Control.
There will be time for Cowen later. When I can take my time with him, and make sure he understandswhyhe’s dying.
When I refocus, he’s gesturing toward the lodge. Her protector guides her through the doors and into the entrance hall. She glances toward the wall, then away but not before I see what’s there.
Trophies. Dozens of them.
Antlers spread from polished plaques—twelve-point, sixteen-point, configurations even larger. Tusks curving in cruel arcs, yellowed with age. Ram horns spiraling tight. Bone ridges that must have grown along spines before they were sawed free. Brass plates beneath each one are engraved with dates and names of those who made the kills.
Alleria fixes her gaze on the floor, on her protector’s boots, and on her own white-knuckled fists. She won’t look at the walls.
I do.
The connection shows me everything in her field of vision whether she focuses on it or not. The trophies are grouped by type—antlers near the door, tusks along the far wall. Above the fireplace, a single rack spreads wider than a man’s armspan. The centerpiece. Cowen’s pride.
Each one was grown on a living fae body. Each one was cut free after the kill.
I can’t recognize who any of them were. There are no faces or ways to identify the fae who died wearing these modifications. But I swear a silent oath that Cowen will answer for every single one.
Alleria climbs the stairs, and the wall of trophies falls behind us. The room she’s taken to has a fire in the hearth, a bed, and a copper tub waiting for her.
“I’m right next door,” her protector says. “Anything you need.”
Emotion floods through the bond again, a twisting, nauseating guilt that steals the strength from her legs. She sinks into the bathtub, hands shaking, thinking about the trophies on the wall, and standing in the clearing with her bow drawn.
I was going to do that.
The thought rises through the bond, clear as speech.
I was going to kill him, take the antlers, hang them in my room and never wonder if he felt it.
Horror follows guilt, then shame, and underneath that, so faint I almost miss it, she’s wondering where I am, and whether the hunters will find me.
She hopes they won’t.
Interesting.
Her thoughts keep circling. My hands on her skin when I healed her. My mouth on her breasts when the guards knocked. The way I pinned her to the floor, her body trapped beneath mine.
And the butter knife.
Back at my body, my mouth curves. She’d moved with all the stealth of a drunken cow, picked up the knife from the table and crept across the room. When she knelt beside me with the blade pressed to my throat, her hands shook so badly the vibration traveled through the steel into my skin.
A butter knife isn’t much of a weapon, but shemighthave opened a vein before I could stop her. Instead, she gave herself time to think. Thinking is fatal when you’re trying to kill someone faster and stronger than you.
The bathwater cools around her. She gets out, dries and pulls on clothes. The sounds of voices drift up from below, but she doesn’t go down to join them. Instead she retires to her bed and stares at the ceiling while her thoughts grow fuzzy, still thinking of me. My face appearing and disappearing in her mind.
When her awareness softens into sleep, I slip back down the bond and release the connection.
My eyes open in the hedgerow. Through the gaps in the leaves, I can see the moon, fat and silver, riding high above the trees … and itcallsto me in a way I can’t ignore.
I crawl out of my hiding place, and move deeper into the trees, away from the Dell’s boundary. When I’m far enough that the torchlight from the gates is just a faint glow through the branches, I find a gap in the canopy where moonlight pools on the forest floor. Stretching out on my back in the dirt, I tilt my face upward.
For every night of my captivity, I watched the moon rise and set through iron bars. Every night I felt it call and couldn’t answer. I could see it, but I couldn’t touch it. The collar drained everything I tried to draw, turned the connection into agony, until I learned to stop reaching. Until I learned to look at the moon and feelnothing, because anything else would have broken me.
Now I reach for it, and power answers.
The moonlight sinks into my skin. I close my eyes and let it slide through me. Drop by slow drop, the emptiness inside me fills. I breathe it in until my lungs ache, until every nerve ending burns with moonstruck power once more.
