Knox and I exchange a shocked glance. This woman. She has no power, yet, and is in a house with a bunch of strangers and commanding a thousand-year-old dragon. If I wasn’t so pissed she was here, I may actually allow myself to like her. But that’s not going to happen.
“This is your house. I’m a guest.”
“I could kill you. I want to,” Emmett grits out, his eyes pulsing with lust.
“No, you don’t.”
The fuck?
“You don’t want to kill me. You are good. I said it before and I still say it now, Emmett. You lose control and that’s what you don’t want to happen. Perhaps if you’re around me, then I can help you. Desensitize you, if you will.”
“I don’t think I could ever become desensitized to you,” his words are soft.
She smiles. “You stay down there and I will stay down here.”
“Ev.” Callum glances at her.
Ev. Fucking Ev. Pet names? I knew he felt a connection to her when he told me about her at the club. He’s obsessed. He’s been beating himself up for the last several hundred years because he held himself responsible for the true fae getting wiped from existence.
Was it him that hunted them?
No.
Was it him that fought for them? With them?
Yes.
He hasn’t told me much about the night he had to save little Aleida, only that he thought he failed and that guilt has stayed with him for all of these years.
And then Everlee walks into the club. Our club.
She’s the first true fae born in several hundred years.
Hiding. Waiting.
I don’t pretend to know as much about the true fae as Callum does. He’s scoured the earth one hundred times around to find any and all documents related to the true fae. What their life cycles are like, their powers, their ability to reincarnate, everything. When they were hunted and killed, the hunters tried to wipe their entire existence from the world by setting everything on fire. So Callum set them on fire.
For years, he traveled around to the towns that killed off the true fae and killed them all. A lot of it was his own guilt for not saving Aleida and feeling like he let his friends down. His family.
He doesn’t talk about it much, but he was abandoned when he was younger. He was told hunters killed his mother because they thought she was protecting gold and treasure in her cave. It washertreasure. Him.
Sofrai and Feyra, the two fae that found him, said they believe that in his mother’s final act, she used her tail to slide him over into a crack in the cave wall. He was dying because it had been days since he ate, so Feyra and Sofrai made quick work and carried him back to their village where they used their combined resources and magic to bring him back to good health. He grew and became their guardian. Protected them. Until he couldn’t. When he lost them, he lost his family. He lost everything.
His home.
That’s what he’s trying to get back. It’s what he was trying to get back when Samara took his wings. I’ve been able to figure out what everyone asked for to get their most prized possession taken from them but him. I can’t figure out how she could have used his words against him to take his wings.
But he doesn’t need his wings to be alpha. He just commands it.
Except with Everlee. She doesn’t seem to give a shit, which I find amusing.
“It’ll be fine,” Everlee says, taking a seat behind me at the bar.
“Do whatever you want, but I’m not playing go between if he decides he wants a taste.”
“Jax,” Emmett warns.
“What? It’s not my fucking fault if she wants to do this.”
