The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(21)

The kiss itself was so fragile and brief it hardly mattered. She would learn only the smell of his cologne, the feeling of his mouth. The most important detail of a kiss was usually the cataloguing of a single fact: is the kiss returned? But this kiss, of course, was far too fleeting to be informative. Better he did not return it, in fact, as no man would allow a woman access to the more worthy corners of his mind if he kissed her too readily to start with.

“Sorry,” she said, removing her hands from his chest. Balance was a delicate matter; the sending of her desire forward while also tearing herself physically away. Those who did not believe this to be a dance had not undergone the choreography long or devotedly enough. “I’m afraid it cost more energy than I cared to expend,” she murmured, “preventing myself from doing that.”

Magic was an energy they all knew better than to waste; on some level, she knew he would relate.

“Miss Kamali.” These, the first words after kissing her, would forever taste like her, and she doubted he’d escape an opportunity to say her name again. “Perhaps you misunderstand.”

“Oh, I’m sure I do,” she said, “but I suppose I quite enjoy an opportunity for misunderstanding.”

She smiled up at him, and he slowly detached himself from her.

“Your efforts,” he said, “would be better spent convincing your initiation class of your value. I have no direct impact on the decision as to whether or not you’ll be chosen for initiation.”

“I’m very good at what I do. I’m not concerned with their opinions.”

“Perhaps you should be.”

“I don’t make a habit of doing things I should.”

“So it appears.”

He flicked another glance at her, and this time, to her immense satisfaction, she saw it.

The opening of a door.

“If I believed you capable of sincerity I would recommend you turn and run,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think you have every weapon necessary to win this game.”

“So it is a game, then.” Finally, something she could use.

“It is a game,” he confirmed. “But I’m afraid you miscalculated. I am not a useful piece.”

She did not, as a rule, miscalculate. Better that he wonder, though.

“Perhaps I’ll simply have you for fun, then,” she said, but as she did not make a habit of being the one left behind, she took the first step in retreat. “Are the transportation portals that way?” she asked him, deliberately pointing in the wrong direction. The moment his mind would take to replace the incorrect information with accuracy would be enough to catch the shadow of something, and she was right, observing a flicker of something heavily suppressed.

“That way,” Dalton said, “just around the corner.”

Whatever lurked in his mind was not a complete thought. It was a rush of things, identifiable only by how carnal they were. Desire, for example. She had kissed him, and he was wanting. But there was something else, too, and it wasn’t interwoven with the rest the way it sometimes was.

Lust was a color, but fear was a sensation. Clammy hands or a cold sweat were obvious markers, but more often it was some sort of multisensory incongruity. Like seeing sun and smelling smoke, or feeling silk and tasting bile. Sounds that rose out of unseeing darkness.

Dalton Ellery was definitely afraid of something. Tragically, that something wasn’t her.

“Thank you,” Parisa said, rather meaning it, and proceeded down the corridor to find there was an additional person waiting in the vestibule.

He, she thought, was interesting. There was something very coiled up about him, something rearing to strike, but the best part about snakes was how little they could be bothered to do so unless someone was blocking their sun.

Besides, call it merciless Westernization, but she liked British accents.

“Tristan, isn’t it?” she asked, watching him look up from a rather murky swamp of thoughts. “Are you headed to London?”

“Yes.” He was half-listening, half-thinking, though his thoughts were mostly unidentifiable. On the one hand they took very linear paths, like a map of Manhattan, but they also seemed to reach destinations that would require more effort than Parisa had energy to follow at the moment. “And you?”

“London as well,” she said, and he blinked with surprise, refocusing on her.

He was recalling her academic origin of école Magique de Paris and her personal origin of Tehran, basic introductory details distributed by Atlas.

Good, so he’d been paying attention.

“But I thought—”

“Can you see through all illusions?” she asked him. “Or is it just the bad ones?”

Tristan hesitated for a moment, and then his mouth twisted. He had an angry mouth, or at least a mouth accustomed to camouflaging anger.

“You’re one of those,” he said.

“If you’re not busy, we should have a drink,” she replied.

He was instantly suspicious. “Why?”

“Well, there’s no point in me going back to Paris. And besides, I need to entertain myself for what remains of the evening.”

“You think I’ll entertain you?”

She allowed a deliberate flick of her eyes, following the shape of him.

“I certainly think I’d like to see you try,” she said. “And anyway, if we’re going to do this, we ought to start making friends.”