Alaric had used words to destroy him. Had whispered lies and called them friendship. Had made promises and called them truth. Words were a battlefield Gareth no longer wished to fight on. So he let silence become his armor. Let his sword speak for him. Let his reputation spread—The Silent Reaper, they called him, because death came without warning when he was involved.
The last word he spoke was his betrayer’s name.
Alaric.
A curse. A promise.
Three years passed. The silence held. And Gareth waited—for what, he couldn’t say. Revenge, perhaps. Justice. Or simply an end to the hollow ache where his trust used to live.
He was still waiting when the storm came.
CHAPTER 2
London, England, Present Day?—
The coffee had gonecold an hour ago. Elodie Hart didn’t notice. She was too busy triple-checking her citation formatting for the third time, her reading glasses sliding down her nose as she hunched over her laptop in the cramped office she shared with two other research fellows—neither of whom were present, which suited her fine. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with a buzzing that seemed designed to induce migraines, and somewhere in the building, a pipe was making a sound like a dying whale. She loved academia. She really did. Even the dying whale sounds.
“Okay,” she muttered to herself, scrolling through the PowerPoint presentation. “Slide fourteen. Provenance analysis. Clear, concise, conservative.” She’d used the word conservative approximately forty-seven times in the last draft. It had become a kind of talisman.See? I’m sensible. I’m rigorous. I don’t believe in fairies.
Not anymore, anyway.
Her phone buzzed with a text. Jennifer’s name flashed on the screen with a string of emojis—a fairy, a question mark, and what appeared to be a tiny castle.
Conference prep going okay? Remember to breathe.
Breathing is for people who haven’t rewritten their methodology section six times.
That bad?
Wiggam is on the panel.
Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.
Ah. The one who called your fae paper “charming but fundamentally unserious”?
Elodie winced. She didn’t need the reminder. The memory lived rent-free in her head, popping up at inopportune moments like a particularly persistent ghost. Five years ago, fresh from her doctorate and still naïve enough to believe that original thinking was rewarded in academia, she’d published a paper that had effectively ended her career before it began.
The Archaeology of Enchantment: Material Evidence for Fairy Belief in Medieval Britain.
It had been rigorous. It had been interdisciplinary. And it had connected archaeological evidence—ritual deposits, unusual site formations, the deliberate placement of objects at liminal spaces—to documented folklore in ways no one had attempted before. She’d argued that understanding why medieval people believed in the fair folk could illuminate both their material culture and their inner lives. The academic establishment had not been impressed.
Whimsical, they’d called it. Imaginative—and not as a compliment. Perhaps Dr. Hart would be better suited to writing children’s books. That last one had come from Wiggam himself, delivered with a patronizing smile at a conference three years ago while she stood there holding a glass of wine she suddenly wanted to throw in his face.
She hadn’t, of course. She’d smiled, nodded, and spent the next two hours hiding in a bathroom stall, stress-eating the emergency chocolate bar from her bag.
The Fae Paper followed her everywhere now. Every grant application, every job interview, someone brought it up. Sometimes subtly,I see you have an interest in folk belief systems, and sometimes not.Aren’t you the fairy girl?She’d learned to keep her head down. To write safe papers about safe topics. To never, ever let anyone see the part of her that still believed the world might contain wonders.
Another text.
You’ll be brilliant. And if Wiggam says anything, just remember he’s a miserable old goat who hasn’t published anything interesting since 1987.
Elodie smiled despite herself.
How do you always know what to say?
It’s a gift. Now go eat something. Preferably not the chocolate bar you’ve been carrying in your bag for six months.
“It’s only been four months,” Elodie said aloud, then realized she was talking to an empty room. Excellent. Very professional. Very not-weird-at-all.
