Devil’s Kiss by Zoe Archer

vision to adjust, from light to dark and back again.
    Zora’s heart sank. The mask was back, and with it, his darker self. He was harder than the flint he now pocketed, his eyes both burning and cold. He looked the same. He looked entirely different.
    “I’m not done with you, Zora.” He said this with a proprietary malevolence, as if not only she but her name as well belonged to him for his exclusive pleasure. When he made to cross to her, reaching for her, she shrank against the chilled window.
    “Only by force,” she reminded him.
    Despite his profound alteration, he stopped in his tracks. A muscle twitched in his jaw. After a moment, he pulled out a chair.
    “Sit,” he said.
    She sat.
    He took a chair for himself, spun it around, and straddled it to face her. His long legs stretched out so that she was forced to tuck her feet back to keep from touching him. Despite the chair having a high back, he was tall enough that he braced his arms easily upon it. The pose was indolent. The shadowed force radiating out from him was not.
    “Tell me how to read someone’s fortune,” he said.
    “You have coin in abundance, my lord.” He had requested this before, yet still his demand mystified her. “There is no need to dukker for money.”
    His smile, small though it was, softened the severe edges of his face. “Oh, I could just see myself, hoops in my ears, wrapped in scarves. Going from house to house. ‘Cross my palm with silver.’” He held out a hand, and the candlelight gleamed on the band of his signet ring. A talented Rom could easily slip the ring from his finger, but finding a buyer for a ring emblazoned with a nobleman’s crest would be difficult.
    Still, Zora fought her own smile, imagining this vigorously male gorgio dressed like a Romani woman and knocking on doors for the promise of a few shillings.
    “If not for coin,” she asked, “then why learn to dukker ?”
    “Because you know how,” he answered, lowering his hand. “And I want every part of you.”
    The bold simplicity of this statement made her shiver. “I’m more than a teller of fortunes.”
    “I am well aware of that.” His gaze roamed over her, burning her. “Yet this is where I will begin, and then delve deeper.”
    She did not know if Wafodu guero had enchanted Whit’s voice, but that seemed likely, since each word from his mouth caused a deep current of heat to rise within her. Protecting herself remained key, however, so she moved on hurriedly.
    “There’s no magic in dukkering ,” she said.
    He raised a brow. “That is not what your fellow Gypsies say.”
    “The greater the hokibens —nonsense—the greater the profit.”
    “Like gambling. Sometimes it is better to bluff for a higher take.”
    She nodded. “The true skill lies in the reading of faces, not the lines on someone’s hand nor the lay of the cards.”
    “I know that well from the gaming tables,” he said. “To study every aspect of a player’s face, the discourse of their body. It’s called the ‘tell.’ I thought after years of experience and training I had no tells, but that is how you were able to cut me so deeply back at the Gypsy camp.” His mouth flattened, and she remembered with wounding vividness how she had neatly, callously described his character.
    “I was truthful, but not kind.” She glanced down at her hands in her lap. “That’s the surest way to earn no money.”
    “No profit in truth.” He considered this, and she looked up to see him enmeshed in thought, turning ideas over in his head as one might examine polished gems. “Yet you spoke the truth to me. Why?”
    She was tempted to lie, or make some evasion, but the subtle pressure of his magic bore down on her will. It felt like a ghostly hand drawing truth from a locked compartment. Frightening, and unpleasant. An answer leapt from her. “Because I liked you too well to treat you as just another source of coin. You deserved better than that.”
    His smile was slow and