I don’t think he’s ever been close to anyone before, not the way he traces over the freckles on my arms and inspects the scars on my hands before questioning me closely on how they came about.
“Mostly clumsiness,” I tell him. “This one was when I skinned my knuckle putting a plate back in a cupboard and I caught it on the edge of the wood. Silly really.”
Linton growls under his breath, as if he could fight the kitchen and win me back my skin.
“I dislike you’ve been hurt, my Kaitlyn.”
“It hurt for a fraction of a second, Linton, and it happened many years ago.”
“But you still recall it.”
“Because it was silly.”
He growls again under his breath, obviously thinking I might not hear it.
“I don’t want you to hurt.”
“And I don’t want you to hurt either, which is why I didn’t want you to get involved in informing the human world beyond the veil about the Faerie.”
The growl gets louder.
“I appreciate keeping you from it will be impossible, and anyway, like I’d ever let you out of my sight again.” I pinch his chin between my thumb and forefinger. “You’re a liability.”
“What the brothers put in my head is no longer there,” Linton says with some confidence. “The hunter’s moon took it.”
“It took it?” I run my hands through Linton’s long, silky hair, deliberately not avoiding his antennae which have folded flat again. “You know everything now?”
He half closes his eyes and hums with delight. “I already knew everything,” he says. “Like I know you would not go alone on your quest, and I would always come with you.”
I have a feeling this is because I probably couldn’t have stopped my mothman stalker regardless. I wanted so much to make sure he didn’t get hurt, I didn’t see how stopping him would have hurt him the most.
And after all, myquestas he puts it, is only to find out if the lottery has stopped. Yes, we still have Tam Lin to deal with, but that, potentially, would have always been the case.
Finding out what I need to know shouldn’t pose any risk to either of us. And from everything I’ve seen so far, all that’s happened to Linton is he’s been used by everyone he’s come into contact with, from the Faerie pulling him into their war, to the brothers of the stronghold who practiced mind control on him to turn him into an assassin and stop him from coming back to his home.
And what a home it is. It’s everything I would have expected from Linton and more, only perhaps less chaos. Because the chaos isn’t who he is, it’s who he has become.
I would never want to separate him from the chaos, but seeing what went before it, it grounds me as I think it does him.
A soft snore alerts me to the fact mynever sleepingmothman is, once again, asleep.
“What didyou do with my knickers?” I ask as I retrieve my dress from the floor.
Linton lounges in the bed, entirely naked, one arm tucked behind his head, eyes following my every movement.
I doubt he’s ever been this comfortable whilst watching me.
“Knickers?” he says, in the tone of someone who is very bad at lying.
“My undergarments. You removed them with your teeth,” I point out.
Linton grins at me, showing all of his teeth.
“You were delicious.”
“And my knickers?”
“So were they.”
