Kiegan sat back, crossing his huge arms over his chest and watching us knowingly.
“Then meet me in the common room in ten minutes. Wear something discreet.”
As if anyone looked twice at mortals to begin with.
Also, it would take me ten minutes just to make it up those stairs.
As Fieran strode away, radiating irritation, Kiegan winked at me. “You’re welcome.”
Thirty-One
“Ithought this was a mistake,” I told Fieran when I found him in the common room, waiting for me impatiently. I closed my bedroom door with a bang, worried Fieran would somehow sense my illicit book, my connection with Ander. “That we had to wait.”
“It would be wise,” he muttered. “But you obviously aren’t going to trust me or my plans until Tay is on his feet.”
“Trust your plans?” I echoed. How surreal. “You won’t tell me your plans.Youdon’t trustme.”
“You’ll tell my plans to Ander if you think it’ll help Lidi and Tay,” he said the words as simple fact, as if he didn’t have any feelings around that truth. It was probably yet another of his lies.
“Not if you give me a reason to trust you.”
“That is the problem, isn’t it? One of us has to bow first.” He gestured me ahead of him, sweeping one arm in front of him in a mocking little half bow. “Which I’m trying to do, by saving Tay and having him returned home, so no one will hold power over you.”
“You’re the one with all the power, aren’t you, Fieran?”
“I wish.” There was something heated about his gaze.
If he’d been keeping Tay in the healing sleep in order to maintain hispower over me, maybe this was him surrendering. Or maybe he genuinely wanted me to trust him.
We crossed the foyer as shifters streamed around us, giving Fieran a wide berth. For once, I didn’t feel as if I might be carelessly knocked over by jostling shifters who either paid me no mind or intended to hurt the mortal.
Two shifters were pulling the enormous arched doors, shutting out the arc of the dark night sky. When Fieran called to them, they paused.
As Fieran walked through the gap, I hesitated just inside the threshold.
“Trust me to get you back into bed tonight, or stay there,” Fieran said without looking back over his shoulder.
Fuck. I smiled my thanks at the two just as they started to move the doors anyway—assholes—and I slipped through the closing gap in the doors.
Then I was out on the marble stairs down to the city. The cold night air slapped me in the face as I rushed to catch up to Fieran, with his damned long legs. “Don’t suppose you care to explain the plans for how we get back in?”
“No. Over time, you’ll come to trust me.”
“Is that so?” The two of us reached the bottom of the steps. “I have ideas for how you might earn my trust.”
“I already have a simple seventy-two-step plan to do just that,” he promised me.
“Seventy-two steps?”
“I know you’ll be difficult.”
Two Fae walked past us, arm-in-arm; their eyes studied me for too-long a second before they flickered to Fieran, and the tension that trembled in the air died.
When my shoulder bumped his arm, I was startled by how I’d moved close to him. He didn’t comment, for once.
A shimmering silver moth, bigger than my hand, fluttered by my face. I glanced down the alleyway it flew toward. There were no stacked crates or discarded trash or tidy herb gardens between businesses in the village; instead, the alley was a slice of forest, the entrance to it dark and foreboding.
“If I tell you not to come out here at night,” Fieran asked casually. “Will you do it just to spite me?”
