Chapter 154: She’s The Rule

Elara:

Inside the car, I tried to sit as calmly as possible, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. The heat beneath my skin had grown unbearable, spreading through me until I felt as though I couldn’t get enough air.

I heard Lorien speaking to the driver, telling him to head directly to the academy, and then felt a faint shift in the air around us as he cast some kind of spell. I barely registered it. Whatever he had done, whatever the spell was supposed to accomplish, my mind was far too foggy to care. All I could think about was finding something cold. Anything cold.

I reached toward the window and fumbled with the handle, desperate for the cold night air, but before I could open it, Lorien reached across and stopped me.

"Don’t," he said, his voice sounding strangely distant. "You’ll catch a cold."

I barely heard the rest of his words because his fingers had closed around my hand, and the coolness of his touch immediately sent relief through me. I stared down at our hands, almost mesmerized by the contrast between his cold fingers and my burning skin.

He tried to pull away after stopping me, but before he could, my fingers curled around his hand and held it in place. He looked at me, clearly surprised, while I found myself unwilling to let go. The coolness felt too good. My heartbeat began to accelerate, but this time it wasn’t only because of the heat coursing through me. Something else was taking over, something deeper and more confusing.

I shifted closer without really thinking about it, my gaze lifting toward his face. My eyes settled on his lips, and suddenly I remembered what they had felt like against mine. The memory surfaced so vividly that my breath caught, and for a moment, I found myself wondering what they would taste like now.

Lorien seemed to realize where I was looking because he abruptly turned his face toward the window, deliberately avoiding my gaze. I followed the movement without thinking, my eyes drifting from his jaw to the line of his throat. The pulse beneath his skin caught my attention, and I found myself staring at it as another wave of heat pooled through my body.

I didn’t understand why I couldn’t look away. All I knew was that something inside me had changed, and suddenly the distance between us felt far too small.

I didn’t even realize that I had moved, but his hands were on my shoulders before my mouth reached his throat, which was a shame, because his throat was right there. All I could see was the pale column in the dark of the car, with the pulse going under the skin... and I wanted it.

"Elara." Lorien’s voice came out low and careful, the way you would talk someone down from a ledge. "Elara. Look at me."

I looked at him. That was the problem. I had looked at him for months and never once been allowed to touch. A part of me still remembered the humiliation from a certain storm night back at the Argentis mansion, but somewhere between the heat burning through my body and the deep yearning I felt for this man, I had stopped being able to remember why I shouldn’t be doing this.

"Help me, Lorien," I pleaded softly, and leaned in.

He caught my chin between his fingers, turning my face up to his. Streetlights slid across his cheekbones and settled in his eyes, highlighting the golden flakes in them for a few seconds. "You are drunk."

"Extremely."

"You had-" His jaw worked. "There was aphrodisiac in that drink. What are you feeling right now is because of it. Just hang on for a while, and I’ll get you to the healers."

The words went through me like a struck match. Everything had gone loose and hot and enormous inside me since the second or maybe the third drink. My skin was singing, bones were humming, and I had blamed the alcohol. But I’d also thought, when he lifted me into the back of this great black car like I weighed nothing, that I wanted to climb him like a tree. And that had nothing to do with any drink.

"I don’t care what was in it." My mouth found the corner of his lips. "I care that you are here."

"Elara-"

"Don’t say my name like that. Like it’s a sentence."

His breath came out shaky through his nose. Up front the driver kept his eyes dead ahead, and I knew without being told that Lorien had done something. That spell earlier was actually for the driver, so the man would see nothing of what happened back here. The privacy was meant for me, and now it would be for both of us because I planned to annex every inch of it.

I went back to his throat, and this time he let me. His head tipped back against the seat in a small, almost accidental surrender. I took the offer, dragging my mouth down the side of his neck, tasting cold air and pine and, underneath both, the skin I’d spent yearning for in those dreams of mine.

I bit down, softly, where his pulse ran, and his hands tightened on my shoulders like he was the one holding himself up.

"This isn’t right." He spoke in a low, almost restrained voice. "I’m your headmaster."

I pulled back far enough to meet his eyes, and the words came out clean and sharp even through the haze. "And yet you are the one who kissed me first that night."

He seemed torn, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t dare to.

"What?" I demanded. "Want to call it a mistake again? Didn’t know you were such a coward, Lorien."

He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply, his hands tightening at her waist. When he opened his eyes and looked at me again, his voice sounded much calmer and under control. "I stopped because it’s against the rules, Princess. This... what we are doing right now... is against the rules."

The corners of my lips curved as I stared down into his eyes, and I felt so much power as I spoke the words. "I am the rule, Lorien Moonveil."

Something broke behind his eyes. I watched it go - that careful headmaster composure, held for years, cracking along every fault line. "Elara, you are not thinking-"

"I have thought about it. And now, I’m done thinking."ℯℯ𝑙.