Seduction

by Jaymin Eve

  Table of Contents

  Glossary

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Also By Jane Washington

  Also By Jaymin Eve

  Connect With Jane Washington

  Connect With Jaymin Eve

  Seduction

  Jaymin Eve

  Jane Washington

  Copyright 2017 © Jaymin Eve and Jane Washington.

  All rights reserved.

  The authors have provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publically available in any way.

  Copyright infringement is against the law.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Eve, Jaymin

  Washington, Jane

  Seduction

  www.janewashington.com

  www.jaymineve.com

  Edited by David Thomas

  www.firstreadeditorial.com

  ISBN-10: 0-6480542-9-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6480542-9-0

  For Jane: This book isn’t dedicated to you.

  Also for Jaymin: This book is dedicated to me.

  Contents

  Glossary

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Also By Jane Washington

  Also By Jaymin Eve

  Connect With Jane Washington

  Connect With Jaymin Eve

  Glossary

  click – minute

  rotation – hour

  sun-cycle – day

  moon-cycle – month

  life-cycle – year

  minateur – soldier

  bullsen – domesticated work-beast

  sol – dominant race

  dweller – serving race

  minatsol – world of the dwellers and sols

  topia – world of the gods

  blesswood – the center of Minatsol

  dvadel – the first ring

  soldel – the second ring

  tridel – the third ring

  swimmer – fish

  pantera – winged horse

  flame-rash – nothing you need to know about

  One

  The strange thing about life was that some sun-cycles it gave you reasons to rise above your station and change the world around you, and some sun-cycles it just made you want to punch a girl in the face. That sun-cycle was now, and that girl’s name was Emmanuelle, formerly known as Emmy.

  “Did you just re-name me to my original name?” Emmanuelle demanded, her pretty brown eyes narrowed as she jumped up from the bed and stalked toward me.

  “Did you just read my mind?” I shot back, sounding just as angry as she had sounded, except that I was mostly just scared and pretending not to be.

  Ever since Cyrus had stolen my soul-link from the Abcurses and started reading my mind, I had developed a completely rational fear of people suddenly growing the ability to hear my thoughts.

  “No, Willa,” Emmy was almost groaning now, her hand rubbing over her face. Her posture was somehow both rigid and exasperated. It made her look like she couldn’t decide whether to slump back onto her bed or shake her fist at me. “You were speaking your thoughts out loud again. I haven’t magically learnt how to read your mind in the last five clicks.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first one,” I grumbled. “It’s happened at least twice … that I know of.”

  She ignored that statement, her eyes still steadily narrowed, her hands still firmly planted on her hips. “Why are you revoking my nickname?”

  “I saw you with that guy.” I could feel the pout that had started to tug down my lip, and I tried to stop it. I tried really hard.

  “Are you jealous?” she asked dryly. “You know I’m allowed to have other friends, right?”

  “No,” I returned sulkily.

  “Seriously?” She tossed her hands up and fell down onto the mattress beside me. “He’s just a friend, Will. I haven’t forgotten Atti already. I’m dealing with my—”

  “You’re not.” I jumped up just as quickly as she had sat down, spinning to face her and adopting her earlier posture, my hands against my hips and my eyes narrowed. “You’re keeping yourself so busy you barely even have time to sleep, let alone grieve properly, and you’re hanging out with that friend—what’s his name again?”

  “Fred.”

  “Stupid name. He’s stupid. You’re hanging out with him way too much. You’re avoiding. It’s bad for you.”

  “You’re not my mother.” She jumped up again, and the mattress seemed to squeak a little in protest this time. “You can’t tell me what to do! That’s my job!”

  I tried to stop the sigh from escaping, but I was pacing and rubbing my temples and before I knew it, I was sighing like I really was her mother. “You’re acting out,” I reasoned aloud. “I get it. You went through something terrible. You lost—”

  “Stop trying to fix it.” Emmy’s voice had turned cold, almost flat.

  She wasn’t even looking at me as she walked to the door and pulled it open. She glued her eyes to the wall beyond, gritting out a goodbye from between her teeth before disappearing altogether. I wanted to scream, or pick up the little sundial that she had left behind and violently throw it at the rough, stone wall … but I wouldn’t do either of those things, because my sun-cycles of being immature and throwing fits to deal with my problems were over. If Emmy was going off the rails, I needed to be responsible.

  I needed to … stalk her.

  Responsibly.

  I marched out of the room, swiping the sundial as I went and shoving it deep into my pocket. I could see her blonde hair through the scattering of dwellers that remained in the underground section of the dweller residence, and I hurried to catch up to her. I didn’t bother trying to hide myself from Emmy, because she was striding ahead with far too much purpose for me to think that she would turn around at any point—but I did keep my head down and my expression hidden from the other dwellers. I didn’t need anyone calling out my name and alerting her to the fact that I was maturely keeping an eye on her. Like a responsible sister. Like an adult that doesn’t throw fits. Like a dweller-sol-hybrid who knows how to weigh up pros and cons and save enough tokens to buy a little hut one sun-cycle halfway between Minatsol and Topia.

  It didn’t surprise me in the least to spot Rome in the corridor right above where Emmy’s dorm room would have been on the lower floor. Even though I’d barely felt the tug of the soul-link while I had been in the room, moving toward the staircase had been a lesson in agony. We had figured out this trick a few sun-cycles ago, when I needed to speak to Emmy but refused to drag a contingent of Abcurses down into the dweller-dorms with me.

  “Why are you walking like that?” Rome asked, running a broad hand through his short hair, his glittering green eyes flicking down my legs before settling on my face.

 
“Like what?” I asked, as he fell into step beside me.

  He was starting to blow my cover a little bit, because every person—dweller or sol—in our immediate vicinity seemed to be covertly sneaking glances at him as though they were too terrified to look him squarely in the eye. I understood the dilemma. He was kind of huge. Looking him in the eye was difficult, because his eyes were so far up.

  “Like you’re scared of the ground,” he replied on a snort. He had taken a micro-click too long to answer, which meant that he had probably been entertaining himself with my thoughts again.

  More specifically, my thoughts about how tall he was.

  He might be tall but everything else about him is utterly unimpressive, I thought, as loudly as I possibly could.

  He smiled, cutting his eyes sideways to look at me again. “Watch out, Rocks, you know what we say about multitasking—”

  But it was too late.

  One click I’d been walking along in perfectly acceptable sleuth-mode, and the next click I was colliding with another body and causing a domino-effect of toppling sols, books, dwellers and trays. The noise was jarring, as was the elbow in my stomach and the knee in my back. I had no idea how anyone had even managed to fall on top of me, since I had been the one to start the momentum and I had started it in a forward direction, but ever since the guys had told me their theory of me being Rau’s Beta, I had been forced to embrace the irrationality of my own personal brand of Chaos.

  “We really need to stop meeting like this,” a voice rumbled out from beneath me.

  I flinched, because the voice was familiar. I distinctly recalled shouting something embarrassing at it a moon-cycle ago, while attempting to disguise the fact that I had been hiding in a supply closet with five oversized gods and two unconscious sols. I had shouted because Yael had forced me to shout. Because Yael was an Abcurse. And the Abcurses didn’t like it when other boys touched me. Which made the fact that I was currently sprawled over Dru’s chest a particularly awkward fact.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, pulling my head up to try and spot Rome through the mess of tangled bodies. “We really should. For your sake.”

  Rome was the only person in the hall still standing. He was up against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest, his foot pushed back against the stone, a small smile on his face as his eyes crawled over the people now struggling to get to their feet. He was enjoying the Chaos. I liked that. It was my Chaos after all. I wasn’t very good at making it happen on command, but I was excellent at making it happen by accident.

  Dru started to grab me around the hips to help me up, but I quickly scrambled off him and leapt over the nearest fallen dweller. The mountain-sized sol seemed surprised to see me leaping around, all uninjured and unfazed. That made two of us.

  “Can I walk you to class or something?” he asked, jumping to his feet and following me over the dweller.

  I took another few steps back, until I felt an arm hook around my front. I glanced down, seeing a big hand settle across my right hip, fingers digging in. A bolt of heat travelled right through my body, and I tensed up and pushed back all at once, eliciting a small grunt from the body behind me.

  “No,” I croaked out, before clearing my throat. “No, that’s okay! Thanks, though … Ah … I’ll see you later, alright?”

  “Right.” He was frowning, apparently displeased that Rome had interfered, though he really should have been used to it by now. “Sure. See you.”

  He turned, and I watched him walk off as the rest of the fallen people managed to find their feet and recover their dropped items. Rome didn’t release my hip until Dru was out of sight, and even then, it was only to spin me around to face him.

  “You should—”

  “Stop talking to boys,” I interrupted. “Yeah. We’ve had this talk before. It’s irrational. I can’t avoid all males.”

  “Just the sols.” He frowned. “And the dwellers. And the gods.”

  “So just … all males, then?” I arched a brow at him.

  He nodded, once, short and sharp—as though we had just figured out our differences and come to a mutual agreement, and then he took my arm in hand and started to march me in the wrong direction. Wrong, because I was supposed to be following Emmy, who was now out of sight.

  “Shit!” I pulled out of Rome’s grip, spinning around and quickly scanning the people again to see if I could spot her.

  She wasn’t there, so I started off in the direction I had last seen her. She was going to see the stupid guy with the stupid name. I was sure of it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to stop it once I discovered that I was right, but that was a concern for Future Willa.

  “Where are you going?” Rome fell into step beside me, but luckily didn’t grab me to turn me in the other direction again.

  Luckily for him, because he would have been too strong for me to resist and it would have forced me to use my super special Beta-God abilities on him … or throw a tantrum. Always have a backup plan.

  “I’m following Emmy,” I whispered, hurrying to the end of the passage and then kicking into a run toward the dining hall.

  It seemed like the sort of place a guy named Fred would ask to meet a girl, because it was the most obvious and unoriginal meeting place in the whole of the academy, and I didn’t have very high hopes for Fred’s originality or subtlety.

  “You’re stalking her,” Rome corrected. “Following is far too innocent a description for the look on your face right now.”

  “This is the face I wear when you shouldn’t mess with me because I mean business.”

  “Ri-ight.” He drew the word out, but the smile was back. I liked it. I was pretty sure I wanted him to smile all sun-cycle. I was pretty sure I would do almost anything to keep the smile there, just so that I could keep looking at it.

  The smile grew.

  I mean who needs a fancy smile anyway, I thought, even louder than before. It’s just a smile. Lots of people have smiles. That guy has a smile. That guy has a smile. Oh that guy is—

  “Pay attention to where you’re walking,” Rome snapped. “We don’t need another accident happening.”

  We were back to the bossing around, apparently. Well, two could play that game.

  “How about you pay attention for me, and that way I’m free to multitask and maturely follow my sister around to make sure she’s not doing anything stupid.”

  “What level of stupid are we talking here?” Rome asked, ignoring the first part of my bossing. “Are we talking stupid like a Beta who can’t seem to stop talking to other males, forcing me into ‘crusher’ mode, as she so eloquently phrases it? Or is it more like Trickery when he decides that his little amusements are more enjoyable than letting us all know what he’s up to?”

  My feet tangled up again, but I managed to right myself before falling. Progress? Damn right it was! I knew Rome was referring to my latest rebellion against the Abcurses, during which I had walked around the halls of Blesswood semi-naked. Only … they didn’t know that I had been walking around semi-naked, because Siret had used his Trickery to mask the fact.

  “Coen almost put Siret through a wall!” I burst out. “Are you telling me that is the lesser level of stupid?”

  What was he going to do if I didn’t stop talking to other guys? No, Willa! A small part of me was suddenly determined to find out, but that was almost definitely the Chaos part, right?

  Rome was nodding, his eyes locked on me. “Yes, he went easy on the bastard. I would have put him through ten walls.”

  With a shake of my head, I started walking again, hoping I would forget the last conversation we’d just had. The violence of his words and actions stirred something inside of me, almost as though it was calling to the budding Chaos contained within me. Either that, or I was hungry and my stomach was trying to tell me to eat.

  The dining hall was reasonably empty when we entered, which meant that it wasn’t quite lunchtime, yet. There was no sign of Emmy—no, Emmanuelle. She was most definitely not ear
ning her nickname back until she returned to the rule-loving, responsible, solidly-upstanding dweller that I knew her to be.

  I could pretend to be mature and rational for a little while, but it definitely wasn’t the best long-term solution. The real me would break through at some stage and go on a rampage to get back at the mature, rational me for locking her up for so long. The real me was a wild animal, and she needed space to … roam. Or hunt. Or sleep on tree branches. Or just space to not be forced into a polite, sol-driven social structure.

  Rome let out a small bark of laughter at my side, which I ignored. I actually had a good grip on my ability to shut the Abcurses out of my head … though it only worked when I really wanted them to stay out—which wasn’t right now. We’d already come far too close to losing our soul-link, and I needed the comfort of knowing that the connection was still there.

  “Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Rome surmised, his amusement growing with each word. “Where to next?”

  My snort of annoyance acted as an answer, until my brain had a chance to catch up. “If you’re not going to be helpful in this situation, maybe you could … like, give me a bit of space. Everyone is staring and you’re ruining my cover.”

  The breath knocked out of me as he stilled and locked those unnatural eyes on me. His irises were even more gem-like than usual. They were almost glimmering, and it made me uneasy, for just a moment. I had never been able to afford rare things before. Or glittery things. Not that I was considering purchasing Rome’s eyes … because that would require some kind of underground, organ-harvesting group of eye-collectors and I wasn’t sure I could handle any more secret groups or secret meetings after the dweller uprising.