Chapter One #2
Nesta tugged off his shirt, leaving nothing but bare skin in its wake.
His eyes widened, but the scent of his fear remained—not fear of her, but of the male he’d heard at the front door.
As he remembered who her sister was. Who her sister’s mate was.
Who her sister’s friends were. As if any of that meant something.
What would his fear smell like if he learned she’d used him, slept with him, to keep herself at bay?
To settle that writhing darkness that had simmered inside her from the moment she’d emerged from the Cauldron?
Sex, music, and drink, she’d learned this past year—all of it helped.
Not entirely, but it kept the power from boiling over.
Even if she could still feel it streaming through her blood, coiled tight around her bones.
She chucked the white shirt at him. “You can use the front door now.”
He slung the shirt over his head. “I— Is he still—” His gaze kept snagging on her breasts, peaked against the chill morning; her bare skin. The apex of her thighs.
“Good-bye.” Nesta entered the rusty, leaky bathroom attached to her bedroom. At least the place had hot running water.
Sometimes.
Feyre and Elain had tried to convince her to move. She’d always ignored their advice. Just as she’d ignore whatever was said today. She knew Feyre planned a scolding. Perhaps something to do with the fact that Nesta had signed last night’s outrageous tab at the tavern to her sister’s bank account.
Nesta snorted, twisting the handle in the bath. It groaned, the metal icy to the touch, and water sputtered, then sprayed into the cracked, stained tub.
This was her residence. No servants, no eyes monitoring and judging every move, no company unless she invited them. Or unless prying, swaggering warriors made it their business to stop by.
It took five minutes for the water to actually heat enough to start filling the tub.
There had been some days in the past year when she hadn’t even bothered to take the time.
Some days when she’d climbed into the icy water, not feeling its bite but that of the Cauldron’s dark depths as it devoured her whole.
As it ripped away her humanity, her mortality, and made her into this.
It had taken her months of battling it—the body-tensing panic that made her very bones tremble to be submerged.
But she’d forced herself to face it down.
Had learned to sit in the icy water, nauseated and shaking, teeth gritted; had refused to move until her body recognized that she was in a tub and not the Cauldron, that she was in her apartment and not the stone castle across the sea, that she was alive, immortal. Even though her father was not.
No, her father was ashes in the wind, his existence marked only by a headstone on a hill outside this city. Or so her sisters had told her.
I loved you from the first moment I held you in my arms, her father had said to her in those last moments together.
Don’t you lay your filthy hands on my daughter. Those had been his final words, spat at the King of Hybern. Her father had squandered those final words on that worm of a king.
Her father. The man who had never fought for his children, not until the end. When he had come to save them—to save the humans and the Fae, yes, but most of all, his daughters. Her.
A grand, stupid waste.
Unholy dark power flowed through her, and it had not been enough to stop the King of Hybern from snapping his neck.
She had hated her father, hated him deeply, and yet he had loved her, for some inexplicable reason. Not enough to try to spare them from poverty or keep them from starving. But somehow it had been enough for him to raise an army on the continent. To sail a ship named for her into battle.
She had still hated her father in those last moments. And then his neck had cracked, his eyes not full of fear as he died, but of that foolish love for her.
That was what had lingered—the look in his eyes. The resentment in her heart as he died for her. It had festered, gnawing at her like the power she buried deep, running rampant through her head until no icy baths could numb it away.
She could have saved him.
It was the King of Hybern’s fault. She knew that. But it was hers, too. Just as it was her fault that Elain had been captured by the Cauldron after Nesta spied on it with that scrying, her fault that Hybern had done such terrible things to hunt her and her sister down like a deer.
Some days, the sheer dread and panic locked Nesta’s body up so thoroughly that nothing could get her to breathe.
Nothing could stop the awful power from beginning to rise, rise, rise in her.
Nothing beyond the music at those taverns, the card games with strangers, the endless bottles of wine, and the sex that made her feel nothing—but offered a moment of release amid the roaring inside her.
Nesta finished washing away the sweat and other remnants of last night. The sex hadn’t been bad—she’d had better, but also much worse. Even immortality wasn’t enough time for some males to master the art of the bedroom.
So she’d taught herself what she liked. She’d obtained a monthly contraceptive tea from her local apothecary, and then she’d brought that first male here.
He had no idea that her maidenhead had been intact until he’d spied the smeared blood on the sheets.
His face had tightened with distaste—then a glimmer of fear that she might report an unsatisfactory first bedding to her sister.
To her sister’s insufferable mate. Nesta hadn’t bothered to tell him that she avoided both of them at all costs.
Especially the latter. These days, Rhysand seemed content to do the same.
After the war with Hybern, Rhysand had offered her jobs. Positions in his court.
She didn’t want them. They were pity offerings, thin attempts to get her to be a part of Feyre’s life, to be gainfully employed. But the High Lord had never liked her. Their conversations were coldly civil at best.
She’d never told him that the reasons he hated her were the same reasons she lived here.
Took cold baths some days. Forgot to eat on others.
Couldn’t stand the crack and snap of a fireplace.
And drowned herself in wine and music and pleasure each night.
Every damning thing Rhysand thought about her was true—and she’d known it long before he had ever shadowed her doorstep.
Any offering Rhysand threw her way was made solely out of love for Feyre. Better to spend her time the way she wished. They kept paying for it, after all.
The knock on the door rattled the entire apartment.
She glared toward the front room, debating whether to pretend she’d left, but Cassian could hear her, smell her. And if he broke down the door, which he was likely to do, she’d just have the headache of explaining it to her stingy landlord.
So Nesta donned the dress she’d left on the floor last night, and then again freed all four locks.
She’d installed them the first day she’d arrived.
Locking them each night was practically a ritual.
Even when the nameless male had been here, even out of her mind on wine, she’d remembered to lock them all.
As if that would keep the monsters of this world at bay.
Nesta tugged open the door enough to see Cassian’s cocky grin, and left it ajar as she stormed away to search for her shoes.
He strode in after her, a mug of tea in his hand—the cup probably borrowed from the shop at the corner.
Or outright given to him, considering how people tended to worship the ground his muddy boots walked on.
He’d already been adored in this city before the Hybern conflict.
His heroism and sacrifice—the feats he’d performed on the battlefields—had won him even more awe after its end.
She didn’t blame his admirers. She’d experienced the pleasure and sheer terror of watching him on those battlefields.
Still woke with sweat coating her at the memories: how she couldn’t breathe while she’d witnessed him fight, enemies swarming him; how it had felt when the Cauldron’s power had surged and she’d known it was going to strike where their army was strongest—him.
She hadn’t been able to save the one thousand Illyrians who had fallen in the moment after she’d summoned him to safety. She turned away from that memory, too.
Cassian surveyed her apartment and let out a low whistle. “Ever thought of hiring a cleaner?”
Nesta scanned the small living area—a sagging crimson couch, a soot-stained brick hearth, a moth-eaten floral armchair, then the ancient kitchenette, piled with leaning columns of dirty dishes. Where had she thrown her shoes last night? She shifted her search to her bedroom.
“Some fresh air would be a good start,” Cassian added from the other room. The window groaned as he cracked it open.
She found her brown shoes in opposite corners of the bedroom. One reeked of spilled wine.
Nesta perched on the edge of the mattress to slide them on, tugging at the laces. She didn’t bother to look up as Cassian’s steady steps approached, then halted at the threshold.
He sniffed once. Loudly.
“I’d hoped you at least changed the sheets between visitors, but apparently that doesn’t bother you.”
Nesta tied the laces on the first shoe. “What business is it of yours?”
He shrugged, though the tightness on his face didn’t reflect such nonchalance. “If I can smell a few different males in here, then surely your companions can, too.”
“Hasn’t stopped them yet.” She tied the other shoe, Cassian’s hazel eyes tracking the movement.
“Your tea is getting cold.” His teeth flashed.
Nesta ignored him and searched the bedroom again. Her coat …
“Your coat is on the ground by the front door,” he said. “And it’s going to be brisk out, so bring a scarf.”