Then I dared a glance at him. Her light reflected off his face, off those hard lines and angles, off the mad, careless smile that wrote itself over his lips. He was lit with gold.
His hand tightened on mine, and I tensed, ready to drop and reach for my boot knife if he made a move. The odds seemed impossible, but he was the most impossible man I’d ever met.
Instead, he raised his free hand, palms out, in mocking surrender.
“Hello, Mother.”
Thirty-Three
Icould barely fathom this most recent secret of Fieran’s. “Were you going to mention the Fae Queen was your mother?”
How had I been so stupid? Fear had seemed to see himself as a king, so I thought Ander called him a prince to mock his arrogance. I wanted to slap myself almost as much as I wanted to slap him.
We were alone in an enormous room. The queen’s castle, like the rest of the city, felt as if it were an organic thing, but everything here felt wrong somehow. We were surrounded by towering rose quartz walls, veined with gold, and I could’ve sworn the walls pulsed. I only caught their shivers out of the corner of my eye, but it made me want to run.
Fieran’s hands were bound, though he looked relaxed and at ease even now, as if he was merely going along with the pretense that he could be held. “I heavily implied it. I told you I could protect you from anyone but her.”
He was so full of bullshit. I wasn’t sure if he was worse when he was lying or when he was feeding me those endless half-truths. “That’s not a very comforting thought, given where we are now. What does she want with you?”
He gave me a look that said I knew the answer.
“Fuck, Fieran,” I said as the truth set in. “What does she want fromme?”
“She wants to know whatIwant from you.”
“But I don’t know anything!”
“You’re welcome. I’ve been keeping you in the dark for your own benefit.”
“I cannot tell you how much I want to take my chance to punch you now while your hands are bound.”
“You’re welcome to try,” he assured me. “I’m happy to take any opportunity to train you for the arena.”
I turned away in exasperation. “How do we get out of this?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Something will come to me. She thinks I’m scheming for her throne.”
“But you aren’t?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want a throne. I want freedom for shifters, Fae, and mortals alike. She should know that by now.”
He raised his voice on the last sentence, looking around meaningfully.
When I looked up, the queen was on her throne. My stomach dropped.
Neither the queen nor throne had been there a heartbeat before, and the entire image was terrifying. Beautiful though she was, she sat in a throne woven of gold-dipped bones.
Enormous bones.
Dragon bones.
She’d heard all of our conversation, hadn’t she? Playing it back now, I was sure Fieran had been manipulating it to make sure I confessed my ignorance.
He was trying to make her believe I knew nothing.
“Little mortal girl,” she said with a purr.
The way she looked at me reminded me of the Fae who had stripped my magic, and once-cold fear, dormant for almost twenty years, rippled through me. I found myself frozen, the same as I had been when I was a child screaming for help that never arrived.
