I blink. “I’ve…I’ve never thought about it that way.”
“You’ve always had control. You just need to learn how to wield it. I think you’re scared. I think you’re holding yourself back, and that’s why your gold isn’t coming—because you’re blocking it.”
Anger trips up through my veins, making my mind stumble. “I’m not.”
“Auren…” I don’t care how persistently calm he still is, that tone rattles me down to my bones. “I know you.”
“Maybe you don’t,” I spit back with far more vitriol than I intended. I’ve gone as stiff and as cold as the frozen gold, caught in my own momentum. I steel myself, readying for the backlash, preparing for the fight.
But he doesn’t give it to me.
Instead, Slade watches me with that unerring green gaze, face betraying nothing.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” I go on, wanting to break that shuttered expression, wanting to crack open the eggshell view that he has of me and show him the rottenness inside. Prove that he didn’t put it there. “Snippets and unanswered questions—that’s what we have. So don’t sit there all superior and act like you know everything, because you don’t.”
I don’t even know all of me.
And that’s the splinter that’s caught in my chest, unable to be plucked free.
My magic changed—so wholly that I’m terrified of it. My ribbons are gone. Like leaves stripped from a vine. And I…
“I am not the same person I was when I walked into Ranhold.”
“That’s true,” he concedes. “But I still know you.”
A balking, frustrated laugh tumbles out of me. “Are you out of—”
“Let’s talk about that night.”
My words lurch to a halt. My heart does too. I feel it snag against my throat. “We don’t need to talk about that night. We were both there.”
A look of frustrated sadness lines his face. “Talk to me, Auren.”
“What do you want me to say?” I demand. I’m up and on my feet before I even realize I’ve moved. “This.” I gesture around the room, at all the gold that doesn’t feel like me. “This doesn’t make any sense. That night at Ranhold doesn’t make any sense. My gold isn’t working right, and what I did that night…I never should’ve been able to do that.”
“And what did you do?” he presses, and I curl my hands into fists because I—
“I killed.”
That’s the thing that nobody is saying. The thing that I haven’t been able to face.
“How did I even do that? I felt my power leave me when the sun set,” I say as I begin to pace around the cave, skirting the solidified splotches. “I shouldn’t have been able to use any part of my power, but that…” I stop, looking down at the ground. “There was something inside of me that just snapped open.”
“It needed to happen.”
My head shakes, voice cracking, and my anger cracks with it.
Because I’m not angry at him. I’m angry at me. And it’s easier to hold that anger than to feel anything else, because I don’t know how to navigate these other emotional landscapes. They’re dark and terrifying and rocky, and I feel lost as I try to cross them.
I hate my snappish tone. Hate how the first thing I do is try to push him away because of some internal feeling like I’m going to lose him anyway.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. Sincerity fills my tone, and I drop my guard, drop my snappishness that he doesn’t deserve, and I tell him the truth.
“I became a beast. I killed a lot of people that night, and I could do it again. What if I go full fae here?” I ask. “What if I lose control and gild all of Deadwell, and you can’t stop me? I remember what I did that night, just like I remember what happened leading up to it. How I was on that mezzanine. How confused and helpless. I felt angry and alone, and then I finally found you…”
Slade’s eyes are an empty, starless night. “I want you to ask me, Auren.”
My brows scrunch up in confusion. “Ask you what?”
“I want you to ask me those questions that have been on your mind since you woke up. I deserve to hear them. You deserve to voice them. One in particular. So ask me.” His gaze is dark, his tone hard. But not with the fight that I was trying to pick. Not with anger at all. With anguish.
I suck in a breath. Because right away, I know what he’s referring to.