“Marshal?” I asked, interrupting his story about someone who had tried to pickpocket him in the sinks. “Don’t come to Arcon again.”
He didn’t answer right away, likely because he had every intention of returning to Arcon. “I have an appointment with Larsen in two days to discuss an assault charge. Somebody reported what they saw at the party.”
“Cancel it.”
“No.”
“Kellee. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
“You forget I’ve dealt with the fae. I know exactly what he’s capable of. I’m keeping the appointment.”
I remembered the heat in Larsen’s gaze, the terrible knowledge that he could destroy a human life for entertainment. His kind had watched me do the same for them countless times.
“If he suspects you’re on to him, he will kill you.”
“I’m not that easy to kill. Will you be there?”
“I…” I scanned the empty room. “If I get you something solid to bring to Talen, will you cancel?”
“Kesh, you don’t need to protect me. Doing the right thing…? It’s what I do. It’s my job. I’m not canceling.”
“Dammit, Marshal. Your right thing will get you killed.”
“I don’t expect someone like you to understand.”
Someone like me? As though I couldn’t know what the right thing was? I laughed bitterly and hoped he heard it. “A slave-raised killer, you mean?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Forget it. It’s amazing what I can hear without all your pretty distracting me.” I plucked the comms off and dropped it into my pocket. I knew what he had meant. The fae had raised me to kill. How could I know what doing the right thing meant when I’d been doing the wrong thing since they first put a blade in my hand and told me to kill the child in the cell next to mine for a pat on the head?
But my moral compass wasn’t so broken that I didn’t know the marshal’s sense of justice meant he would walk into an impossible fight. Larsen would eat him alive.
I returned to my room and picked up the broken fragment of glass. Dried fae blood flaked off and rained around my boots. I had to turn the situation on its head. While Larsen held my reins, nothing would change. It was time to see just how much I mattered to the warfae and why.
I sunk the blade into my wrist, embraced the pain, and tore open a vein.
Chapter 17
Blood loss made the world spin, or maybe it was magic, because everything around me was soft and bright and smelled fresh and too wonderful to be real. No, wait, that was magic. His.
I lifted a hand and tried to rub the fog from my eyes. Larsen was here, leaning against a table, upright and rigid like a blade forged in Faerie’s deepest fires and sheathed in leather. Complete with wrist bracers, I noticed, as my eyes cleared. For the first time, I took the time to admire the points of his ears peeking out from his waterfall of black hair. The tight braids were gone. His hair hung loose over one shoulder. It wasn’t all straight. Some ends licked up. I wondered if he hated that. He seemed the type to want everything as it should be.
Wait. I blinked lazily. Where was I? Dark wood panels wrapped the room up tight. The furniture, all wood, dictated each area. A desk, a table, chairs. But something was wrong here. The softness didn’t fit. And then I realized there was no tek. None at all. What light there was streamed in through the windows. Black drapes stirred. Drapes that looked like his hair.
Wait, what? Had I been drugged?
No. Yes. Maybe. Why couldn’t I think straight? I dropped my hand onto the pillow. Oh good, a bed. I was on a bed. A proper bed, not like the cot I’d been forced to sleep in. Maybe if I lay here a while, I’d get to the thing I needed to do eventually—whatever that thing was.
My fingers brushed the iron collar, and for a moment, I forgot the terrible thing I had done. I was back in Faerie, before that night when everything changed, before the first collar had been removed. Back when I had the illusion of freedom, but really, I had been no freer than the pitiful saru children still locked in their cells. Sometimes—actually, most times, an illusion was enough. Who needed reality when you had Faerie to answer your every desire, to tend to your every need? The only price was blood. And I’d paid with plenty of mine and that of my saru brothers and sisters. The boy, Aeon’s blood. He hadn’t bled like the others. But he had died all the same. “Oh, how fragile mortals are.” The fae had laughed. “Look at them fall to her.”
“Look at them fall,” I muttered, reaching for the memory of Aeon’s hand, holding on to it for a little while longer even as it cooled and stiffened.
And then Larsen was there, peering into my eyes, spoiling everything. “Go away,” I told him and tried to brush the vision of the fae away.
One of his perfect eyebrows arched. “That was a foolish thing you did.”
Killing the queen? I wondered. But she had told me to.
What did I do? What was I supposed to do? Something… something soon. Heat throbbed up my arm. I clawed at the bandage.
“Leave it,” Larsen’s voice ordered, distant now as he moved away.
I looked for him and found him walking away, and damn if he didn’t know how fine he looked while just walking. I’d seen them fight. I’d fought ones like him. There wasn’t an inch on that body that didn’t have a purpose. He could run like the wind, and then stop and turn and cut his enemies down before they could draw breath to beg for mercy. They killed mercilessly. I had always admired that, always aspired to it.
I’m a bad person.
I blinked at the ceiling, my thoughts coming back to me. My arm. I’d cut myself, and here it had brought me, inside what had to be his personal chambers. Here I would discover things about him. Here he would have secrets. Secrets I would tell Kellee, who would tell the imprisoned Talen. And we’d know for sure who our insane fae was. Though I suspected… didn’t I? I knew…
I turned my head. Metal rattled.
My fingers traced a line of iron links. I didn’t need to look to know my triumph had been short-lived.
“Well, this is degrading,” I mumbled.
“It is what it is,” he dismissed.
Chain links dangled from my collar and trailed to where the chain connected to a latch in the wall. I tried to summon rage but couldn’t. He was right. It was what it was. And it was nothing I hadn’t dealt with before. Not since I was a naughty saru child tinkering with tek.
I dropped my head back down and wished I hadn’t when his citrusy scent tingled on my tongue. He slept in this bed. How nice for him.
“Unlatch me now and I’ll kill you fast instead of slow when the time comes.”
“Kill me with what?” He smirked. “Bad thoughts?”
A snarl bubbled up. “Have I not earned the right to freedom? I bowed to you. I meant it.”
“Worthless.” He gestured. “Humans lie.”
“So you keep saying, and yet here you are, living among them. You’ve been here so long, pretending to be human for so long, that maybe you think you are one?”
“I know what I am.”
“An arrogant, selfish, sociopathic, narcissistic sluagh-bait?”
He chuckled, and the sound did horribly wonderful things to the feminine part of my brain that seemed to be more and more in control around him.
“You really can be entertaining.”
“Fuck you.” Not exactly my most intelligent of replies, but I was losing my patience. “You want me to entertain you? Unchain me.”
His smirk grew, and so did my hatred. “I will,” he said. “When I can trust you.”
I wondered where my coat was. The comms—my only method of reaching Kellee—would be in the pocket. At least Larsen hadn’t undressed me. I lay, fully clothed, on top of his sheets. Five years of freedom, a lifetime of killing, and I was reduced to a plaything tied to a bed.
Twisting on my side, I propped my head on a hand. “Am I your pet, then?”
His lips twitched and his eyes sparkled. “Perhaps.”
No, that wasn’t it. This wasn’t a sexual thing. “A challenge? To yourself.” He wet his lips and looked down. Yes. Something in those words rang true. “You want to see if you can resist the Faerie in me?”