But the guilt? Her feeling guilt over killing Midas, now that will kill me.
I don’t know how many seconds pass as her mind recalls what transpired, but finally, her eyes hook back onto mine, and my heart nearly drops down through my feet at the tears gathered in them.
“How?” she whispers. “I felt my power leave me when the sun set. That shouldn’t have been possible, but I—” Her words choke off. “There was something inside of me that just snapped open.”
“And it was fucking glorious.”
She flinches. “How can you say that?” she asks, her voice cracking. “I became a monster.”
But I shake my head, brush my thumbs over her wet cheeks. “No, baby. Not a monster. A fae.”
CHAPTER 14
AUREN
Fae.
The moment he says the word, I know it’s true. I know that’s what this beast inside my chest is, the one that even now, lies in wait, talons gripping the rungs of my ribs.
I look around the shadowed space of the strange cave, and that grip tightens. Gold is splashed everywhere in messy blotches, most of it congealed in puddles around the ground. When I look at it, all I can think of is how the fae in me took over. How it tore through me, hooking onto the reins of control, yanking them right out of my hands.
And with it…
Great Divine, the noises.
Every glint of gold in the cave is a glint in the castle as it shuddered and spread. Every reflection gleaming back at me is me seeing this wild version of myself tearing through people, killing them with merciless sweeps.
There were so many sounds of splashing and crashing, but mostly, what rings in my ears are the screams.
There has only been one other time when my gold acted like that. One other, and I swore to myself it would never happen again.
But it did.
When I back up a step, my heel soaks into the gluey liquid, and I jerk away from it with a flinch. It tries to creep up my leg, tries to come alive again and react to my emotions and movements, but I kick it away. Fisted hands shaking, I slam up my walls, cutting off the gold. Cutting off the fae beast. Shutting it all away so that those things can’t overtake me again.
I won’t let it.
A shudder goes through me, and I feel incredibly heavy all of a sudden, as if those walls I just erected inside my chest are weighing me down, pressing against my bones and cementing through my feet.
“Auren?”
Turning, I look at him with all that cumbersome weight straining my gaze. “Where are my gloves?” I ask. “I need to cover my hands.”
He hesitates and then slips off his own gloves, striding over to hand them to me. I can’t help but grimace when I see how stained they are or when I hear the squelching sound beneath his boots when he steps in one of the hardening puddles.
“Thank you,” I murmur.
I can’t quite look at him. I’m too embarrassed by the way I jumped him, for how I admitted that I wanted to be punished for the things that I did. I basically just used him so I didn’t have to think, so I could feel pain for the pain I subjected on others.
“Auren,” he says firmly, and despite how heavy my eyes are, they rise up. “Nothing about what we just did is anything shameful. You don’t need to feel embarrassed.”
I scoff, shaking my head as I pull on his gloves, feeling slightly better at having my hands covered.
“It’s true,” he says firmly, his eyes pulling me in. “You’re fae, just like me, which means we’re going to have wild, raving urges. Like fighting and fucking. Those two go hand in hand.”
My cheeks heat at his bluntness, and then I go hot all over when he carefully slips a hand to the back of my neck. His hair is disheveled from my fingers spearing through it, some of the strands stained with streaks of gold, even more of it dragged down his cheeks and gleaming on his lips. Something in me wants to purr at seeing all my marks on him like that.
“It’s completely natural,” he goes on, his voice rumbling through me with decadent heat. “And I, for one, fucking love it when I see more of your fae nature coming out.”
I let out a shaky smile. “I must not be that fae, considering these,” I say, tapping against the rounded tips of my ears.
“I have them too,” Slade points out, and as if to prove his point, his body shifts. His spikes absorb back beneath his skin, stealing away the wisps of his aura and the shine of scales along his cheek. When his eyes are green once more and his ears no longer pointed, he taps against them. “Though, mine are rounded in this form because I’m only half fae.”