What did you do? (Infatuated fae #2)

4. Present Day

4

PRESENT DAY

Mendax

R ough, textured bark pressed into my back while I stood against the old tree, my body too large to be completely shadowed by the night, but it didn’t matter. I was the night. I was the darkest thing this human land would ever see.

A piece of hair fell into my eyes, darkening my view further. I didn’t raise my hand and brush it away though; I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. Instead, I watched her.

She moved quickly, placing items in a traveling satchel. I could feel her heart from where I stood, watching her through the windows of her human shack. The black hair that had fallen in my eye shifted to the side with a breeze filled with the earthy smell of a forest at night.

My eyes tracked every move she made, every wrinkle in her shirt, every nervous tap of her fingers. I would never miss another move Callie—or whatever her name was—made again.

A noise sounded behind me. I wanted to turn and look, but I couldn’t pry my eyes away from her. It didn’t matter anyway. I watched my only threat in this world.

A pop sounded from my jaw, and I felt the deep, grinding pressure of my teeth clenching when the golden fae entered the same room as her.

Turning my head to the side and closing my eyes for a beat, I pressed my ear to my shoulder and cracked my neck with a loud snap.

My body thrummed with the need to kill the Seelie for being in the same room. He had no idea how fortunate it was he was a SunTamer and I couldn’t impel his mind, because if I could, I would have decimated him.

The old gods thought they were being fair when they made the stronger powers infallible to each other.

A shiver of excitement ran over my skin as I imagined everything I would make him do had I been able to crawl inside his mind.

I listened as they talked.

He spoke differently to her. Gently, softly.

He called her Calypso, and I nearly laughed into the night at her brilliance. Giving me a misspelled nickname was smart. It wasn’t tied to her strongly enough for us to use, but it was close enough that when spoken, no one would have doubted her reaction to it. Calypso did not seem like a normal human name though—perhaps she’d lied to him as well.

I knew she was human. I had felt her broken heart in my hand.

I didn’t give a shit what her name was.

Mine was the only name she deserved.

She was clever, so she would realize she was only mine quickly.

Her eyes scanned the poorly lit room they stood in before grazing the window I watched from.

For a moment our eyes locked.

She saw only darkness, but holding her gaze for a moment caused my breath to halt in my chest.

She was a goddess.

Anger boiled under my skin as I watched her return to her tasks. It wasn’t anger that she had betrayed and lied to me the entirety of time I had kept her. No—I had known the moment I saw her that she was different, that she attempted to blanket a fire inside of her. I just hadn’t realized I would be drawn to it like a fucking moth to a flame. I wasn’t even angry that she had stabbed and tried to kill me…that she believed she could kill me. If anything, that made me want her more, made me want to set her darkness free and see what it could really do once its shackles had broken.

I gripped the tree so hard, flaky, pale wood crumpled, creating a divot where my hand had been.

The old tree creaked in protest.

Aurelius moved closer to her while they continued to talk.

My face hardened, now with pure fury.

She had left me.

She had left me when she hadn’t really wanted to. That meant someone else was pulling her puppet strings, and that wasn’t going to work for me. It wasn’t going to work out very well for them either. I knew who it was. I just needed to see if there was anyone else to add to the list.

The Seelie and the Unseelie queens had always been on the verge of a war, and I was afraid this human had probably doomed us all—unknowingly. I knew she wasn’t aware of all there was to the Seelie queen, or she wouldn’t have been packing a bag as a human to join her right now.

The only thing that might have saved her and gotten her away from them safely was our bond. Funny how much she fought against it, when it was probably the only thing that would keep her alive in Seelie. If she thought being a human was unsafe in my realm, she was in for a shock.

She definitely received some of my powers when we bonded, though how much or why was unclear. My mother and I had never heard of such a thing happening. Typically the bonded receives some of the Smoke Slayer’s powers once the marriage ceremony is completed, but I’ve watched the smoke cascade from her soft skin enough times to know that wasn’t the case with her. Through the bond, I can feel her emotions. They are watered down and faint, but they are there. She feels mine, too, when I’m not keeping them in check, even though she thinks they are her own.

This will be fun.

A tight grin lifted one side of my mouth.

The golden shit tried to hug her. She recoiled, likely repulsed by his sunshine glow, then they watched as the charcoal smoke caressed her skin.

I shuddered, feeling my smoke dance across her skin. She liked the feel of it. It reminded her of me.

“Fucking stars,” I growled.

Aurelius finally left the room to collect something from her kitchen. She shuffled frantically through another box, stuffing odds and ends into her bag in his absence, checking every so often if he had returned before hurriedly placing more odd-shaped items in the bag.

For the first time since she left me, I smiled so wide I could feel something crack open in my chest.

I couldn’t wait to play with my little hellhound. I couldn’t wait to see the look on her face when she realized I wasn’t dead, and I especially couldn’t wait until I punished her for leaving me.

I told her she would never, ever be free from me, and I fucking meant it. Whether she had killed me or not, I would have returned to haunt her—and that’s exactly what I planned to do.