just got it and I can’t afford another.”
She slipped it into her pocket, and I let out a mental sigh of relief that neither she nor Fionn had looked too closely at it. There was no way to explain how a backwater dryad from Mag Cíuin would have an Acorn phone that wasn’t even on the market yet.
But she hadn’t noticed the delicate moonstone ring on my hand; or, if she had, it was unremarkable enough that she didn’t care to comment. Even without the phone, Robin hadn’t left me defenseless.
“She can go through.” Silke’s voice was utterly toneless now. She stood aside, her arms crossed over her chest and looking back out at the dance floor like she was bored out of her mind.
“Bitch,” Fionn muttered under his breath. Silke didn’t so much as twitch an eyelash, but I thought I caught a glimpse of a satisfied smirk on her full lips as he pushed the door open and dragged me in.
I caught a glimpse of her back, smooth and hollow, before he closed the door on her.
A sigh slipped out of me. I’d made it into the belly of the beast.
Then I realized what I was looking at under the low lighting.
Robin would lose his fucking shit when he saw this.
8
At first, the VIP room was even darker than the rest of the club. For the few seconds it took my eyes to adjust, all I saw was lumpy shapes in the dim light, piled around the red velvet couches.
A glint of light was caught in hair the color of burnished gold. I blinked, frozen just inside the door and willing myself to see, and realized it was the Prince.
Brightkin was sprawled across one of the couches, his head tilted back. His hair spilled over his shoulders, so bright and unearthly that even without light, he still seemed to glow a little.
His shirt had been torn open. The violet shimmer of evanesce coated the edges of his nostrils.
There were three human girls draped around him. Well, maybe draped was a weak word; one of them had her face buried in his lap over his unzipped fly, her head bobbing up and down.
The other two stared blankly into space, their hands running over him languidly. Evanesce was streaked across their noses and mouths, and as I watched, Brightkin reached over to a platter and picked up a slice of faerie fruit, as red as blood and dripping thick juice, and fed it to one of them.
I felt like a boulder had been dropped into the pit of my stomach. The girl ate the fruit out of his hand, sucking his fingers for the juice when it was gone.
She whimpered like she was in pain when even the juice had vanished.
Brightkin didn’t even open his eyes all the way when Fionn brought me in. He just curled his fingers in the hair of the girl sucking him off and pushed her head down lower.
“She’s a cutie,” he said. His eyes glimmered through the slits of his eyelids, the brilliant green of spring grass.
Fionn grasped my arm and pulled me closer to the couches. Every muscle in my body wanted to lock up tight, but I made myself walk. Pasted a grin on my face even though the dead-eyed girls made my skin crawl.
I sat carefully on the velvet couch, as far away from them as I could manage without being conspicuous, and beamed at him. My smile felt like it was going to split my face in half.
“Oh, my trees! Fionn didn’t tell me you’d be here!” I giggled nervously, which wasn’t too hard to accomplish right at that moment. “You’re, like, the actual Prince!”
Fionn hadn’t sat down. He passed behind me, running his fingers through my wild curls. Once he was gone, the soft clink of glass reminded me that he’d promised me a drink.
One of the human girls looked barely out of her teens. She was curled up against Brightkin’s side, staring at me with her hand inside his shirt. There was a touch of sunburn lingering on her cheekbones, a little scar in her eyebrow, and her nose was a little too long for conventional prettiness.
It was all those little things that made me feel even more nauseous when I looked back into her empty, glazed eyes.
I wanted to scream at Brightkin. She’s a person, a human, not a piece of meat.
But I said nothing.
The couch opposite me was set in deep shadows. I hadn’t realized it