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Done and over with was better than it hanging over my head.

Not that I wouldn’t use this mess as leverage over Angel and his annoying mate in the future. Right now, I had a different problem.

I rose from the chair, rolled the tension from my shoulders, and reached for that internal thread of power few knew I carried, the one that connected me to places that weren’t quite places anymore. Underhill. The in-between. The court of deals and debts.

The portal opened like a wound.

Silver and gold bled through the air of my office, spinning into an archway that hummed with the smell of wet earth and ancient rot. Cold seeped through the room. Somewhere on the other side, a fae woman waited.

Not a bargain woven by fate, but of my choosing. Curse though it still may be.

I walked through the opening and let the oppressing wave of magic and chaos slide over me.

She waited, armor still strapped to her chest, expression bored. No throne. No ceremony. Just two unwilling participants trying to survive a bargain. Her armor was white as fresh snow, her hair cut short and brutal. Skin the color of a winter sky just before a storm. She looked at me like I was already a disappointment. Gaze gliding over me as her jaw tightened.

She did not smile. Unseelie fae saved their smiles for battle.

The bedroom was spare, ice-carved walls, a bed of frost-covered furs, no warmth anywhere. She removed her armor piece by piece, movements efficient and impersonal.

“I don’t want your words,” she said without joy or even interest. “I don’t want your warmth. I want your seed and your silence. Nothing more.” Her gaze held the flat, cold patience of a soldier completing a mission.

“If you are unwilling…” I began.

Her expression hardened. “I choose this.”

But not me. That much I understood. I was a chore. No more.

“Understood.”

We did what needed to be done. Efficient. Silent. Two strangers performing a transaction neither wanted but both had agreed to. There was nothing else to say.

When it was finished, I dressed in silence and stepped back through the portal into the cold, empty office. I used the adjacent bathroom to shower.

I stared into the mirror for a long time, not really seeing anything. Just lost in a void of thought. With no one else in the apartment, the night stretched too silent, and I wondered what the point of any of it was.

Could I have left Angel to suffer the fate he’d bargained for? Of course. He’d be a warrior beholden to the fae until he died a gruesome death. It wouldn’t change the course of my life one way or another. I’d continue to exist. The world would move on as it had for a millennia.

I dressed and left the apartment, heading out into the chill late-night air, wandering streets empty of anything remotely mortal.

The city was still asleep. The stars hadn’t moved. But my steps took me in one direction.

The apartment building was unremarkable from the outside, a purchase several years back, before the Veil splice had settled and the building had been abandoned. Only the top floor was occupied and should have been completely dark at this hour. Humans slept during the darkest hours of any world.

But vines crept up the brickwork, green and thriving despite the late hour and the cold. They curled around the windows, through the wrought-iron railing of the fire escape, along the roofline like living garlands. Ivy, mostly, but threaded with a pulsing green-gold light, as if the plants themselves were breathing.

His power was growing. It meant more danger, and that I couldn’t be the one there, protecting him, that made my gut flip and rage burn as if it wanted my blood to boil. But I couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

I lingered in the shadows below, unable to drag myself away from the light in the illuminated window near the back.

Loneliness dressed up as duty. Gwen’s words echoed through my memory.

He wasn’t the first fate had tried to throw at me.

Usually, I crossed the globe to remove myself from any possible interaction.

Why not this time? Because I’d become too established? Had to protect the shifters? Duty, as my sister claimed? Or something more?

He’d hate me if he knew. Maybe even cry.