47. Fate
Chapter forty-seven
Fate
M y gaze snapped towards the true High King of Faerie.
He was awake and alert.
“You son of a bitch,” I breathed.
He rolled his eyes, grunting as he pushed himself up into a sitting position on my bed. “Considering she’s Malum now, you’re not wrong.”
I took a mental shovel out on the relief that rushed through me at the sight of him sitting up, clear-eyed and skin healed, and tried to bury it beneath my rage.
His blond hair was matted with crusted blood, as was the diamond hoop in his earlobe, but the fire had cleansed the rest of his face, chest and the chain tying the insignia to him. He was still wearing his leather pants, splattered with mud and blood, and I hadn’t bothered to pull the covers over him.
“What is your name?” My voice threatened to shake, threatened to break into a million little pieces.
He held my gaze, some of the fire returning to his eyes. “Try again.”
The healer had propped him up with three of my pillows, but there was one on the bed next to him. If I was fast, I probably could have grabbed it and held it down over his head until he stopped breathing.
I lifted myself off my perch on the window and began to walk towards it, moving slowly as the blood trickled back down into my stiff legs. It had grown dark outside, barely a streak of light left in the sky.
“What is your full, real name?” I asked, leaning down with my hands on the bed so we were eye-to-eye. “What is the name that your parents gave you, the name that the other faeries know you as?”
He didn’t blink. Even as molten gold swirled in his irises. “Lucais Starfire.”
The impact his answer had on me was unprecedented. I felt like I was going to die, but I ploughed onwards.
“Are you, Lucais Starfire, the High King of Faerie?”
“Yes.”
Breathe, I told myself.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Am I your mate?”
“No.”
My eyes flew open. He was smirking at me, but there was a hint of regret in his eyes.
“You are supposed to be my mate,” he clarified, and I sagged forward, kneeling on the edge of the mattress. “Technically, you aren’t my mate until you accept the bond. Keep working on your phrasing. You’re getting better.”
“I hate you.”
His eyes followed a lazy line over my body on their way back to mine. “And I think the feeling is mutual, bookworm,” he murmured, but his mouth twisted to one side.
“No,” I said, adjusting to sit down on the bed. “I really hate you.”
Wren’s— Lucais’s —face was the portrait of innocent alarm. “I know. You threatened to kill me while I was drinking your blood.” He arched his golden eyebrows. “Thank you, by the way. I’ve spent weeks wondering how you taste, and this part of you, at least, did not disappoint.”
I made a gagging face. “You make me sick.”
He smiled softly. “I recall saying something similar to you not long ago.”
Intent on sprinting towards the point instead of jumping over the hurdles in his games, I leaned towards him and propped myself up with my elbows on the mattress. He mirrored me, coming as close as he could with a hand braced on the bed.
“Why?” I demanded. “No lies, no trickery, no bullshit. Tell me why.”
Some of the light in his eyes dimmed. “You want the truth?”
“Always.” I narrowed my eyes at him and added, “Even if it kills you. Especially then.”
He gave me a withering look. “Fine. I didn’t want you to know that you were designed to be my mate because I don’t want you here. I meant what I said—that it would be easier for me if you were never born, because the things that they will do to you if they find out…”
I flinched, and he grasped one of my hands. The touch was warm, affectionate. I pulled away.
“Aura,” he murmured, flexing his fingers as he stared at my hand. “They will pull you apart in ways that prevent me from ever putting you back together. If you accepted the bond, then I’m signing your death warrant, and I can’t even fathom how I would survive that. How Faerie would survive that—”
A bitter laugh bubbled out of my mouth, and I shook my head at him. “All because some Oracle showed you a vision?”
Wren’s— Lucais’s —eyes softened in a way I had never witnessed before. The rest of his face followed, smoothing down into an expression of handsome desire. “The vision made me curious. I wanted to meet you until the Malum sent their first message, and I realised how dangerous it would be if we ever did. I had no idea who you were when I returned to Belgrave, but the moment I appeared in that bookstore, and it was covered in your scent…” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “If you hadn’t come back that night, I would have slaughtered the caenim and destroyed the portal and thrown a ward up around your town. And come home.”
“So, why didn’t you?”
“Because you came back,” he answered simply, opening his eyes. “Even after catching a glimpse of the monsters following you. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”
Because I’d left my keys behind.
No .
Because he was there.
“I knew the moment I laid eyes on you for the first time that you were my mate, and that I couldn’t leave you,” he went on. “I couldn’t even pretend to leave you without putting the whole of Faerie in jeopardy from the storms it could create, but you couldn’t know the truth. It was better for you to hate me if it meant keeping you and my world safe.”
My gaze dropped to his mouth, my heart beating out of rhythm. The question was on my lips, but I was too afraid to press further.
“In the cottage,” he said, answering it anyway. “I knew that the bond was real and true in the cottage that night when you woke up from a bad dream, screaming for me. Hearing my name on your lips like that for the first time broke my heart. I felt it first in the Forest of Eyes and Ears when you had the whole damn thing attack me, but that night cemented it.”
Part of me wanted to touch him. Lucais. Not the Lucais I had been introduced to, but him. The one in front of me. The man from my dreams.
His hand was resting on the bed, so close to mine, and I wanted to hold onto it because I was reminded of the way he screamed as the spike was pulled from his torso. The scream that had tormented me for months, from the man I had wanted so desperately to save. The man I had wanted to love .
He was staring right at me with a warmth in his eyes that I had missed before now, a warmth that I had felt mirrored in my own eyes so many times.
But he’s been staring at me for weeks.
Lying to me.
He doesn’t love me.
I frowned at the empty space between our hands. “You realise that you fat-shamed me to your horse?”
He lifted his hand, cupping my chin, and tilted my face up towards his. Lucais dropped his voice to a near-growl and said, “You realise that I’m a liar?”
A shiver ran down my spine, and I almost leaned into his touch.
The magic in my veins leapt with joy, ecstatic that the rest of me was finally catching on to what it had been trying to tell me all this time.
Every question I had was being answered. The confusion was clearing like a wind pulling the clouds from the sky.
I’d had no idea who he was, but I had felt all along that it wasn’t who he let me believe he was.
“Those wicked things I said to you were mostly part of the ruse, Aura. But I really don’t want you to like me. You felt it the moment we met. I saw it on your face, and so I spent the next few weeks trying to override those feelings, to convince you they were wrong.” His thumb brushed my cheek. “I tried to convince myself that they were wrong initially, too. But I realised early on that it was futile.”
I shook my head, making no effort to reduce the impact of my words as I whispered, “But I was attracted to Lucais—I mean Wren.”
Lucais’s grip tightened almost imperceptibly on my chin, but he said with intense calm, “You can be attracted to whoever you like, bookworm. The mating bond doesn’t mean anything.”
I slapped his hand away from me. He let it drop but gave me an exasperated look.
“Why?” I hissed. “Why would you let him use me like that?”
He arched a brow, a hard look in his eyes. “Use you? He tried to stop you—”
Groaning, I threw myself face down on the bed and covered the back of my head with my hands. The things that I had done with Lucais—fake Lucais, real Wren—in the dining room, and in the room off the hallway, and even in my mate’s bedroom.
Fake Wren, real Lucais had watched. He’d waited outside and listened and said horrible things to me in the hallway afterwards. I had a better understanding of his anger now, but it didn’t explain why he had let it happen in the first place.
When it became hard to breathe against the mattress, I rolled over and sat up. I was closer to the true High King than I had been before, and by the way his shoulders tensed, I knew he was aware of it too.
“You enjoy his company,” he said too quietly. “Does part of me want to snap his wrists? Yes. Are those feelings warranted? No. They belong to the bond, which answers to the stars, not the High King.”
I sighed. “None of it was warranted.”
“Wrenlock didn’t actually agree to the plan,” he confessed. “It was a foolish, split-second decision I made alone in Belgrave when I gave you his name instead of mine, and then I didn’t provide him with a chance to argue when we arrived back at the House. I figured if there was something real budding between the two of you—”
“ Is something,” I corrected.
“Then maybe,” he ground out, fists balling around the covers, “I could convince people that we weren’t mates, that the Oracle was mistaken somehow. And maybe being with him instead of me could save your life if you chose to stay with us.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “It’s not only the Malum, Aura. There are enemies among my own people, carrying around a centuries-old hatchet and waiting for the right time to use it.”
Because he freed the slaves.
Lucais, my fated soulmate, had started a war by granting freedom to faeries far and wide. It was the action of a High King, an action that had stirred affection deep within my heart, even though it put a bounty on our heads.
But what else did I not know about him? About his reign as High King, about his past, about his personality?
I sighed and turned towards him, the weight of all the truth becoming too much for me to bear. “You tricked me,” I stated.
Lucais’s golden eyes narrowed—not out of anger, but in preparation for the blows to come.
“Instead of letting me prepare myself to face the real enemies I may have, you had me believe that you were one,” I said, keeping my voice even. I felt hollow like my heart had been carved out of my chest.
Lucais had haunted my dreams, and when I met him as Wren, I’d known that he was in that dungeon with me. I had been so sure of it, and the only explanation I could find was that he had been one of the men who had tortured my prisoner.
But he was the prisoner I’d screamed for all along.
How different would things have been if he had simply told me the truth from the start?
“You let me fall for your best friend based on a lie,” I went on, banishing the fantasy in my head. “I would have done anything for you—pretended to love Wren, even—if I’d known who you were. But instead, you bullied me, made me feel worthless, and pushed me further and further into his waiting arms like I’m nothing more than a sheep being herded into a corral. And then you slut-shamed me for it! I don’t know much about your mating bond, but I do know that if I was truly your mate and I was truly the intended High Queen, then I deserved better.”
“You do deserve better,” he told me, his eyes going to some faraway place as they studied my face intently. Like he was imagining the same fantasy of our storyline following the truth instead. “I realise that you don’t want to know me, bookworm, and I realise that it’s because I am destined to disappoint you by order of the Oracle.”
I felt my magic flickering in delight at his acknowledgement of fate, even as the pit in my stomach flipped and shrieked.
“And you are the intended High Queen of Faerie. It doesn’t make a difference whether you like me or not.”
I took a deep breath. “Yes, it does.”