“Fine then. If I can’t have you, then you can just be this ugly burnt thing that I leave behind. This will mark you as mine, and no one will touch you.” He doesn’t stop burning me. My hair catches on fire. All of me screams and screams and screams as he tortures me, as he burns away anything he thinks is pretty. “I’ll leave that pretty face. It’s my favourite part of you.” Hisfoot kicks into my stomach, and my cries increase. “You will change your mind. I’ll come back for you one day.”
“No, you won’t,” I manage to whisper with every bit of strength I have left. “I am choosing to take you to death with me, Eli, and only one of us is going to burn in hell.”
He looks up, his eyes widening as he realizes what I’ve done. In my time here, I found all the gas pipes in the walls and floor. I dug through the walls and ground, cutting my hands and ripping my nails off, but I knew it was the only way. When he came in, I opened the pipe by the fireplace, and now it’s too late for us both. The air explodes with fire, slamming into him, throwing him away from me as it rips across the room in front of my eyes. I just smile. Even as I begin to burn again. “Tannith, I’m sorry. Goodbye.”
I wake up with a gasp, a hand stroking my face, pulling the hair away from my cheek. The memory of Eli fades from my nightmare, and I remind myself I did survive. That humans found me, a healer took pity on me, and I woke up with Tannith holding my hand. It took months for the healer to make it possible for me to even get out of the bed. Many more months before I could wear clothes and function on my own.
I was told there was nothing much left of the house other than ashes and my body under the rubble, and I know Eli must be dead. He would have come after me if he weren’t. There was a madness to that wolf that will always scare me, but he just lives in my nightmares. Not reality. He is dead. “Fire. Fire. No! Stop the burning!” I whisper a plea, struggling to push the feeling of the burning from my mind. The pain feels so real.
“You’re not burning.” Reed’s hands cup my face, pressing me against his chest, his voice so firm that I pause. I hear his heart beating fast next to my ear, and I focus on it, letting the memory wash away like a river. “I’m here,” Reed breathes into my ear, smelling just like the salty sea. “I get nightmares too, and I knowit helps to focus on something real when you wake up. Listen to my heartbeat, little human. You’re not alone, and you’re definitely not burning when a water prince heir is holding you.” For a long time, I just do as he says, listening to his heartbeat until my shoulders untense and drop, until I unclench his shirt I’ve been grasping. “Why would you be burning, little human?”
“I’m scared of fire,” I whisper into the room. I can’t tell him about Eli and the burns, but I give him a bit of the truth. I glance at the other bed in the room and see Elizabeth isn’t in it. It doesn’t surprise me; she often falls asleep on the sofa downstairs and chooses to sleep on it.
He holds me closer. “I should have seen that. You didn’t want to sleep by the fires we made, even when you were shivering. I’m so sorry.” He breathes the words into my ear. “I’m so sorry for so much between us, little human. There is one thing I’m good at, and it’s fucking up everything decent in my life.”
The curtains are wide open, and moonlight is shimmering onto the end of the bed. I don’t know where Tannith is, but Reed is in bed with me, and I’m curled up on his lap. His thick arms are wrapped around me, and my legs are on his lap, my head pushed against his chest. I look up, wary of meeting his blue eyes. I want to compare his eyes to the ocean, but there is nothing I’ve seen as blue as Reed’s eyes. The way he is looking at me…it’s different. He is too good-looking to be looking at me of all people.
“You locked me in here,” I whisper. “It’s triggering for me…my past is complicated, but please don’t lock me in here anymore.”
His head drops in shame, and his words are just for me. “I heard you screaming, and I rushed in. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just got into bed and held you until you woke up. The door’s been open for hours, and we were planning to talk to you in the morning and apologize. It’s only been a few hours,but still, we fucked up.” He gulps. “I get it if you hate me, and I’ll make it up to you if it’s the last thing I do. I am not making an excuse for any of this, but our lives back home are filled with backstabbing betrayers who would do anything to get close to the throne. To be alpha. I’ve been alive long enough to know I couldn’t trust a single person except for Blackfire and Orion…and now there is you.”
There is you.It almost sounds like I am one of them, and that can’t be true. Tannith is the only person who has my back, who is my family and who loves me. They have each other, and I am not part of them. I huff. “You don’t think I’m some spy then, sent to win this contest with my monster stalker?”
“Is that what he is to you? A stalker?” He stares at me, and I shrug. I don’t trust Reed enough to tell him about my monster. “Fine. Blackfire has his own suspicions and paranoia, but…no. Yes. I do think you’re keeping secrets, but aren’t we all? I don’t care if you have a monster stalker, only that you’re safe.”
I’ve never been safe, not really. Eli wiped away any trace of my life where I felt like I had a chance at being normal. He made sure no one would want me once they saw what I hide beneath clothes.
“Distract me,” I whisper, my heart pounding. I don’t know what I’m asking for, only that I need something.
A rumble echoes through his chest. “There’s so many ways I’d love to distract you, but not when you’re upset, and this is new.” He smiles at me, and his smile is distracting enough. He holds his hand up in the air, and water appears. Drops of water appear from everywhere, from the ceiling, from the floorboards, shimmering in the air around us. Several of them gather together, and they make beautiful flowers, reflecting the moonlight so dots of silver light bounce around the darkness. The flowers spin in the air, and each one is a different type of flower.
The moonlight casts a silver-blue hint of light across Reed’s face, and I smile back at him. Reed’s magic dances the flowers around the room, and I watch, admiring magic for the first time in my life. Maybe not all magic is some horrid thing made for pain. Maybe magic can be beautiful too.
I don’t know how long we spend together in the night, but it feels perfect. Normal. Like I’ve woken from a nightmare into something that feels like home.
“Do you know that when I first saw you, I realized I wanted you, and the force of that feeling nearly sent me to my knees? I would have crawled to you, and I didn’t even know your name.” I suck in a deep breath as he turns my chin towards him with the touch of his finger. “I know that sounds strange to you, but I’ve never wanted anyone for myself before. Everyone I’ve come close to has been a distraction to pass the time and nothing more. I didn’t know what to do with you, this new feeling. I’ve never been as obsessed with anything in this world as I suddenly became with you. I thought maybe you could be my fated mate. My parents are fated mates, and they’re extremely rare, a bond that’s given to them by the goddesses above. The mate mark we have is a copy of what a true mark is between fated mates, and I’ve heard it would never compare.
“Fated mates are only found when a series of three moments happen in their lives. They first have to be in danger; that starts the bond between them. And then they have to commit to each other with words of love. The final part, which will truly bind them for life, allow them to speak in each other’s minds, share powers and feel each other’s emotions is sex. I thought maybe you could be my mate, but then you nearly died under the water, and no bond began with us. I remembered that you’re human and that a bond can’t be here between us. It’s only a bond that wolves share.” He sounds so sad, and I don’t know what to say back. “I realized that I don’t care, approximately two secondslater. I just want you withme. If you’re a spy, and you’re going to kill me, then fine, kill me. Just don’t leave my side, Meredith Crone, please.”
Goddesses above…he is intense, and his confession is so raw between us. “Reed?—”
He groans, tightening his hands on my waist. “I fucking love when you say my name. Say it again.”
I feel my core tighten. “Reed…you do know that when we eventually leave the Folkland, I am bound to the Crone Pack alpha, and he marked me. He is not going to let me go, and I can’t…” I can’t say “do this.” Fall in love with him. He will destroy me, and I know it because he has already begun to.
“I’m secretly a bastard because I don’t want the Folkland to end. I don’t want this time to end where it is just us, where I can get to know you and get closer to you. Please say you forgive me and that you will give us a chance.” He nudges my cheek and breathes me in. “Also, Meredith, what makes you think I won’t begin a pack war to keep you for myself?”
A war.For me.
“You know I’m human. I can’t offer you a full life,” I whisper. My heart is beating so fast he must hear it.
“But you feel this, right?” His hand slides through my hair, running the soft locks through his fingers. “You feel this draw we have to each other?”
I breathe in because I do. It would be a complete lie if I said I didn’t, because when he locked me in here, it hurt because I have feelings for him.
He leans down, and I just know, when he kisses me, it’s going to change everything. I don’t find myself wanting him to stop, though. I find myself wanting him to continue. I find myself wanting him to kiss me again, and this time, not to save my life. This time, to claim me. The door slams open, and we wrenchapart. A big brown wolf stomps in, claws clicking on the wood and rain dripping off his fur. Orion.
I’ve not really seen him this close up, but he’s just as huge, and somehow he is even pretty in wolf form. His head has to duck to come through the doorframe, and his body barely squeezes through the small space. Brown, deep brown, soft fur smothers all of him, and his massive jaw has two sharp teeth hanging out, jutting into the bottom of his mouth. There are waves of green throughout his fur that the moonlight, and the smell of maple syrup makes my mouth water.
