“Is all right, Cathal.” I shrug his hands off my arms.
Though his reluctance to let me go is whittled into every line and hollow of his face, when I walk Behati to the door, he stays put.
Right before she reaches for the handle, she slashes her finger on the back of her pearl earring. “I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. I fathom you have many.”
Since I imagine this isn’t what she stole me away from Cathal to say, I remain quiet as she paints a sigil on my door—the one to slip through walls.
Sure enough, before pressing her palm to it, she leans over to kiss me on both cheeks, except she doesn’t do it to wish me farewell but to disguise a whisper. “That male isn’t your mate. Not anymore.” She moves her mouth to my other cheek, brushes her lips against it, and adds, “I had a vision.” And then she presses her palms to my forehead. The scene plays out in devastating detail.
For long seconds after she leaves, I stare at the door, at the bloodied drips of the cross circled in more blood.
I didn’t think anything could stun me more than learning I had a life before this one, but I was evidently mistaken, for her last confession has rooted my feet to the stone and the air to my lungs. I close my eyes to gather my bearings, but all that does is drive her vision back to the forefront of my skull.
“What did that woman say to you, Príona?” Cathal’s voice strokes over my forehead.
I startle and winch my neck. Anger exudes from his stare like smoke from his pores. In silence, he watches me and I watch him back. It’s become so quiet that I can hear my white nightgownmove over my pounding chest as though it were crafted from rows of pearls instead of silk and lace.
I sense his shadows wanting to devour the distance between our bodies, the same way I sense him restraining them.
“What did she show you?” he grits out. “Why have you lost all color in your cheeks?”
His anger used to scare me, but not anymore. Not now that I understand its source. Mates are sacred to Crows, and he lost his.
“In past, we mind-speak?” I twirl my finger to indicate him and me.
“Yes.”
“Is it?”
He frowns. “Is it what?”
“What make mates? Mind link only? No mark on skin? Or…” I shrug. “Or other?”
“The mind link is the most obvious sign.”
“What else?”
He takes a step toward me, but I hold up my palm to keep him at bay.
“Mates cannot live without one another, Daya. When my sister-in-law was killed, my brother—” His voice breaks, but then he repairs it with a deep inhalation. “My brother asked Lorcan to end his life.”
“When Meriam kill me, you ask die?”
“I—I…”
I wait, not even certain why I want to know this. What does it matter anymore?
“I didn’t know she’d…I didn’t know what…” He balls his fingers as though he wants to strike some invisible wall. “Ifeltyou were still alive, Daya. And there was Fallon to consider. My brother didn’t have a child to live for.”
That’s fair. My mother may have picked her lover over her child, but she also ended my Shabbin life. Cathal doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who’d ever inflict harm on his daughter. Speaking of which. “Is Fallon…our?”
“Yes.”
I want to weep again. I don’t. “Why she no say?”
“She tried, at the beginning. But then, once we realized you didn’t remember your life…us…we decided to wait.”
“For what?”
