Page 39 of Wicked Knight
“Dimitri.”
“Mackenzie.”
I roll my eyes at him, and he smiles.
“Do you seriously think we can just be together for six months in this contract without our parents noticing and going crazy?”
He shakes his head. “No, I don't think so. But I never said anything about our parents.”
I wish I could peel back the layers of his mind and get the answers instead of being spoon-fed them in drips and drabs. “What are you planning, Dimitri?”
He reaches out and touches my jaw, like he did the other night. “A game of secrets.” His voice has that rough-meets-soft tone again.
“Secrets?”
“Like we used to when we were kids, except this is us all grown up.”
“But your father?—”
“My father is not here,” he cuts me off. “And he's not the boss of me.”
“But he's the boss of me while I’m at Raventhorn.”
“No, he's not. That's where you're confused. I'm the one in control here. Not him.” Dimitri’s voice drips with dark venom, cold and deadly with menacing intent. “You and I have a blood oath contract, Mackenzie Domachenkov. Not him.”
“I’m aware of that.” That contract, although done in the spirit of fun, is so serious it can bind a senior Knight like my father and they have to honor it. That’s why I was able to stop him in his tracks.
“Good, so you know that contract makes you mine.” His lips curve into a sly grin, then, as if for dramatic effect, he slides his mask off and gazes at me, the look in his eyes just as venomous as before but tinged with malice. Now that I can see his face properly, I can tell just how serious he is. But I’m stuck on the wordmine. “You belong to me. That means the only person you need to worry about pleasing is me.”
His words grip me in a lock that makes it difficult to breathe. I barely get a moment to think before he lifts my chin, takes off my mask, and guides my face toward his. His touch and his stare hold me in place, paralyzing my me.
“You know the rules of a blood oath contract, don’t you, Mackenzie?” He tosses our masks on the floor.
“Yes.”
“Good, so you know if you break it, youandyour family get punished.” His stare sharpens, cutting into me like pieces of broken glass. “We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”
His threat snaps my mind back into focus, and I pull away from him, staring him down as anguish squeezes my heart. “You bastard.” I want to follow that up by asking him if my family haven’t suffered enough, but I hold back when I remember he lost his brother. So, I decide to hold back within reason. “Are you threatening me?”
“I just want what’s mine. What’sowedto me. You honor your part of the agreement, and I’ll honor mine. Then we won’t have a problem.”
It’s odd to me that he seems so certain of what he wants now. Everything he’s saying was applicable back in June when he took over the contract. What took him so long to get to this point?
“Why did you wait so long to tell me this?”
His blue eyes darken, becoming stern. He would almost appear to be void of emotion except for the determination lurking in the edges of his gaze. “I had to think and plan. Now that I have, you and I are doing this.”
Think and plan. So, Isabelle was right. It was that. I’m assuming that was because of his father. He would have known before the summer break that his father was going to become the new Lord Chancellor.
My brain struggles to think. I’m stuck again. This time worse because now I know he’s adamant we stick to the contract.
It doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to change his mind. It doesn’t seem like Ican. So, now the bigger question is, what do we do in this game of secrets?
What will we do that will break me even more?
After the incident, it took me years to gather the fractured pieces of my heart and move on. Not being allowed to speak to him was no different than a bad breakup.
It was unfair. I’d lost my memory, and it literally felt like one day we were friends, and the next we weren’t. And like some cruel joke, I was cursed to forget the gory details.