Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(88)

For Ari, his loss was a knife twisted into her side by the Administrator himself. Her eyes teared up miserably. “Please, don’t. I can’t talk about him now. I can’t… We have to take the deal. Go back to Lionel. Find some spark of hope and—”

“No matter what Mercer lets us have, it won’t be ours. We will be possessions. And we,” Gwen motioned down at their friends far below, also on their knees, heads cast down, “would rather die. Here. Now. With the universe as a witness.”

Ari felt herself looking up into the dazzling, bright lights, whispering the Administrator’s embittered words, “Martyrs do kill the economy.” She turned to Gwen, the terrible stone of a crown biting into the side of her head. She felt a sting and a warm spot. The edges of it were so sharp it was making her bleed. Gwen touched the side of Ari’s face, fingers coming away red.

As red as Kay’s mouth in his last laughing moment.

Ari shuddered, pain spiraling outward at an alarming rate. “I have an idea, but I need your help. You know I’m no good at pageantry.”

Gwen smiled, ever so slightly. “You are miles from where you used to be, dragon slayer.”

Ari winced, casting a quick look at the enormous mound of Big Mama beside the dais. She hadn’t moved, and Ari’s scheme to keep the dragon alive seemed less and less realistic. “I have an idea, but we have to win the crowd. We need to surprise them. Something simple but attention grabbing.”

Gwen stared at Ari, biting her lip, cheeks flushed.

Was that a suggestion?

“Gwen…” Ari stared at her pink mouth and the bright pain behind her eyes. The crowd was still eating up the video of their wedding. Even the Administrator had his head tipped back, staring up at the entranced crowd, pleased, no doubt, by the mounting roll of incoming credits.

“It would surprise them,” Gwen whispered.

When Ari was marooned on Ketch, she had dreamed about kissing Gwen again. She’d set the stage in her mind thousands of times. There were swooping embraces. Passionate, swirling lifts. Soft, drowsy bedtime kisses. Fierce, needing, rolling, gasping ones…

All of those longings faded now, turned to something so fractured she couldn’t see the image through the shards. She didn’t know what was still Ari and Gwen. There was so much Mercer now. So much Kay. So much King Arthur.

Ari turned away, thinking back to that moment behind the stables when they were young. They’d never gotten along, Gwen and Ari. They’d argued through knight camp so heatedly that their teacher had paired them up as a punishment, and yet it had flipped their magnetism. That moment against the wall, out of view, they’d started to fight about something pointless. Gwen’s shoulder was slipping out of her dress—always slipping out—and Ari had bitten in. A full-on attack of hormones and desire that tumbled them into a knot of unending kisses and hands and hips, skin feverish to meet skin.

It hadn’t stopped their arguments, but it’d inspired new ones. Beautiful ones.

A few million light-years in space and time from those two girls, Ari found herself staring at Gwen’s shoulder. This time her clothes weren’t slipping free; this dress fit like a corset, so tight it left angry red marks where it was pressing in.

But it was also strapless.

Ari’s face dipped low, closer, closer. Her mouth found Gwen’s shoulder, breaking the barrier between them with a playful nip, destroying it as swiftly as Excalibur had demolished the one around Ketch. Gwen cradled Ari’s face, bringing their lips together in a way that seemed to make the whole gods damn universe tremble.

Or maybe that was just Ari.

Gwen bruised things in Ari’s heart. She always had. Her closeness was a continuous tender ache because what would Ari feel, do, be afterward?

New.

Every kiss with Gwen left Ari new.

They pulled each other to their feet—no more kneeling in front of the Administrator—and kept kissing. Their history served them, but so did their pain, knotting their bodies together in a way that could not be faked. Or pulled apart. Ari was only barely aware of the moment when the arena noticed their passion, the applause turning riotous and raw. Screams of joy from so many people who wanted to be this entangled—which only encouraged Ari to deepen the kiss.

After all, love was one of the few things Mercer could not sell.

The Administrator’s elevated voice filtered through Ari’s ears. His aww shucks turned into impatient chatter. “Break it up now. We have business to discuss!” he tried playfully.

Finally, breath slipping fast between both of their lips, Ari asked, “Are you ready?”

Gwen nodded and ripped the crown off of Ari’s head, throwing it into the stands with an impressive arc for its weight. After the brief flash of delight from the crowd, the Administrator’s cold stare chilled the entire arena.

“Nobody puts a crown on my girl but me,” Gwen said with a pleased smile, her voice echoing for miles. The Administrator’s jaw popped like it had right before he’d smashed that crown into Kay’s chest, and Ari felt the mere seconds they had to live, right as the arena exploded with an arcing rainbow of fireworks.

Gwen glanced up. Everyone did—except Ari. She searched the stands, feeling him. And he was there, several sections up, and yet she would have recognized his skinny power stance from a few hundred light-years away.