Chapter 31
Ash
“I’m just saying,” Orion’s voice carries from behind me, “if the tavern doesn’t have actual food, I’m eating Finnian.”
“You’d get indigestion,” Finnian replies without missing a beat. “Too much knowledge. Very hard to digest.”
“I’d risk it.”
“I’m touched by your commitment to cannibalism.”
“Would you two shut up about food?” Kieran’s voice is ice and exhaustion. “Some of us are trying to brood in peace.”
“You can brood and walk at the same time,” I call back. “I’ve seen you do it. Very impressive multitasking.”
“It’s a gift.”
The banter should feel normal. Should feel like us. Four people who’ve been through hell together and come out the other side speaking a language no one else understands.
But my mind isn’t here.
It’s in a bathroom in an alternate timeline, watching Lucy smile about dying.
It’s on a nursery floor finding out I was about to marry my poisoner.
It’s calculating the exact distance between where I’m walking and where three men are trying to love me, and how long until I disappoint them the way I’ve disappointed everyone else.
When was the last time it was just the four of us?
I look at the men who swooped into my life, knocking me not just off my feet but right on my ass. They did that. Changed everything. Became even more.
The only sure thing in my life are these three men and it makes me want to pull my hair out.
I got them. I got everything I wanted. The men, the crown. Their obsession. Their love. It’s mine. And yet there is this gaping hole in my life that I don’t know how to fill.
And I keep waiting for the joy to show up. Keep waiting to feel like I deserve any of it. Instead there’s this hole where my family used to be, and every time one of them touches me I think you don’t know what I cost the people who loved me first.
My cousins pulse at the edge of my awareness. Have since I woke up in that grove.
Their impossible love through distance and time. I still feel it humming under my skin. And when they crossed into Faerie, when their feet touched wild soil...
I knew my time was up. No more figuring things out in the safety of distance. No more pretending the reckoning wasn’t coming.
I can’t get Lucy out of my head. The way she smiled when she realized dying was her ticket to finding mates. Who smiles about that? Who looks at death and thinks finally, the good part?
Apparently my dead friend. Who isn’t dead in one timeline. Who I could have saved if I’d just shown up. Who might still die in that timeline, too, because fate doesn’t care which version of me makes which choice. It just waits for the outcome it wanted all along.
I choke and stumble.
“Okay, we aren’t going a moment longer until you explain what’s going on.” Orion catches me, lifts me up by the waist like I weigh nothing, and sets me down on the path.
The soles of my feet sink into the dirt and I swear I feel a tickle of a small root under my foot. The Wild Court magic reaching for me. Recognizing me. Whether I want it to or not.
“I can walk.”
“You can also wander into a carnivorous plant and get digested. I’ve seen you do that, too.”
“That was ONE time.”
“Once is enough when it comes to being plant food.”
He doesn’t let go immediately. His hands linger at my waist, thumbs pressing into the space above my hips. And the way he looks at me—
Orion doesn’t see into my soul. He doesn’t need to.
He sees the thing underneath. The creature I’ve been trying to keep caged since I was old enough to know it made people uncomfortable.
The hunger. The violence. The part of me that liked it when the forest tried to eat us because at least then I had something to fight.
He sees all of that and his response is finally, someone who gets it.
When he looks at me, it’s not like he’s trying to understand me. It’s like we’re the same animal wearing different skins, and he’s just been waiting for me to stop pretending I’m domesticated.
“You gonna tell us what’s wrong, or do I have to throw you over my shoulder again?”
“You’d enjoy that too much.”
“Guilty.” But he’s not smiling. “Talk, Ash.”
“I don’t want to talk.” I huff and blow my hair out of my face.
“Unfortunately we do not have the blue goblin for the emotional soul support.” Kieran crosses his arms, staring me down. “You have us.”
Kieran sees the fractures. Every single one. The guilt, the rage, the part of me that’s convinced I ruin everything I touch. He catalogues them the way he catalogues threats. Then he doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t try to fix them. Just stands there like yes, and?
The first time someone looked at my damage and didn’t treat it like a problem to solve, I almost didn’t recognize what was happening.
He loves the fucked up fractured Fae. Not despite. Because.
“If I may?” Finnian steps forward, hands clasped behind his back like he’s about to deliver a lecture. “I do believe that most interpersonal conflicts can be resolved through direct verbal communication.”
I glare at him. In my head I kick him in the very balls I love to lick. He holds up his hands.
“A conversation,” he clarifies. “I’m suggesting we have a conversation.”
“I understood you the first time. I was just marveling at your ability to use seventeen words when three would do.”
“Brevity is overrated. Precision matters.”
“You know what else matters? Minding your own business.”
“Impossible.” His amber eyes hold mine, and there’s nothing academic in them now.
Just heat. Just want. Just centuries of learning how to read people and all of it focused on me.
“You are my business. You became my business the moment I chose treason over obedience. So forgive me if I’m invested in your emotional wellbeing. ”
That’s how Finnian looks at me. As though I am his entire fucking universe…
Like every book he’s ever read was just preparation for understanding me. Like I’m not a person but a revelation, the most important one he’ll ever make.
Instead I want to shake him. Scream you chose wrong, you idiot. I’m not a revelation. I’m a disaster in progress. And when you figure that out, when you finally see what everyone else saw before they gave up on me—
I can’t finish the thought. It hurts too much.
“That was smooth,” Orion mutters. “I hate when he’s smooth.”
“Practice.” Finnian doesn’t look away from me. “Centuries of it.”
“Troublesome thing.” Kieran gently presses his thumb to my chin, guiding me to look at him. “Talk. For the sake of all of us. We want to know what troubles you. We wouldn’t ask if we didn’t care.”
“That’s just it.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “What if what I have to tell you is so messed up that you can’t forgive me?”
“Are you sure it isn’t you who must forgive yourself?” Finnian asks.
I glare at him. Hate that he’s right. Hate that he can see exactly where the wound is and press on it so gently it almost doesn’t hurt.
“Pepper.” I sigh, saying the name that makes my tongue taste like a red-hot soaked cotton ball. “They’re here. I felt it the moment they stepped onto wild lands.”
“What worries you?” Finnian asks, so goddamn gentle it makes me want to scream.
“What if she’s here for duty? Not me?” It would be karmic really.
Only in Faerie because Sabina and Vanessa forced them to go.
“What if she shows up and looks at me with that face, the one that says she’s fulfilling an obligation, not fighting for someone she loves?
What if I have to stand there and smile and pretend that doesn’t hollow me out? ”
“What was your last dream?” Kieran asks.
Orion grunts and leans against a tree, making himself comfortable. Settling in. Like he knows this is going to take a while and he’s not going anywhere.
So I tell them. All of it.
The alternate timeline. Waking up about to marry Davis, who’s been poisoning me with iron, who I trusted, who smiled at me while he was killing me slowly.
Lucy alive with Pepper’s demon-eyed daughter named after her.
Pepper who didn’t hate me because in that world, I showed up.
I intercepted Cassandra. I saved Lucy’s life by being in the right place at the right time.
One person. One presence. That’s all it took.
And the trade-off. Lucy alive but mateless, because her mates exist in the underworld and she has to die to find them.
“She was happy,” I whisper. “Happy about dying. Because it meant she’d finally find them. She looked at me with this...this peace. And said she forgave me. For something I didn’t do in that timeline. For something I did do in mine.”
I drag in a breath that feels like swallowing glass.
“And the worst part? The worst fucking part is that I didn’t deserve that forgiveness. Not from that Lucy. Not from my Lucy. I didn’t earn it. I just got it. For free. Because she was generous enough to give it to a version of me that doesn’t exist.”
The silence that follows is heavy.
“Fate.” Orion chuckles a little to himself, but there’s no humor in it. “You cannot escape what is meant for you.” He pushes off the tree. “It will find you no matter what reality, timeline, or path you choose. Sped up or delayed. The destination stays the same.”
“For so long I didn’t think fate had any kind of hold over any of us.” I rub my temples. “I thought we were free. I thought our choices mattered.”
“They do matter.” Kieran moves closer. “You’re looking at it wrong.
Stop thinking you’re at the mercy of fate.
The path changes. The stops along the way change.
What you carry when you arrive, that changes, too.
” His jaw tightens. “But you still arrive. And you can either spend the whole journey punishing yourself for the route you took, or you can look up and see where you actually are.”