“Kieran is the one who looks like winter. Dark hair. Ice-blue eyes. He’s Unseelie royalty. His father is the king we’re about to dethrone.” I pause. “He’s also the one who defied his entire court for me. Twice.”
Sabina whistles low.
“Finnian is the scholar. Curly hair, amber eyes. Seelie, but he committed treason to be here. He’s been studying me since before I knew what I was, and not in a creepy way.” I reconsider. “Okay, marginally creepy. But in the way where he memorized my heartbeat and uses it as a baseline for my emotional state.”
“That’s deeply creepy and deeply romantic,” Vanessa says. “Continue.”
“Orion is the Wild Court guardian. Red hair. Built like he was designed to carry things. Including me. Specifically me, on multiple occasions, over his shoulder, without asking.”
“I like him already.” Pepper’s eye is still just the one, open and assessing.
“He’s also the one who lost his Treasure—a magical artifact that lived in his chest—stolen by the god who is in fact making a pot of BBQ for Vanessa.” My voice goes quieter than I intend. “He blames himself for that.”
“That sounds delicious.” Vanessa eyes the door to the tavern and licks her lips.
“And you?” Sabina asks, gentle in the way she gets when she’s about to say something that will gut you. “How are you with all of it?”
“I’m—” The word fine rises like a reflex. I watch it come and let it pass. “I’m in love with three men who haven’t said it yet. And I haven’t said it either. And we’re about to start a war.”
It all sounds way too heavy when I say it like that. But I can’t take it back.
“Ash.” Vanessa sits up, removes her hexagon sunglasses, and looks at me with those dragon eyes that see heat signatures and lies in equal measure. “Have you asked yourself why none of you have said it?”
I stare at her. “We’ve been a little busy running for our lives.”
“Sure.” She puts the glasses back on. “That’s one reason.”
I hate when Vanessa does that. Drops something precise and devastating and then just…puts her sunglasses back on like she didn’t just perform surgery.
The worst part is, she can see potential futures just like Finn can.
Pepper sits up. The dual sun catches the short crop of her hair and for a second I see the woman from the dream. The one who turned her back. But this Pepper is here. In the flesh. On Fae soil. She came.
“The brooding one keeps looking over here,” she says.
I don’t need to look. The silver-blue bond tells me.
“Kieran.”
“He looks at you the way Jasper looked at me before he figured out I wasn’t going to bolt.” She picks at the clover. “Like he’s already grieving something that hasn’t happened yet.”
Oh. I swallow even though I want nothing more than to turn around and look at Kieran over my shoulder.
“And the big one—Orion?—he keeps starting toward us and then stopping. Like he’s fighting himself.” Sabina hides a smile,her fingers twitching toward her bow like she wants to shoot him.
“Don’t,” I warn her, and her fingers stop twitching. “He can’t help it.”
“Mmhm.” She doesn’t sound convinced. “And the third one? Finnian?”
I glance toward the tavern.
Finnian isn’t hovering in the doorway like the other two. He’s sitting on the bench outside, legs crossed at the ankle, reading something. Or pretending to read something. The stillness of it is deliberate. The careful distance of a man giving me exactly what he thinks I need.
Which is space.
And he’s right. I do need this. I need my cousins and the clover and the feeling of being known by people who loved me before I had thorns or pointed ears or bonds on my wrists.
But noticing that he’s right—that he read the situation before I did and adjusted without being asked—does something complicated in my chest.
