ares who exchanges
bodies for gold;
bodies for gold;
Apolonia has never been called a sweet girl before. Until this moment she doubted she ever would be. Normally it’s girl with the axe, gun for a mouth, and O knows she deserves it, normally even enjoys it, but this is different. Anandi is different. O has never before cared this much about having someone like her. Sweet girl—her whole body goes dark with a shiver of pleasure at the sound. The way it leaves Anandi’s mouth, so dulcet, so… ripe.
Her whole heart clenches like a fist. She does not even realize she’s stepped forward until she’s looking down at the space left between them, suddenly cleaved in half.
But Anandi has side-stepped with all the grace of a dancer, and the distance opens again. It breaks. Oh, and it hurts—O has never been privy to useless emotions like grief or longing, but even the extra yard between them has her stricken with something like a craving. She watches the kelpie with eyes that are painted by wishes she cannot yet put a name to. Though she holds herself stubbornly in place, it takes leagues more effort than she’d like to admit.
Queen Apolonia. She shudders again. (Perhaps it was a foolish endeavor to tell this stranger her real name; it holds a power over her that is amplified tenfold by the sweetness of Anandi’s voice, and already she feels weaker than she should. Than she ever has.) “One day,” she says, dreamy and unusually sincere. And after a breath that shakes her to the bones she says—“And you could join me.”
This all must be a vision. The moonlight on her skin and the cool salt of the air. The pounding of Apolonia’s heart that says nothing but please, please, please. But—it is not anything she could have imagined, not anything she could have known she wanted—and how could she have come up with someone so beautiful and so strange? Almost she wants to say this out loud, to admit to Anandi the reasons for her stunned silence. It would flatter her. She might like me more. O’s thoughts are dazed and nearly narcotic. But no. No, she’s done enough for now, more than enough.
She blinks, and Anandi is circling her. Like a jungle cat circles its prey. Like a vulture circles a carcass from above. But she is not afraid—how could she be?—every step Anandi takes is a new opportunity to be entranced, a new chance to fall in desperate, stupid lust, and O will take whatever chances she is offered, as she always has. The moonlight dapples the girl’s skin in a pattern O cannot remember ever seeing before. Even the slow shift of her muscles, the smoke-green of her eyes, they have a hundred different facets in the fading light. And Apolonia is watching every single one.
“…thank you.” Her head tilts, her heart pounds against her throat. “I think?” And she laughs, though even she cannot tell if it’s real humor or just anxiety, making a fool out of her when she needs it the least. Scrumptious.
And if it were anyone else, she would be scared at the way it sounds, and the things it suggests. But she would do anything to hear a compliment from Anandi’s lips again. Even the kind that points toward doom.
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