“Maybe.” I sigh. “I don’t even remember his name. But I remember the echo of him. Which is odd because I knew of the Fae. But I didn’t know much more.”
“Go on.”
I breathe a little easier as the wound opens up. Like I’m staring at the bleeding part of me. Bleeding out on a cold bathroom floor.
“He was a professor here. I haven’t seen him at all.” Odd thought.
“Maybe Velasca ate him.”
He would know. “He was more earth side. Working with my team.”
“A cover.”
I look at him to the left of me, smiling and pleased with himself. He reminds me of a Cheshire cat.
I hum and look back. “Things moved so quickly. And I fell hard and fast. Harder than him. And then he left me a note that he was returning to Faerie and that he never wanted to see me again.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Unlovable.” I can’t even look at him. “When I look back there was nothing in the relationship that fed me. Nothing that whisperedthis one is for you.”
The scene dissolves and the next is me sparring Kieran in the middle of the night.
“And this woman.” He points to me.
I watch myself lunge. Watch him counter. Watch the moment my eyes went somewhere I didn’t understand yet. My heart was already his and I didn’t even have the language for it.
I was in love then. I just didn’t know love could look like that.
I turn back to the me crying around a toilet.
“Our lowest points may not be our lowest.”
“Aengus.” I sigh.
“Forgive yourself.”
“For what?”
“Look at you.” He points. “Look what you did to yourself.” He flips to another image. “And here.”
It’s me crying in the woods. Silently as Davis has my back. Through the woods hunting a lycan. That was when I turned him down and it didn’t go well. And somehow I felt bad for hurting his feelings.
“Here.”
The moment I shot Vanessa’s mate. My hands didn’t shake then. They’re shaking now.
“Here.”
When I tortured Kade. I watch my own face in the image and I don’t recognize the woman wearing it.
“Here.”
When I sat in my bunker staring at a baby picture of Lucy.
“Here.”
My mom sending me a picture of Thanksgiving. My chair empty and waiting. A casserole dish where my plate should be because she still sets a place for me. Every year. Even when I don’t come. Even when I don’t call.
