Page 184 of Tempt

Dante heaves a breath, holding up his hand. I can tell he’s not a gym guy—a bit like me. Makes me like him more. “Just…hang on. Fuck.” He clears his throat and straightens up. “Come with me and talk to Eissa. I don’t know a lot about the Vorthex, but he and Vyrian can explain to you why your idea is a very, very bad one.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Getting dicked down and sucked by some…tentacle appendage doesn’t sound like the worst idea.”

Dante rolls his eyes up toward the sky. “Please.”

Vyrian takes a step forward. He’s lost his smile. “Dante is telling you all truths. The Vorthex are not like the Vyastil. We may be genetically related in a lot of ways, but they are dangerous.”

I could just turn and walk away, but I have a feeling these two might follow me, and that would blow my cover. Especially because it’s going to take some mind-fuck trickery to get Hepyn to hear me out, let alone agree to let me be his…hole, or whatever.

The thought makes my face bloom hotly. God, I haven’t been fucked in so, so long, and now I’m going to offer my ass up to my boss to save him?

What even is my life right now?

“Where is Eissa?” I finally ask.

“He’s on his way. He’ll be here in ten minutes. You two can talk out back,” Dante says, waving me back to the house.

I shuffle back in, and Cielo gives me a sad trill and a half smile as I nod at him, then I follow Dante through their little cottage kitchen and out the back door. It’s a really nice setup. There’s a low fence with the perfect view of the lake, and a monster-sized swing hanging from a pagoda in the distance.

Dante gestures to their dining table, and I sit, folding my hands on the mosaic tiles. A few scarites make their way across the edge of the table, and I watch them.

“Oh, ew,” Dante says, raising a hand.

“Don’t!” He freezes, and I take a breath. “Sorry, just…they’re good to have in your garden.”

Dante shudders. “They creep me the fuck out.”

I’ve always been fascinated by bugs, so I don’t get where his fear comes from, but after years of studying entomology, his reaction is not uncommon. Even other biology majors at the college get weird about insects.

“I like them,” Vyrian says, dropping to a crouch beside the table. He gets so close his nose is almost touching the metal, and I can see his rainbow irises following their path. “Why do they help gardens?”

“They eat a lot of garden pests,” I tell him. Leaning forward, I push my finger toward two of them, and they both immediately fall over onto their backs.

Vyrian gasps and leans back. “Dead?”

I grin. “No. They play dead when they’re threatened. They usually live underground, so I think people scare them.”

“Like Cielo’s pussyum!”

I blink at him. “His what now?”

Dante covers his smile with his hand for a second, then says, “’Possum.”

Fighting back a laugh, I reach over and pluck the beetles from the table and cup them in my hand. A couple give an exploratory squirm before going still, and I jerk my head toward the edge of the grass.

“Come on. We can bring them home.”

Vyrian jumps up, looking thrilled, and he follows after me, crouching at the edge of the grass when I do. I open my fingers, then tip my palm and drop them onto the sandy bits of dirt that line the grass.

“They look dead,” Vyrian says, giving a mournful trill.

“Just watch.”

It takes a moment, but after several long seconds, they all pop up and quickly burrow beneath the earth. Vyrian watches with a careful expression, then looks at me. “We have a lot of underground on Erethar. Some of it is very nice. Some is…not.”

“The mines,” I murmur.

He nods. “I would be sent to the mines if I were not a prince.”