“Breathe, Koryn.”
Garrick’s thigh pressed into mine as he knelt at my side. He picked up my hands, lifting me back to sit on my heels. His hands engulfed my own, his warmth finding the power within me and soothing it back into submission.
It was just enough for me to remember the techniques that Tomin had taught me. I forced my eyes open, scanning the room through the watery mist that clouded them. I counted off items as I saw them. One—the unmade bed, two—the rustedshutter hinge, three—the torn fingernail on Garrick’s left thumb. I closed my eyes again, focusing now on the sounds. One—the crackling of the fire, two—Garrick’s thundering heart. I opened my eyes and focused on what I could feel. One—the rough callouses on Garrick’s hands where they stroked mine.
Slowly, so painfully slowly, I regained control. My power quieted. So did the blood thrumming through my veins.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
“I killed him.” The rough sound of my own voice surprised me.
Garrick squeezed my hands. “You have killed before, and you will kill again. Killing should never be easy. You should feel every single death. Even when it’s necessary, and even when you don’t regret it.”
I couldn’t do any more than nod. That was what made me different than the rest of my coven. No matter how long and how hard I tried, killing had never become easy. A witch’s duty was to coven above all others, but my heart yearned for humanity and all its messy intricacies.
My shoulders slid and I leaned forward. Garrick met me halfway, pressing his forehead to my own. We stayed there for minutes that might have turned to hours, sharing one another’s air, regulating until I could begin to make sense of the hell that had unfolded around me—the hell I’d wrought and that I’d have to live with. In some ways, it was more intimate than the kiss we’d shared hours before.
My breath turned shaky again. I’d kissed him. Dark God below, I’d done more than just kiss him. I’d been ready to let him take me right there on that table, before thirty humans and my familiar. And more than anything, I wanted to lean in and kiss him again.
As usual, I had no control over my mouth. “Earlier, in the common room, I shouldn’t have?—”
Garrick drew back, breaking the connection. My hands tightened around his, reflexively trying to keep him with me. He did not pull those away, but it was impossible to miss the small sigh that slipped between his lips. “Forget it. You were intoxicated by your own spell.”
But I could not forget his words any more than he could take them back. Things had been shifting between us for a while. Somewhere between the Lifebind and the weeks spent in forced proximity traversing the Seven Gates… the Lifebind was not the only thing holding us together any longer.
Yet in more dangerous, more irrevocable ways, nothing had changed.
I was a witch. An immortal.
He was a half-human bounty hunter with ties to the fae court.
The conflict between us subsumed the gates and the Lifebind. I hated half of who he was—the same half that he hated. Witches, humans, fae, our shared presence on Velora had done nothing but lead to harm and curses and death.
Garrick and I were too small to fight that. And even if there was something bigger, something more between us, we were bound to the Seven Gates.
If I made it through the gates, I would be restored to my coven. If I did not, I’d be dead. There were no happy endings waiting for the pair of us. Faerietales belonged where they’d always been—in my long-forgotten past.
I watched Garrick’s throat slide as he swallowed at the same time I did.
Neither one of us needed to say the words. We understood each other too well for that. We may be different in every measurable way, but we were both what Velora had made us.
I fought back the emotions and the power, unwilling to let them loose again.
“Why didn’t you intervene?” I asked, rocking back on my heels, desperate for any conversation to distract me from my thoughts.
Garrick released my hands, but he did not move to stand. “What do you call this?”
I huffed out a half-laugh. Isanara appeared at my side, tromping through Nash’s blood and over his body without any regard for the man whose soul had once resided inside the frozen shell. He deserved none of her regard, anyway.
“I meant before, when Nash attacked. You just…” I wasn’t quite sure where he’d been. I had not even thought of him. My focus had narrowed to protecting Isanara.
“I knew you could handle yourself.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a smirk, but it lacked something. “And now you know it, too.”
I had no answer to that. I thought that had been the purpose of all our sparring and hiking in the mountains. I reached down, caressing the tender scales between Isanara’s curved horns. But Garrick reached for me again.
“Not just here.” He stroked a hand over my forehead, brushing back the sweaty strands of hair. Then he slid two fingers down my face, past my chin and collarbone, between my breasts. “And here.”
I could not bring myself to correct him, to tell him that it was impossible to feel in a heart that no longer beat.
