Her blood thrummed in her veins beneath my grip, the sound a direct echo of my racing heartbeat. I shook my head, all traces of amusement disappearing as I wondered if she’d broken the skin on the back of her head—if even now her blood stained the stone beneath her. “I don’t want to hurt you, Little One.”
“You already have!” she shouted, lifting her upper back and neck off the ground as she struggled to get free. She knew as well as I did that it was pointless; with my legs straddling her hips, she didn’t stand a chance of getting away.
“I never intended to hurt you,” I said, trying to appeal to the part of her that had to know it was true.
The corners of her mouth tipped up into a grin, something sinister gleaming behind her green eyes for the briefest of moments as she prepared for the threat—the strike she meant to hurt me. “You say that like it will stop me from cutting out your heart the first chance I get,” she snarled.
She shoved her hips upward, lifting my body as she forced her arms to slide across the ground toward her legs at the same time. My grip on her wrists followed, throwing off my balance and leaving me to release her in order to prevent my face from hitting the broken stones of the road. She moved quickly, the maneuver well-practiced in a way that made my teeth grind. Wrapping her arm around my elbow, she pressed her hand into the joint until it collapsed beneath me and she rolled me to my back.
Watching as she hurried to stand, I couldn’t help the laughter that escaped me. “There’s that tingle,” I said, getting to my feet. She didn’t run this time, facing me as if she were a conquering warrior, with her chin raised high. I took a single step toward her, feeling my nose shift to the side as it healed. Estrella stared at it in horror as I took another step. “Do you want to find out where I feel it, min asteren?”
“Fuck you,” she snarled, taking a single step back. The corpses behind her closed in, forming an impenetrable wall and leaving her with nowhere to go.
“No objections on my part,” I said, quirking a brow as I stepped toward her. I didn’t stop until her breasts pressed into the black metal and leather armor on my stomach, making me yearn for there to be nothing between us. I’d felt her body. Felt her skin against the magic of my glamour, and wished all along that I could feel her against my true form.
Her mouth twitched with the need to reply, to offer a scathing remark, but as soon as it had appeared, all pretense dropped from her face. Her eyes dropped low, avoiding my gaze as she asked the question burning inside of her. “Why?” It was barely a whisper between us, something the dead and the Fae Marked watching us from a distance wouldn’t have even noticed, but for the movement of her lips.
I watched the heartbreak pass over her face, stealing her features back from the rage that had contorted them. Her eyes filled with the threat of tears, but Estrella never let them fall. Sniffling them back to keep for herself, she shook her head minutely as she shoved that vulnerable part of herself down.
I had my work cut out for me if I wanted my mate to love me as she had before. “We knew of the Resistance before the Veil was formed. Mab sent me here to infiltrate it and discover if the witches might have hidden her daughter there. I couldn’t do that if I revealed myself to you as your mate, so I gave you the opportunity to fall in love with me before you learned the truth, instead,” I said, reaching out a hand to touch her cheek.
She lifted a hand between us, trembling fingers brushing against the nose she had most definitely broken. The skin felt tight where she touched it, newly formed as if she’d never harmed me. She stared at it as if she couldn’t quite believe how quickly my body had healed the proof of her assault, then let her hand fall away. I watched it tremble as it dropped from my view.
“You lied to me,” she said, sinking her teeth into the corner of her mouth. Her chest heaved as she fought back the surge of rising emotion. In the wake of the ebbing rage and desolation that she couldn’t escape me, there was nothing to distract her from feeling my betrayal burning between us, turning our love to ash.
“I never once lied, min asteren. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to. I never said I wasn’t your mate,” I said, dropping my forehead to hers and staring down at her. “You saw what you wanted to see. I simply didn’t correct your assumption. All you needed to do was ask.”
2
ESTRELLA
“The Fae can’t lie,” I whispered to myself, thinking back to the legends I’d read in the books during our brief time with the Resistance. I’d assumed most of them to be grandiose versions of the truth; the human perception of the creatures that had always been larger than life.
“All the stories I told you about my life were true. Everything you have come to know about me and my history has been real. I’ve never once lied to you,” he said, his jaw clenching as he considered the words.
“You told me a bunch of Fae half-truths in the place of something real. Just because you did not lie, doesn’t mean you were honest, either.” Running my tongue over the backs of my teeth, I fought back the surge of nausea in my gut. He stared down at me as if nothing had changed and he was still the man I’d fallen completely in love with, but he was the reason I’d lost everything.
He was the reason my mother was alone in a brutal village that had no use for her any longer; the reason my brother’s body floated in the sea somewhere. If Caldris didn’t exist, I’d be…dead, but at least my family would be unchanged.
“I simply never told you I was Fae. Can you really blame me when you’ve proven exactly why that was necessary?” he asked, tilting his head to the side. He watched me, seeing the hatred I knew made my eyes burn.
“You took everything from me,” I said, the words coming out as brittle as they felt. He might not have been responsible for the events that had led to my downfall, but it all went back to him. To his existence, and to the stupid bond that stretched between us, ignoring my desire to tear it to shreds as if it had some right to my soul despite my objections.
He raised a hand to touch my neck, the whorls of his Fae Mark winding on his skin. The black circle on the back of his hand seemed deeper somehow, the shadowed tendrils of pure darkness rolling off it as if he couldn’t quite contain the magic that stained him. The ink of his mark extended farther than before, gliding up onto each of his fingers. “Because your life was so incredible?” he asked, his voice raw with fury. “Abused by the Lord of your village. Bled daily and scarring yourself to feed people you’d likely never meet.” He lifted my hand from my side, holding it in his grasp and running his thumb over the faint white scars left by the thorns of the Twilight Berry bushes. The circle that had once seemed dull compared to the rest of my Fae Mark swirled to life beneath his touch. My hand burned as the mark sent a shock wave of searing heat through my fingers, the ink twining around the knuckles to match his.
“What did you do?” I asked, the shock of pain making me try to tear my hand away from his. He held fast, refusing to release me while my skin burned, sizzling as the heat of the mark finally started to fade and the ink settled into my flesh.
“When the Mist Guard tried to kill you, your fear awakened the winter part of your Viniculum. You’ve relied on it to protect you since that moment and never tried to access the other part of you, which comes from the Shadow Court. Even so, that option is there, waiting dormant inside of you until you choose to use it for the first time. Everything I can do, you can do on a lesser scale, Little One,” he said, gesturing to the dead around him and the way they waited for his wordless command. “If I am the God of the Dead, then the mirror of my power enables you to raise the dead as I do.”