I roll over again to face him, but he stays on his back. I stare at his profile, silhouetted in the moonlight streaming in from the window.
“I hoped you were asleep,” he replies.
“You have quite the reputation. Was it all subterfuge?”
“A lot of it,” he admits. “But not all.”
I hate that it stings to hear him say it.
“Would you like to know the truth?” he asks.
“Always.”
“The Tremaines’ youngest daughter was meeting up with the scullery maid. I was simply providing lookout, and then a cover story when the two young lovers were almost caught.”
“And Christine Cambere?”
“Got her shoe caught in a trellis trying to climb the garden wall to return to her bedroom unseen. I was only helping to get her unstuck. Parties bore her.”
“So none of the rumors are true?” I ask.
“None of the more popular ones. I’m not a saint, I’m just not clumsy enough to get caught. The tryst I had was actually with Christine’s sister Georgia, though we were quite good at keeping that one under wraps. I’ve had my fair share of lady’s maids, barmaids, milkmaids.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking. “And Faith,” I add.
Emmett goes quiet. “And Faith.”
“You said you didn’t love her.”
He wrings his hands in the sheets before he answers. “Faith and I hurt each other because we weren’t what the other wanted. I was too self-obsessed to give Faith the respect she deserved, and she didn’t love me in the way I was hungry for. We were clumsy, and things got broken, but it doesn’t mean some great love story was ruined. Faith and I have talked, we’re friends now. I can assure you she does not love me, nor I her.”
I expect to feel jealous, but instead I just feel sad for him.
“I was only eight when my father gave me up,” he says. “I so desperately wanted love that I searched for it everywhere. They had to switch out the maids who built my fires daily, after I started growing too attached to them and asking them to stay with me. At night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I’d sneak out to the stables and read stories to the horses, like they were my friends, even though the grooms told me they weren’t. I spent the first few years after my father’s separation writing him letters at night, detailing every single thing I did that day. I thought one day we’d be reunited and he’d want to know all I had done in his absence. But I stopped believing that some time ago.”
I want to reach out and touch him, offer some comfort, but I can’t.
“My confession is this,” Emmett continues. “I grew up without a family, in drafty palace rooms with nothing but a governess, a tutor, and a battalion of toy soldiers for company. I’ve spent my whole life on my hands and knees, clamoring for crumbs of love. I don’t know if there will ever come a time I am not hungry for it.”
Emmett’s sullen nature, his recklessness with his heart, it’s all coming into focus now.
I offer him a confession in return. “Sometimes I’m afraid that I was too coddled. I think my parents and sister loved me so much, I’m not prepared for a world that doesn’t love me the same way.”
“The only person on earth I’m certain who loves me is Bram,” he replies.
Like a girl possessed, I reach out across the expanse of our shared bed and grasp his cold hand in mine. He squeezes, and I squeezeback.I could love you. Let me love you, but I can’t, and he knows it as well as I do.
I will be Bram’s or I will be no one’s.
And now the only thing I can do is live with it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
If my favorite story inFaeries of the British Isleswas about faerie doors, Lydia’s was about the faerie king. We made Mrs. Osbourne tell it over and over again until it was as well-worn as the grooves on her butcher block. As the story goes, long before Queen Mor, when England was a wild place, the portal between worlds was open. The Others passed through freely, looking to make bargains and use fragile humans as their playthings. Milkmaids would wander off into the night and return at sunrise, strangely hollowed out. Fields would turn to ash in a single afternoon, others would sprout wheat of pure gold that melted in the rain. Babies were snatched out of their cradles, strange copies left in their stead.
Clever humans knew to stay away from the edge of the forest, not to let a stranger inside after dark, and never to respond to someone calling your name if you did not recognize the voice doing the calling. There was one such girl who thought she was very clever indeed.
Her parents, terrified by their daughter’s remarkable beauty, kept her locked up on a country estate much like ours, tucked away from the world outside and the dangers that lurked there.
