“Has it ever occurred to you that I am trying to protect you? That I’m trying to keep you safe?”
Slowly, I turned to him. “No. It hasn’t. For a multitude of obvious reasons. And besides that, I don’t need you to keep me safe or to protect me.”
“Everyone needs someone to protect them.” He tipped back his head, his eyes closing.
“Even you?” I scoffed.
“Even me.”
My brow smoothed out. I’d seen what he was capable of, so the fact that he’d admitted that was rather shocking.
“I do not want to see harm come to you.” His voice was quiet. “I do not have to be with you to want that.”
I flushed to the roots of my hair. “I know that.”
“Then why are you being so difficult about this?” he asked.
“Because…” I toyed with the strap of my purse. “Because I need to do this. I can’t sit by, not when Aric is still alive. You have to understand that.”
The King was quiet for several moments, and then he looked at me. “If you knew that someone you…you looked fondly uponwas doing something that would surely lead to their demise, would you not try to stop them?”
“Are you saying you look fondly upon me,King?”
His head tilted, and then he looked away.
I laughed, but the sound lacked any real humor. “Yeah, okay. But to answer your question, I wouldn’t stop you, even if I knew it was dangerous.”
The King’s gaze cut back to mine. “But you’d still look fondly upon me.”
I gave him a tight-lipped smile. “No. Because it would get you out of my hair.”
“Now, Brighton, you and I both know that’s a lie.” His chin dipped. “If something were to happen to me, you’d be devastated.”
I didn’t even want to think about that. I didn’t want to acknowledge how thinking about that made me feel and what it meant. “You value yourself a little too highly.”
“And you don’t value your life enough.”
My hand tightened around my purse strap. “I value my life. And I don’t think of myself poorly.” I took a step toward him. “Aric and those fae took more than just my mom that night.” Something in my chest cracked open as I spoke. “They took…”
“What did they take?”
I bit my lip. “They took my feeling of security, my belief that I could protect myself and my mom—that I was capable of taking care of her. They took my purpose.”
“Your purpose?” He faced me fully.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I shook my head. I was not getting into this with him. “I’ve said what I needed to say. You don’t have to like that I’m out there, but you can’t stop me. If it ends with me getting myself killed, then so be it. And I don’t say that because I don’t value my life. I say that because at least I would die taking back what they stole from me.”
“I can… I can respect that,” he said, his gaze meeting mine. His eyes were pools of golden fire. “But I won’t.”
For a second, I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “You won’t?”
He shook his head as he approached me. “I will watch you. I will have others watching you. Every time you step foot on that street in some silly disguise or near any location where Neal has been sighted, I will intervene.”
My lips parted as disbelief swirled through me.
“I will become your shadow, always present. That is what I’ll do.”
“You…you are…”
