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“Of what?”

Did I trust him? No, I didn’t. But I wanted to.

I sighed and sat up in the tub, folding my legs under me. “When I was a child, I had no home. No family. No siblings. No parents. In the human realm, they have a system—if you will—called the foster system. It is where orphans are sent to surrogate families to be raised. Some stay with one family for a long time and are raised with love and care. Others, like myself, are not so lucky and are bounced from family to family their entire lives.”

He knew the pain of losing family, but he did not know the blade of losing a family you had never known only to lose the opportunity at family over and over again. “Is . . . Is it the number of families you were placed with in this…foster system?”

I snorted. “No. That number is much . . . much higher than that.” I took a deep breath, remembering the unspoken words between the Bandrui and I. She had encouraged me to trust my instincts, like my mother had, and my instincts were telling me that I could trust him with this knowledge. “In order to survive, to keep myself safe when no one else cared about whether or not I was safe, I came up with rules to live by.”

“What are they?”

I counted out each rule, telling him each one. Some made his face twist in anger some in sadness, but he didn’t interrupt me as I listed them all out.

“And this one?” he asked, pointing to the number on my thigh.

“This one, I created when Rictus kidnapped me. This rule is ‘just survive.’”

He let the words of the rule bloom between us into a heavy bouquet as if he didn’t want to disturb its delicate petals. He could not deny that this rule was necessary, nor the reminder needed to live through each day under the yoke of being constantly in fear of being raped, beaten, or twisted into the whims of someone else.

He finally snorted a small laugh and looked up from the carved numbers. “You sound like one of the old Fae.”

I tilted my head in question, and he went on. “A lot of the Fae before the war, of the ancient generations, lived and died by rules. It’s how many of the humans would trap them into unbalanced deals or servitude in the human realm, back when we visited often. It’s fallen out of fashion though and the power that came along with them lost to the ages.”

I smirked, drawing my thumb over the numbers. So, I had been living as a Fae all this time without truly realizing it. All the small pieces of my life, tiny quirks I thought unique to the brutality of my life, made more sense every day I stayed here in the Fae realm.

I truly was both Fae and human. And growing more of each every day.

“Can I wash your hair, little bug?” he asked, drawing my attention back to him.

I nodded, and he moved behind me where he set down two bottles and a strange dark box.

He peeled off his gloves, and my heart skipped a beat at the intimate nature of this proposed hair washing. I knew he didn’t like our skin touching, knew that he metered out each touch like a bishop counting out each coin to give to the needy that filled up his vestibule. My eyes slid up to him askance.

A bashful smile played across his rugged masculine face and softened his green eyes into a dark meadow.

Guiding my head back to rest on the edge of the tub, he scooted a bucket over and let water from a pitcher flow over my hair, soaking it. The moment his fingers plunged into my tresses and connected with my scalp, lightning erupted and coursed through my body. Every movement filled me with the dawning sun and warmed me from deep within my very soul.

I bit down on my lip as he tended to my hair, working and lathering the impossibly long strands with diligent attention while I squirmed and panted in the tub. Every innocent swipe of his hands against my scalp, neck, and forehead sizzled the end of every single nerve and lit beacon fires within me as the warmth drew hotter and hotter.

“Fuck, Sóna. Please. Feidlimid’s teeth. Breathe. Please.” The quivering weakness in his voice echoed my sentiment so thoroughly that I thought he had crawled inside of me and stolen all my yearning to whisper to me. I purposefully dragged a deep gasping gulp of air into my lungs and exhaled it only to take another. “Fuck, this is torture.”

He rinsed my hair and disentangled his fingers from my strands, leaving it to drip into the bucket below as a towel was pressed into the length to draw away most of the moisture. An oil followed it, perfuming my hair in jasmine and honey scents. His fingers lit more fires as they danced across my scalp as he braided an intricate weave into my long hair, then tied it off with a gold-and-black ribbon like he had before.

He paused.

I could hear him trying to catch his breath behind me, and I turned to see he held the box in his lap and was staring down at it. His naked fingers traced the birds carved into the lid.

“I don’t have many things from the ruins of Breacadh an Lae, Sóna. I don’t have a great dowry to bestow on anyone. Truly, I am all but a pauper. The finery around you is not my own or of my own making. But this . . .” He took a deep breath and pushed open the lid. “This was my mother’s. One of the few pieces of hers I have. It is no great jewel that will glitter in the candlelight as befits you, but she wore it every day. She used to tell me that it was a gift from my father when they were courting. They had gone out hawking, and his falcon had entered a mating flight with hers. This was one of the feathers kicked off from his falcon in their plunge to the ground.”

He drew from the box a simple golden chain that had a single snowy-white gyrfalcon feather bound at the base with matching wire and a shard of quartz struck through with golden threads. It was not the great jewels of a prince or princess as he said, but it was the most beautiful piece I had seen in all the palace.

If I were marking my territory, I would adorn you in feathers.

His words came echoing down the branches of my mind, and I bit my lip against the crush of emotion in my throat.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered past the razor lump in my throat.

He smiled bittersweetly down to the necklace. “You would have liked her, I think. And I know she would have liked you. She was a force to be reckoned with. Deeply dedicated to her family but also fiercely independent.”