Gleam: The dark fantasy romance TikTok sensation that’s sold over a million copies (Plated Prisoner Book 3)

I have to hand it to him, the fact that Slade is even able to see the faded bruise in such terrible lighting is a credit to his fae eyesight.

My hand automatically goes up to the spot he’s staring at, fingers pressing against my cheek, but just like I did to him, Slade knocks my hand away so he can see it better.

Turning my face, featherlight fingertips graze over the spot of burnished gold, like he doesn’t want to put any pressure on it in case it hurts me.

It wouldn’t, not now. It’s a hell of a lot better than it was. A few hours after Midas first struck me, it swelled up pretty badly. I went to sleep that night with a cold compress resting on it, made from snow I collected off my balcony and stuffed into a rag. It reminded me of Hojat.

The bruise is barely showing anymore. My gold skin always marks up darker, bruising in shades of bronze and rust before it fades back to my usual gleam. But at least nearly all of the swelling is gone. The darkened mark can be mistaken for a shadow if you’re not really paying attention.

Clearly, Slade is paying attention.

His touch makes my nerve endings come alive, and it feels like my chest is swelling far more than my cheek did.

“It’s nothing,” I say with a hard swallow before jerking my head away from his scrutiny.

“That is not nothing. Did someone put their hands on you?”

I just look at him warily, which I guess is answer enough.

“Who?”

“Slade—”

“Who, Auren?” he demands, his dark, seductive voice so contradictory to the violence held in his tone.

Because he knows the answer. I can see it in his face.

“Midas,” he snarls, like a predator with its eyes trained on a trespassing hunter in the woods. He waits, looking at me to confirm, yet I don’t reply, don’t even nod my head.

But I don’t deny it either.

At my silent confirmation, Slade loses it.

All of a sudden, his eyes flare, going from startling green to a bleed of pure black. Spikes rip from his arms and pierce through the sleeves of his shirt, making a gasp fly out of my mouth.

I watch as he struggles, shifting back and forth between his forms with the click of his jaw, fury bunching his muscles. The lined power that marks his flesh writhes beneath his stubble, reaching, growing.

A cold sweat breaks out over me as I feel his power dominate the air. It thickens like syrup, and a wave of nauseating death ekes from his body.

“Slade…” The nervous plea falls from my lips as I move to back up, only to remember I can’t. I’m still pinned against the bookshelf, his presence blocking my front.

It’s a shock to see him like this, the way his body seems to be warring back and forth. But as his forms flicker, his essence does too—part corrupt magic, part comforting aura. Both of them beating like drums with a singular reaction.

Anger.

And just as quickly as the fear washed over me, it dissipates, like a burnt-up mist. Because his anger, it feels familiar.

The feathered creature in me, the one ruffling for a reckoning, she sits up and cocks her head. She pays attention.

Slade’s clash of manifestations stems from something dark and writhing. Something that’s cleaved the two halves of him, making him battle within himself. But that thing…it’s letting out a silent call, creating a palpable rhythm in the air. A strained song of discord that my bloomed anger can hear.

Breath buckling in an accordion bellow, I stare at him, not in fear, but in recognition as the beast in me rises up and answers to the beast inside him.

All twenty-four of my ribbons lurch to attention. They become charged with energy, as if they’ve felt the erratic spike of his magic and are answering in kind.

Yet instead of them lashing out at him like they did with Midas, they form a cocoon, like they’re creating another layer upon his aura that’s already surrounding us. These parts of ourselves feel so alive. So decadent.

“Look at me.” My voice is stoic, unafraid, even as his body struggles to hold its form.

His green and black flashing eyes latch onto me, hypnotic in their frenetic oscillation. I don’t know what would happen if he were to rupture, but power flows from him and pounds in the air. This time, it doesn’t make me want to vomit. Instead, it’s like a singing siren, and I want nothing but to be lured in.

“Can you feel that?” I whisper as my hand rises to his chest, my open palm connecting with the chiseled muscles over his racing heart.

The moment my touch settles against him, Slade’s eyes bleed back to a forest of green, like the needles of a pine appearing out of the dark. My breath catches, his heart beating beneath my palm in a rhythm that seems to match the push in my veins.

His touches I’ve savored have coalesced into the one I now press against him. And as innocent as it may seem, it’s somehow intimate.

“Your heartbeat…”

“What about it?” His tone is hoarse, breath gone ragged.

“It sounds like mine.”

Twin beats pulse, just as two tears rip down my cheeks in perforated anguish. Because I can hear it, this perfect harmony, like a hum of sun and soil, of depth and rise. But the moment is tainted, cheapened, because I had my head pressed to another’s chest, hearing a song that wasn’t singing for me. So how can I trust what I hear?

“Auren.”

My shining eyes rise up, and I fleetingly note the spikes sinking back beneath his skin and the scales disappearing from his cheeks. I start to pull my hand away, because I suddenly feel so undeserving of the touch. Yet before I can, his hand comes up to trap mine, and he holds it there as he watches me with an intensity that I can’t fathom.

“You’re warm,” he murmurs.

I nod, feeling the heat circling from my palm, dipping into the soft fabric of his shirt, sinking into the hard chest beneath. The drag of his calloused thumb against the back of my hand shouldn’t feel sensual, but it does.

Heat drips down from my navel, settling between my thighs and making my muscles go tight. His fingernail scrapes against my knuckle, an abraded edge of nearness that carries the hint of a need to dig in deep. Right then, I want to let him. To peel my layers open so he can get to what lies beneath.

“He hit you.” Slade grinds out the words, each one spoken from sharp back teeth.

Midas has done far more than that, but emotional assault doesn’t leave any marks on the skin.

Lines of power snap against Slade’s jaw like miniature vipers, and my gaze follows their insipid movements. “How long has he been doing this?”

“That was the first time.”

He looks wholly unconvinced. “And at the dinner table?”

“What about it?” I hedge.

“There was a moment when your expression changed. Was he hurting you then?”

“Just a pinch.” I don’t dare hint that the just a pinch was more than one, or that they left such dark bruises on my skin that they’re still sore to the touch. The only good thing about Midas’s physical assault is that he’s left me alone since then.

“He won’t ever touch me again,” I declare, because I already made that promise to myself.

Something boils inside of Slade, burning so hot that my hand sears beneath his. “You asked me why I don’t just kill him,” he says, his hard, pitiless eyes hooked on my face. “But why don’t you?”

I blink in surprise as he throws my question back in my face, and my ribbons wilt, falling onto the floor like plucked petals.

His finger comes up to skim against my cheek, and even though he doesn’t lose control again, he’s no less angry.

“Since the moment I arrived in Fifth Kingdom, I’ve thought about little else other than ripping him to shreds with my bare hands. But do you know what stops me?” he asks, his thumb still caressing, our beats still in rhythm. “More than politics and potential world wars.”

I don’t want to ask, but I do anyway. “What?”

“You.”

My mind recoils at the way he spits the word, at the bitterness that stains his exhale, and I yank my hand away from his chest, like I’ve been scalded by it. “Me?”

“Yes. You would hate me for it, because for whatever reason, you still care for him.”

“I don’t,” I argue, saying it again when he scoffs at me.

“Oh, really?” he challenges. “Then ask me.”

My mind stumbles, like I’m riding too fast downhill and the speed is getting away from me. “Ask you…?”

“Ask me to kill him for you.”

I blanch, feeling the blood drain from my face. That was the very last thing I expected him to say.

Everything about Slade right now is fierce, unfettered, and completely fae, despite those parts of him hidden from view. “You say the word, and it’s done. You hear me?” His hand lifts, and he snaps his fingers so loud that I flinch. “That quick, Auren. I’d end him in a breath, in a room full of people who’d run screaming, with monarchs who’d band together against me. But if you wanted me to do it, I would. So say it.”

“It’s not just about me,” I try to explain, but he doesn’t even seem to hear me.

Slade looks at me with that crude, horrible challenge in his expression. “Say it!” he shouts, making me flinch.

“I-I can’t.”

A flash of utter disappointment crystallizes in his eyes. And that gesture as sharp as glass cuts me to the bone. It’s a wound much worse than the one I sustained on my cheek.

“Exactly.” He turns and moves away a few steps, and I feel the space between us like a chasm that I have no hope of crossing. “Which is why I refuse to ruin my chances over that worthless fucker,” he hurls out the insult between bitten teeth. “If I killed him—and make no mistake, Auren, I would gladly kill him for you, damn the consequences. But if I did, the truth is right there on your face. You’d resent me for it. Even if you don’t want to admit it. And isn’t that just a fucking cruel twist of it all?”

Tears build up in my eyes with every pent-up word that peels off him, but I don’t let them drop this time. Not even as they burn and puddle on my lids.

He tilts his head in my direction, particles of dust clinging to the air between us like it’s waiting for us to settle. But we don’t settle, that’s the problem. We never do. Every time I think we’re on even footing ready to stand still, one of us takes another step.

“I’m…” My mouth closes. I’m what? Sorry? Am I apologizing that I can’t ask the male in front of me to kill the one I’ve put behind me?noveldrama

“Is that what you think I should do? Is that what you want?” I ask instead, the question genuine.

He tips his head up and sends a bitter smile to the cobwebbed ceiling. “What I want…” His laughter is soaked in somber asperity, eyes casting for wisdom from a sky that can’t see us. After a pushed breath through his tense chest, he looks at me again. “There’s only one thing that I find I want anymore.”

There’s a churning in my stomach, his declaration twisting me all up so much that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to disentangle myself. Based on the woven look in his grass-bladed eyes, he feels the same.

“I’ll be returning to Fourth Kingdom the day after the ball,” he says suddenly, and something painful tears through my chest. “I’ve been away too long as it is, and I’m needed there.”

You’re needed here too.

He looks at me, and there’s a wait there, an opportunity for me to ask him to stay, and it terrifies me.

Like a confession of pilfered spoils, I hear myself say, “I’m trying to leave him.”

Slade’s attention sharpens, my eyes dropping from the piercing gaze that lands against my face. “I’m trying to just…leave.” My words tear off, like shorn parchment right in the middle of an apology letter. “To disappear.”

That stillness in him has returned, the unmoving mountain standing solid against fits of wind.

I don’t know why I told him, and yet, he feels like the only one I should tell.

Because despite my determination to get away, Slade’s right. It would be so easy to end Midas, to turn him into the gold he covets so much. To bring an end to that tyranny. It would be even easier for Slade to rot him inside out.

But…I can’t.

And great Divine, doesn’t that just leave me conflicted. I hate myself, I’m proud of myself, I’m right, I’m wrong, this is best, this is worst.

Around and around and around I go.

“Judge me for it—for not being able to end him,” I say softly, almost like I want him to. And maybe I do. Maybe it would be a good punishment, fit for the girl who fell in love with her captor and let herself flounder. “I know how pathetic I must seem to you.”

Whatever he sees on my face makes his eyes soften, the angry frustration smoothing from his heavy brow. He walks over to me again, not nearly as close this time, but at least he’s sealed the gap, making the air between us not so cold and jagged when I inhale.

Slowly, Slade lifts a hand to sweep a knuckle across my bruise. I melt into the touch like the brim of wax on a candlestick, and all I can think is, what would it be like to just catch and burn in his heat?

One simple skim is all I get though, and then his touch drops away, leaving the track to tingle. He stuffs both hands into his pockets, as if he needs to keep them there so he doesn’t reach for me again. I keep trying to convince myself that separation from him is what I need, and yet every time I get just that, it feels like someone is fisting my paper heart, crumpling it whole. A pang resonates through me as he stands there, suddenly seeming untouchable.

It doesn’t matter that his shirt is torn on the sleeves from where his spikes ripped through. It doesn’t matter that he’s here in a begrimed library full of rotting books. It doesn’t even matter that I saw him lose a sliver of control. Somehow, he still manages to look kingly. Intimidating. Gorgeous.

“You’re not pathetic,” he murmurs quietly, a somber sort of song. “You just haven’t found it yet.”

My golden brows pull together as I search his expression for meaning. “Found what?”

“We all have our edge, Auren. One day, you’re going to find where yours is.” The darkness of his essence brushes against my skin like a whisper’s caress. “You’re going to find out just how far you can be pushed until you’re tipped over. And when that happens, when you find your edge, just promise me one thing.”

My voice comes out like a croak, a single tear dashing down. “What?”

“Don’t fall.” Time stands still as he leans in and places a kiss on my temple, lips turning to whisper into my ear. “Fly.”

I don’t even realize my eyes fluttered closed until I blink my damp lids open again. But by then, Slade’s already gone, swallowed up by the shadows without a sound.