The thump of the bass reverberates in my chest, and I’m transported back to the last time I was here, the night of the Yule Ball.
ChapterFifteen
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. — Seneca
16 YEARS AGO
Cruel. The word echoed in my mind as I lay in bed the night of the Yule Ball. Chance Delaney confirmed that Seven had stood me up, that the ribbon, the invitation, everything was a painful, humiliating joke. “Seven did you a favor…”
Hurt and mortification seeped like rot to my bones, flooding my face with new tears. Images of people laughing at me flashed through my head. Was I any better than a worm caught under a shoe? I was a joke, the laughingstock of Devashire. And the most humiliating part was realizing how naive I’d been. Why had I assumed the social order wouldn’t apply to me? I was a pixie. He was a leprechaun. Any relationship we’d had was destined to fail.
How many people had warned me? No leprechaun would be caught in public with a pixie on his arm. Oh, leprechaun men might enjoy a tryst with a pixie. They might do things in private for their own pleasure, but they did not date, and they did not marry, anyone but other leprechauns. It had always been this way. Why would I think we’d be different?
The problem was I’d taken to heart all the lectures in school about ending bigotry between species. I’d thought modern fae society was ready for change. I dreamed Seven and I would be the first leprechaun/pixie couple to publicly marry. The first but not the last. We’d be boundary breakers. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that pixies and satyrs didn’t share interspecies relationships, but now mixed couples were common. No one thought anything of it.
But leprechauns were different. Everyone had tried to tell me as much, and I’d ignored them. And the worst part was I’dsavedmyself for him. Almost every girl in my class had lost their virginity. But there I was, still a child at almost eighteen years old.
Miserable, I stared up at the ceiling. I couldn’t sleep. There was too much pain. Everything hurt. My humiliation seemed to fill the room from floor to ceiling, pressing against the walls. All at once, I couldn’t catch my breath. I ran to the window and threw it open, gasping at the cool night as if I’d been drowning.
I had to get out of that room. I had to blow off steam, or I’d never survive this. It would break me. Either I walked down to the kitchen and found a knife to slit my wrists, or I crawled out that window and found a way to numb the pain. There was really no other option.
Before I could chicken out, I got up, got dressed, and snuck out my window. The shuttle didn’t run that late, and it was too far to fly, but I hitched a ride with some human tourists. The bouncer let me in the moment he saw me. I was cute and young, the type of pixie human men loved, plus I’d enhanced my features to make the most of my best attributes. And I must have looked vulnerable. Vulnerability made me catnip to human men, a limping gazelle through a savannah of hungry lions.
I hadn’t even made it to the bar before men started buying me drinks. There’s no drinking age in Dragonfly, but my parents had one. Had my mother known I was in a club, drinking alcohol with humans, she would have grounded me for the next decade. But I drank every fruity cocktail those men bought for me, and I flirted with every man who would pay me any bit of attention.
Anything to soothe the ache in my heart and the humiliation Seven and his father had doled out. They’d made me feel like nothing. Less than nothing. Worthless. The compliments and flirtation temporarily filled a gaping hole in my heart. I was smart enough to know their words weren’t genuine, but I didn’t care. Bathing in their attentiveness was the balm I needed that night.
And thenhewalked in. I’d always had a thing for American movie stars, and this man could have passed for one. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, he was tall and unbelievably broad shouldered, with a torso that tapered to a narrow waist. Women—human, pixie, and satyr alike—watched him cross the room. I couldn’t tear my eyes away, and when he walked straight up to me, my breath caught in my throat.
“You look like a woman in need of some fun,” Dark Stranger said, loud enough to be heard over the throb of the music. “Hard day?”
I loved that he called me a woman and not a pixie, although my wings were out. Humans often made the delineation. “The worst,” I said. “My date stood me up. Just ghosted me.”
He stepped in closer and leaned one elbow against the bar beside me. Gods, he smelled good, like expensive cologne but with a whiff of the outdoors, like he’d just chopped wood or something. I became temporarily speechless as I fantasized about the man wielding an axe, shirtless. I took a deep breath through my nose.
“Couldn’t have been an intelligent man if he stood you up,” he said.
“I thought he was,” I said truthfully.
“You knew him well then.”
“I thought I did.”
“Now you’re not sure.”
I shook my head. When I met his gaze, there were tears blurring mine. “I think… maybe I was a game to him. We were playing a game I didn’t even know we were playing, and so I lost.”
He wiped a tear from under my eye with his thumb. “How could you ever think that? You’re not a game. This man, I have a feeling he’ll come crawling back to you with his tail between his legs.”
The bartender slid a drink into his hand, the dark amber liquid sloshing as he raised it to his lips. The faint tinge of liquor reached my nose as I leaned forward and said, “Maybe I don’t want him to. Sometimes it’s just all too hard, you know?” I rested a hand on his forearm.
Those fathomless blue eyes stared right into me. “Tell me something, what did you like about this guy who ghosted you—I mean… before?”
I sipped my drink. All I wanted to do was trash Seven. I didn’t want to think about why I’d loved him. I’d rather think about how I was going to wreak vengeance on him. But I found the question impossible to resist.
I stirred my drink with my straw. “I guess it was how he saw me.”
“How he looked at you. So it was the attention.”
