Zodiac Academy Fated Throne - Caroline Peckham Page 0,164

turning and darting away into the crowd.

I was taller than pretty much everyone here so it wasn't too hard to keep track of her, but I still muttered a curse to myself as I took off down the street after her. She navigated the crowd like she knew exactly where she was going even though I was almost certain she didn't.

"Roxy!" I called as she managed to pull ahead of me, darting between the crowd and slipping around the flood of people as if they were hardly any bother to her even though I found it almost impossible to get around them.

I lost sight of her as a yammering crowd of tourists following a guide cut across my path and bit my tongue as I looked over the heads of the people all around me with my heart thumping faster as I hunted for her.

Just as I was about to roar at the people closest to me to get out of my fucking way, a warm hand slipped into mine and I looked down to find her smirking up at me with laughter in her eyes.

"Come on, country boy, stay with me and I'll get you through the carnage," she teased tugging me into motion and pulling me between the throng of bodies.

"I'm not a country boy," I growled, but the smirk on my face wasn't leaving and as she snorted a laugh at my expense, I found I didn't even care what she called me.

"Says the dude who grew up on an estate even bigger than mine which housed four people instead of forty thousand. Come on, Darius, don't try to pretend you know how to survive out on the streets. If I abandoned you now you'd end up lost within thirty minutes and you'd probably be discovered wandering around down by the Hudson in three days’ time with no shoes and a wild look in your eye that said you've seen things you can never unsee."

She laughed and I jerked on her hand as I stopped walking, tugging her back towards me suddenly and making her crash into my chest as her eyes widened in surprise.

"I hope you're not trying to challenge me here, Roxy," I said in a low voice, not giving a shit about the flood of people who were muttering curses as they were forced to part around my broad frame to continue their walk down the street.

"You can't seriously think you could survive out here without any magic or money, do you, rich man?" she teased.

"I'm a big boy, people tend not to want to fuck with me," I assured her.

"Hmm." She ran her gaze over my frame slowly and I suddenly realised that I was still holding her hand and as of yet, the stars didn't seem to be doing anything to force us apart. The crowd was hiding us even better than I’d hoped and to make it even better, in the mortal realm, nobody knew who we were. "So maybe no one would dare to beat you down," she conceded slowly. "But you'd still starve to death."

"And you wouldn't?" I arched a brow at her and she shrugged innocently before pulling a handful of scrunched up dollar bills from the back pocket of her jeans. I counted over a hundred dollars as she waved it before me tauntingly.

"Well, these tourists just offered to pay for my dinner tonight. Though I might have to work a little harder if I need to pay for a hotel room - especially here in the city."

I probably should have called her out on stealing from all of these strangers where anyone might have spotted her, but we were in the mortal realm, so I guessed she wasn't really risking her reputation with anything she did here. Not that she’d ever seemed to give a damn about her reputation anyway. And I was not so secretly enjoying getting this look at the girl she'd been before she'd found out she was Fae and a princess and everything else that came with the Vega name.

"I'm not sure you've got enough there to buy yourself a dinner in one of the fancy ass restaurants around here," I teased, laughing as her nose wrinkled in distaste.

"I'm really not meant for mixing with high society," she said and I could see that she meant that in the purest possible way. She wasn't bitter about it, like a girl standing outside a grand party looking through a window and wishing she