. She needed to move on. She needed to leave this room.
“Perhaps I was,” said Niya. “But I am no longer that girl.”
“As I am no longer that man.”
“And who are you now?”
“I am someone much worse.” Alōs’s glare bore down on her. “So you can keep hating me if that gives you solace, but we have fought as enemies for a long while, fire dancer. Perhaps it is time we see what happens when we work as allies.”
“I could never be your friend.”
“No,” Alōs agreed, his stare darkening, eliciting more unwanted heat in her belly. “Friendship was never our fate. But you promised me your absolute cooperation. So you might find it easier to point your hostility elsewhere until promises are fulfilled.”
Niya watched him a long moment. “Very well. Until bargains are complete. Then we are done.”
“Then we are done,” said Alōs.
Niya pushed past him, striding from the room.
As soon as she entered the hall, she breathed easier.
The last piece of the Prism Stone was here. They would get it, and then this horrible game would be done.
Tonight, thought Niya. I merely need to get through tonight.
After which she’d be that much closer to home.
And then Niya would never have to see Alōs Ezra again.