Aelin picked a book from the shelf when they returned, climbing onto the sofa to sit beside him. Silva listened to the musical cadence of his voice, the gentle rise and fall of it, so long absent from her life.
“Why do you have such big teeth?” Aelin’s small voice halted his, and Silva craned her neck, trying to see what her daughter saw.
“These? These are my tusks.” He held open his mouth, letting her examine his teeth more closely, including the jagged proliferation inside. “I have them because my father was an orc, and orcs have tusks.”
She eyed his tusks closely. “Do they hurt you?”
“No. Not at all. And I’m very glad to have them. If I weren’t an orc, that dragon would have been able to bite me after all. He was much faster than me, butIwas stronger.”
Aelin considered this, tilting her head as she did so before nodding again. “I’m glad you have them too.”
Tate continued reading, and by the middle of the second story, Silva could tell Aelin was fading. He stopped once her head had dropped, carefully bringing his arm around her, letting her rest against his side. Silva heard his shuddering breath, and she understood that moment. She remembered the first time she’d learned the weight of her tiny girl against her. She wasn’t nearly as tiny anymore, but this was stillthatmoment for him.
For a yawning expanse, the only sound in the room was the hum of the ventilation system and the steady breathing of their girl, slumped against him.
“Maybe we can go to therapy.” She’d already planned on seeing a therapist of her own and had an appointment with Dynah’s the following week. “Together. I just think . . . we need to start in a better place. You need to let us in, Tate. We can’t move forward if there’s a mountain of secrets between us.”
“What would you like to know, Silva? I think we’re a bit past the point of secrets, to be honest. Would you like the name of my childhood bullies? I have them committed to memory. Would you like to hear about the way a body steams when it’s cut open in a cold forest? I have a firsthand account to share. I’ll tell you anything you’d like to hear. But I’ll expect the same in return. For starters, what were you doing in Winter?”
She was almost stunned at his deftness in turning the requirement of truth back on her.That’snot what I meant.
“I-I told you already. I spent two years looking for you! Do you think that meant on street cornershere? I read things, I researched. I found shops that dealvaluable bits of ephemera,” she mimicked the cat man’s words. “I bought a key at one of them. A key that led to a gate.”
She couldn’t see his face from where she sat at the desk. She could only see the back of his head, but she could tell from the tense set of his shoulders that the pressure of Aelin slumped against him was the only thing keeping him in his seat.
“And where didthattake you, Silva?”
She swallowed hard.Who asked for all this honesty? Maybe relationships are better with a few secrets?“The Court of Winter. I was taken to the Queen.”
“Fucking stars—” He cut off, his free arm raising above his head, hand clenched into a fist. “Silva, I’m never going to be able to bend over again without feeling as though I’m being run through with hot pokers. I had a piece of atreein my skull. All to keep yousafefrom the other side. Safe from harm. Only to find the instant I was gone, you went skipping off to Faerie, not knowing your arse from your elbow, and had a catered sit-down lunch.”
It was impressive that he was managing to keep his voice a low hiss, determined not to wake the little girl beside him.
Silva folded her hands primly on the desk before her. “You told me just the other day you’ve cracked your skull before, so.” She shrugged.
He was trying to crane his neck over his shoulder to see her, grunting in pain as he did so.
“What else? You need to tell meeverything, Silva.”
“Why do you think that’s going to help now—”
“Because it’s going to be horribly ironic if I killed the bastard with my bare fucking hands only for you to have given them another way to find you.”
His words silenced her. She pursed her lips, wrinkling her nose. She’d become too used to not being accountable to anyone for this sort of interrogation.Thisisn’t what I meant. All she’d wanted to do was find him.But he told you not to. He told you not to wait for him. She exhaled sharply.Thiswasn’t what she meant by disclosing secrets. “There’s a florist in the city. Right here, in Bridgeton. Do you remember that party I went to? Well, it was years ago . . . She has access to a flower market. It’s - it’s a hallway.”
“A hallway to a flower market. Silva,tell meyou didn’t go to the fucking Court of Flowers.”
“It was just the market! An in-between space she called it, to browse without making commitments.” Silva hesitated. She didn’t want to continue,hatedrevisiting that horrible day in her memory but she knew he was right. “I followed the pathway, and it took me to a forest clearing.”
Tate made a wounded animal sound in his throat, like a small dog who’d found its paw inexplicably stuck in the door. “Did it take you to the court?”
“No. But . . . but the Queen was there. Just standing there. She made it seem as though—” She broke off, her face heating in a rush. “I was still pregnant then. She made it seem as though the baby was running around, hiding from me in the trees. But I never left the path, and as soon as I followed it back to the market, Aelin was back where she belonged, inside me.”
Tate was silent. The Pixie’s ventilation system clicked, the fan kicking on somewhere deeper in the building. Aelin’s steady breath was like the pull of the tide.
“That’s when I knew I had to stop. Looking for you, I mean. I would’ve searched for you forever. But I’d put her in danger, and I couldn’t do that again.”
It was a long moment before Tate spoke again, his voice tight. “Did you eat anything in Spring? Drink? Anything at all?”
