I felt even Rhys go still.
“You gave up on me,” I said a bit more loudly. “You were my friend. And you picked him—picked obeying him, even when you saw what his orders and his rules did to me. Even when you saw me wasting away day by day.”
“You have no idea how volatile those first few months were,” Lucien snapped. “We needed to present a unified, obedient front, and I was supposed to be the example to which all others in our court were held.”
“You saw what was happening to me. But you were too afraid of him to truly do anything about it.”
It was fear. Lucien had pushed Tamlin, but to a point. He’d always yielded at the end.
“I begged you,” I said, the words sharp and breathless. “I begged you so many times to help me, to get me out of the house, even for an hour. And you left me alone, or shoved me into a room with Ianthe, or told me to stick it out.”
Lucien said too quietly, “And I suppose the Night Court is so much better?”
I remembered—remembered what I was supposed to know, to have experienced. What Lucien and the others could never know, not even if it meant forfeiting my own life.
And I would. To keep Velaris safe, to keep Mor and Amren and Cassian and Azriel and … Rhys safe.
I said to Lucien, low and quiet and as vicious as the talons that formed at the tips of my fingers, as vicious as the wondrous weight between my shoulder blades, “When you spend so long trapped in darkness, Lucien, you find that the darkness begins to stare back.”
A pulse of surprise, of wicked delight against my mental shields, at the dark, membranous wings I knew were now poking over my shoulders. Every icy kiss of rain sent jolts of cold through me. Sensitive—so sensitive, these Illryian wings.
Lucien backed up a step. “What did you do to yourself?”
I gave him a little smile. “The human girl you knew died Under the Mountain. I have no interest in spending immortality as a High Lord’s pet.”
Lucien started shaking his head. “Feyre—”
“Tell Tamlin,” I said, choking on his name, on the thought of what he’d done to Rhys, to his family, “if he sends anyone else into these lands, I will hunt each and every one of you down. And I will demonstrate exactly what the darkness taught me.”
There was something like genuine pain on his face.
I didn’t care. I just watched him, unyielding and cold and dark. The creature I might one day have become if I had stayed at the Spring Court, if I had remained broken for decades, centuries … until I learned to quietly direct those shards of pain outward, learned to savor the pain of others.
Lucien nodded to his sentinels. Bron and Hart, wide-eyed and shaking, vanished with the other two.
Lucien lingered for a moment, nothing but air and rain between us. He said softly to Rhysand, “You’re dead. You, and your entire cursed court.”
Then he was gone. I stared at the empty space where he’d been, waiting, waiting, not letting that expression off my face until a warm, strong finger traced a line down the edge of my right wing.
It felt like—like having my ear breathed into.
I shuddered, arching as a gasp came out of me.
And then Rhys was in front of me, scanning my face, the wings behind me. “How?”
“Shape-shifting,” I managed to say, watching the rain slide down his golden-tan face. And it was distracting enough that the talons, the wings, the rippling darkness faded, and I was left light and cold in my own skin.
Shape-shifting … at the sight of part of the history, the male I had not really let myself remember. Shape-shifting—a gift from Tamlin that I had not wanted, or needed … until now.
Rhys’s eyes softened. “That was a very convincing performance.”
“I gave him what he wanted to see,” I murmured. “We should find another spot.”
He nodded, and his tunic and pants vanished, replaced by those familiar fighting leathers, the wings, the sword. My warrior—
Not my anything.
“Are you all right?” he said as he scooped me into his arms to fly us to another location.
I nestled into his warmth, savoring it. “The fact that it was so easy, that I felt so little, upsets me more than the encounter itself.”
Perhaps that had been my problem all along. Why I hadn’t dared take that final step at Starfall. I was guilty that I didn’t feel awful, not truly. Not for wanting him.
A few mighty flaps had us soaring up through the trees and sailing low over the forest, rain slicing into my face.
“I knew things were bad,” Rhysand said with quiet rage, barely audible over the freezing bite of the wind and rain, “but I thought Lucien, at least, would have stepped in.”
“I thought so, too,” I said, my voice smaller than I intended.
He squeezed me gently, and I blinked at him through the rain. For once, his eyes were on me, not the landscape below. “You look good with wings,” he said, and kissed my brow.
Even the rain stopped feeling so cold.
CHAPTER