“You never should have come back here, Reyna,” he said in a low growl. “I gave you a chance to walk away from this. I should have known you’d be too stubborn to follow through with it.”
She snorted, coughing out a bitter laugh. “You can’t be serious. You sent Nollaig after me. To kill me. I’d hardly call that letting me walk away from anything.”
His eyes clouded over with a filmy haze of darkness. Like mist. “She shouldn’t have told you that.”
“Well, she did,” Reyna said through gritted teeth, thankful that the cloaked fae had waited for her in the woods. If she’d come with Reyna, there was no telling what Lorcan would have done to her.
The only reason he hadn’t killed Reyna yet was to appease Cos Darragh. He needed the High King of the Ice Court to sign the treaty, giving him access to the northern kingdom and the innocent fae inside of it. Her father would never give him that if he lifted his sword in Reyna’s direction. She and her father might have disagreed on almost everything in her life, but she was still his blood.
But as soon as Lorcan got that signature, she’d be dead.
“Where is our mutual friend?” he asked in a voice that slithered over her skin like writhing shadows. “And where is that little book you stole from this place?”
Her brows winged upward. “Careful, Lorcan. You’re giving yourself away. I thought the book was unimportant. I thought you told me to forget about it, to move on from the past.”
His eyes sparked as he stalked across the room. Reyna held herself steady, refusing to move from her spot beside the window. Intimidation would not work on her. She’d faced far worse enemies than a cursed fae. “Give me the book, Reyna.”
“Why?” she asked, her heart thumping. “I think we both know what’s in there, but I don’t know why you’d be so determined to get it back. To destroy the evidence? Or because there’s something else in there you don’t want me to find?”
She and Rhain hadn’t had time to comb through every page of the tome. Could there be a cure inside those pages? If she could escape these tower walls and return to the forest, would she find a way to bring him back from this magic that had a hold on his mind?
He sneered. “You’re so consumed by the Ruin that you can’t see the truth, even when it’s standing right in front of you.”
“That might work on my father, Lorcan, but that won’t work on me.” She squared her shoulders.
He took one step closer. Shadows stretched out from his muscular form, pulsing against her skin. “You are too far gone to even recognize how badly the magic has twisted you. All this time, you’ve fought so hard for peace. And now, here we are. It was in your grasp, and you refused to take it.”
Her hands fisted, and she shook her head. “Your lies are going to catch up to you one day. If your force the kings to sign the treaty, and if Thane undoes the exile as he promised, you’ll finally have to face the truth, like all the rest of us.”
“Us?” He barked out a vicious laugh. “Last time I checked, you’re the one who lies. And that has nothing to do with an exile. It’s because of who you are inside. Broken. Twisted.” His voice slid over her, velvet and cruel. She stared up at him, horrified by how the magic could have transformed him into this. It was as if he was no longer Lorcan Rothach at all. Like he was gone.
She squeezed her eyes tight. No, she couldn’t believe that. He was still in there, somewhere. And she had to do whatever it took to get him back.
Suddenly, he snatched her wrist in his hand and squeezed so tight her bones ached. Gritting her teeth, she yanked away, but his fingers refused to relent. “Let go of me, Lorcan. If you harm me, my father will destroy you, no matter what you try to make him believe about my mind.”
He pulled her to his chest, leaned down, and dragged his nose across her cheek, breathing her in deeply. Reyna shuddered from his touch. Despite everything, she yearned to feel his skin against hers, to feel his lips caressing her the way they always had. She could get lost in his touch, for hours, for days.
His teeth nipped her neck. “I bet your blood tastes so sweet.”
She gasped and stumbled out of his embrace. Heart pounding, she stared up at him. “You will have to kill me if you want to drink me.”
Danger curled his lips. “Not if I give you my blood first. Do you know what it would do to you? How it would drown your thoughts in mist?”
She stepped back. Reyna knew all about the blood. When she’d been sneaking through Molt’s war camp, she’d gotten an eyeful of it. Every fae who drank it had transformed into wild, beastly versions of themselves. At times, they’d seemed as if they were in a trance, lost to the blood magic’s effect on them.
If Lorcan fed her his blood, she shuddered to think what she’d do.
“I will never drink it,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Give me the book, and I won’t force you to.”
“It’s not here,” Reyna hissed. “And you’ll never find it. I’ve made sure of that.”
A warm breeze rustled the loose hair around Reyna’s shoulders, tumbling over her breasts. Lorcan reached out and snatched a strand between his thumb and forefinger. He rubbed the silver, eyes locked on the flush of her chest. Reyna didn’t dare breathe. She wanted to smack his hand away, even as she wanted to drag it down the curves of her body. Trapped, torn between hatred and love, she watched the way his familiar lips frowned, almost in confusion.
They stood like that for a good long while. Lorcan, fingering her hair. Reyna, stock-still. Their bodies so close that she would only have to lean forward for their chests to collide. The curse had clearly driven Lorcan away from her, but as they locked their gazes on each other, a flicker of hope threatened to dull the pain around her heart. Maybe seeing her, maybe touching her…it reminded him of who he was.
His fingers slowed, and then they curled into a fist around her hair. He tugged on the ends, and a sharp pain radiated through her skull. “I tire of these games. I need the book, Reyna. I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me where it is.”
