When vengeance strikes in the form of a bullet out for the princess's blood, Princess Aleia VonAuclair must flee the heart of her country in order to protect the people she loves and take back the pieces of her soul she'd lost to the girl she once l...
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"Whew, that was a close one," Nico said, wiping a hand across his forehead.
I shot him a glare and he chuckled.
After an initial silence washed over the arena, the following eruption of shouts and cheers detonated like a bolt of lightning in the middle of a still sea. The celebrations of those who bet for Edrian and the shouts of protest of those who bet for Taurus clashed head-on, but I was too busy fidgeting on my feet behind the bar to pay much attention to the ruckus happening down below.
"He'll be here soon, and then you can go all bat shit crazy on him," Cara said with humour in her eyes.
"That's not funny, Cara."
She laughed, setting her martini glass down on the bar's marble counter.
"Oh, come on. He won! And it's not like he killed the other guy, so loosen up a little."
"I amloose," I retorted.
Her perfectly trimmed brow rose. "You're fidgeting like my Nana when she's watching her soap opera."
"No, I'm not. I'm just-"
The words died on my tongue when the wall slid open with a reverberant thud. Edrian stepped through freshly showered, his gym bag slung over his shoulder and clad in a new change of clothes.
His eyes held no emotion beyond a twinge of satisfaction, and if I hadn't witnessed the whole spectacle from start to finish, I would've never known that he'd been in such a brutal fight and emerged on the other side with barely a scratch on him.
Despite his relaxed demeanour, exhaustion weighed down on his eyelids in the form of dark bags and the slight slump of his shoulders, and when I went to round the bar, his gaze latched onto me. Something flashed through his eyes, and he instantly went rigid. It made me go rigid.
Confusion flooded me at the sudden anger radiating off of him in waves.
"What is she doing here?" he seethed.
A lump materialized in my throat.
"We thought she could convince you to back out, but you started earlier than we anticipated, and we couldn't get her to you in time," Lily said hesitantly, her face pulling unsurely at Edrian's fuming gaze.
"It was stupid of you to bring her here."
Before anyone could respond, I stomped forward, his irritation infecting me - like he hadn't just thrown himself into a pit of death and expected his friends to stand back. The nerve.
I mirrored his glare.
"No, it was stupid of you to pull something like this," I shot back. "Do you have any idea how many things could have gone wrong?"
"Yes," was all he said. Simple and dismissive and it spurred on my exasperation.
