City of Fae

“We were talking about you.”


“No, you were. I want to talk about you.” His fingers tapped out a beat on the bed. “When I took your draíocht on the platform, I thought you were there to kill me. I could barely move to defend myself. Then you looked at me like I was the puzzle, with hunger in your eyes.”

“You knew from that moment I wasn’t real?”

He nodded, eyes on me, checking for my reaction. “I knew you weren’t what you appeared to be.”

It bothered me. Everything he’d said, everything he’d done, he’d been watching me, testing me, waiting for me to snap. And I’d thought … what? That he liked me? That we could have been friends? Maybe more? What a joke. I’d pushed him away, thinking the Trinity Law would protect me when in reality, the three laws didn’t even apply to a construct.

“When was the last time you had chocolate cake?” Reign asked, voice light, laced with enthusiasm.

“Huh?”

“Well, you’ve only been around a few days. So, you’ve never had chocolate cake, right?”

Was he deliberately distracting me? Had my thoughts been so easy to read on my face? “I guess.” I remembered cake, but as I scrabbled around my head searching for the memory, the taste, I couldn’t find it. The fake memories were superficial, just skin deep. My lips twisted, frown cutting deep.

“Strawberries?” he asked, getting to his feet and veering around the bed.

“What?”

“Strawberries. Ice cream. Steak.” With each word, his smile grew and a playful laughter brightened his eyes. “And chocolate. Have you eaten chocolate at all in the past few days?”

“No, I …” I hadn’t eaten much of anything, and yet I didn’t feel hungry, at least not for food. There was something … a hunger, a need … not to be alone.

“You haven’t lived.” He announced, with an utterly over the top flourish. “We need to rectify that, right now.”

“Reign, please … I don’t think ….”

He strode to the door, opened it, and turned back, pure wickedness playing in his eyes. “C’mon, live a little, American Girl.”

“You’ll be recognized.”

“It’ll be worth it. I promise.”

“I—”

“Alina”—he purred my name, in that way he must know shortened my breath and quickened my heart—“you can’t spend another minute of your life without having tasted chocolate.”

“But the FA, the queen …” I was already halfway across the room, with no memory of moving. I wanted to go with him, to experience things I apparently never had before. The way he smiled, the dance of mischief in his eyes … I couldn’t say no, even though this was his way of avoiding my questions.

“What do you have to lose?” he asked, lowering his voice and giving me the kind of scandalous look that drove the paparazzi wild.

Nothing.





What started off as a sedate meal in a nearby dockside restaurant turned into a veritable feast. I argued there had to be something more useful we could be doing, but Reign brushed my concerns aside. “There is nothing more important than living,” he said, and then added, “and chocolate.” Reign ordered for me, foreign pronunciations rolling off his tongue. There was no way I could eat it all, but he insisted I try. The more peculiar it sounded, the more he urged me on. We tried sautéed vegetables, and salmon, and poached pears, and tangles of pasta, and chocolate fudge cake with ice-cream. I thought I remembered all these things, but I’d been wrong about that too.

He fit right in beneath the subdued lighting and among the chink of crystal glasses. Eventually, I gave up asking if our time was better spent preparing, or hiding, considering we were wanted by the FA, but he’d resorted to giving me the through-the-lashes look, somehow chiding and teasing all at once. “Would you rather spend your time worrying about events we cannot currently change or enjoying the company of London’s most infamous pinup?” He was joking; at least, I laughed like he was. He seemed to take his celebrity status with a large dose of irony.