Chapter 20
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The list of things Castor won’t do for me is short, but annoying.
“Castor…” I protest, albeit weakly.
His smile carves itself into my skin as the backs of his fingers dance across my cheek. He’s close, so close, and we’re lying down, in my bed, aloft, in the golden cage I walked right back into after he brought me home from promises of freedom.
Because I’m demented, obviously.
And delusional.
And in need of tremendous amounts of therapy…
And—
“Yes, my heart?” he whispers.
I swallow, and my cells bend toward him, eager, interested, dazed…
My thumb grazes from the tip of his pinkie to his wrist. I shudder and close my eyes as Castor’s tongue draws yet another picture into my throat.
We should stop. Really we should.
Right now, layers and layers of magic cloth separate us, but the fabric of his robes and the reams of my dress are somewhat less comforting when I feel all the same sensations of him from them. With a snap of his fingers, I’ll be in nothing but the undergarments I bought when he took me shopping.
This is a bad idea.
It’s been mere days.
I’m in a cage—with him, but still.
He’s dangerous.
He’s fae; I’m human.
I—
A soft sound leaves me as my soul gives up. What does it matter anyway? At least these chains are so, so pleasant…if they’re even chains at all.
As though to prove how safe and free and heard I actually am, Castor…stops. He pulls back from my throat and touches his fingertips to my lips, prompting, “Love, you were going to say something?”
Well. Yes. I was going to broach the very bad idea we’re entertaining by lying here together like this, hyped up on hormones and feelings and stuff like that.
I was going to, gently, suggest that we aren’t ready for what this sort of situation can lead to.
I was going to be all kinds of reasonable and logical and level-headed.
Was being the condemning word, of course.
It seems I have quite firmly left my sense in the past.
“Are you going to stay with me tonight?” I ask, instead. Like a moron with a crush on the bad boy biker man who’s a decade older and probably still living in his parents’ basement, where he does hard drugs and cusses at thirteen-year-olds in video games.
In stark contrast, like a mature, rational, and intelligent adult, Castor says, “No, darling.”
Disappointment hits me right through my stupidity.
Castor swells, blessing my lips with a kiss far more chaste than the nonsense we’ve been getting up to ever since he brought me home from the moth palace.
“I’m not going to take the chance that I fall asleep with you and lose my blind in the night.
” A sigh settles in his chest, against me, as he holds me so close.
“I’d offer to gouge my eyes out for such blessing…
but I’m not confident the—” he swears, “—things wouldn’t be back before morning. ”
My stomach dips—with inexplicable flutters. “You’d gouge your eyes out for me?”
“Of course.” His tone suggests I’m silly for feeling the need to ask him such a question when the answer should be common sense.
This is bad. So bad. I’m on the precipice of falling hard for this man, because of dreadfully concerning reasons.
I say, “They…grow back?”
“Unfortunately.”
Unfortunately. Even though he can see, he chooses not to, and he’d choose not to forever to keep me safe.
I have never been a priority. My interests and well-being have never mattered beyond how they might affect my mother’s ability to turn a profit using me. This sensation of being prioritized is heady and all-consuming. It amps up the delusion and the daze and the depravity.
Kissing his chin, I whisper, “Would you cut out your tongue for me?”
“Yes,” he replies, no hesitation, breathless.
My lips graze along his smooth jawline. “What wouldn’t you do for me?”
His mouth opens. Thoughts pass in the silence. His throat bobs with a swallow. “I can think of nothing, but I am sorely lacking in my mental capacity at the moment. Everything is just…” His nose buries itself in my neck and hair. “You.”
I’m used to being plastered in all sorts of environments that make it really feel like everything is about me. Never before has it actually been true, though. “Stay with me,” I say.
“For your sake, I cannot.”
“You wouldn’t stay awake all night for me?”
“I do not trust myself to win against weariness with the weight of you in my arms. The peace you elicit in every speck of my being lulls me toward a dangerous edge. Were I less selfish, I’d have left you hours ago. But…”
“But?”
His fingers dig into my body as he begs for a closeness that I’m not sure physical proximity can sate. “You chose me. You didn’t have to. I… I was clear, wasn’t I?”
“You were.”
“You didn’t feel pressured, did you?”
I didn’t. “I felt…relief. When I saw you, I felt relief.”
Castor swears, and his fingers run through my hair, gripping. “Mine,” he says. “You are mine.” A broken laugh escapes him. “Willow was right.”
“Willow?”
“To be chosen…it is an experience I am grateful for.”
She left me with Cael on purpose. So I’d have the opportunity to choose Castor.
That’s a crazy move, but it makes so much sense. She really did drop me off and disappear back to her home library, didn’t she? It was like delivering a package. She said, Welp, my work here is done, and left.
What an odd character.
For how strange everyone I’ve met here—including Zahra in the flesh—is, it’s a wonder how much I feel as though I belong. The peculiar becomes ordinary. The odd commonplace. The unusual and broken fit right in.
For the first time in my life, I wonder if this is what it’s like to feel almost…safe.
My heart shakes as I open my mouth. “Castor?”
“Yes, love?”
“There was…something Willow said to me, that day when we talked alone.”
Castor tenses, but he repeats, “Yes…love? What was it?”
“She told me that I was powerful, like you. She said that the first step to truly accepting you as my soulmate and breaking the cycle of abuse I’ve found myself in is learning that I don’t need you.”
His fingers tense in my flesh, but his tone remains conversational, “What a thing to say.”
“Tonight…” I pause, feel the way he’s already turned stony around me, and risk mentioning the moth prince anyway, “…Cael asked what I was.”
Humming, Castor chuckles. “Indeed he did. You shattered his magic, love. Completely unaware, with naught but a flick of your hand. The fool no doubt is panicking. Not just anyone can dispel the magic of the erlking.”
My eyes widen. “I dispelled magic?”
“Yes? Why do you sound so shocked?”
“I’m human,” I say. “An odd one, I’ve gathered, since I can see fae and such. But…can I…do magic? Am I really capable of being as powerful as you?”
Stillness stretches. Moments pass. Castor pulls back a fraction, presses his lips together, clears his throat.
“Oh my goodness,” I say, probably much too settled, much too drunk on his touch and kisses, much too comfortable. “You forgot to tell me something insanely important again, didn’t you?”
His mouth opens. He closes it. I watch him swallow as his fingers worry shapes into my waist. “Well, there is a possibility…” He coughs. “A slight chance that… Um.”
Risking even more, I sit myself up, putting distance between us.
His fingers, latched to me, twitch with protest before he follows my lead, sitting himself up, too.
“I apologize, Mine. It’s not my intention to keep basic knowledge from you.
I just get so wrapped up in other thoughts and things, and I…
forget. Or think I have already. Or I assume that you know.
I do that quite often. When I’m comfortable with someone, I assume they know what I know.
More than I know. It happened a lot with Polly and Cael.
Around them I always seemed to feel…smaller.
Less. They are so smart, wise, good. I’d regularly try to outsmart them.
I’d regularly fail.” His fingers smooth against my skirt as his tone softens.
“In the end, that tendency became a main point of contention.” Giving his head a slight shake, he skates his touch up my body until he can fix his cool fingers against my cheek. “You are of fae blood, Mine.”
My heart thumps. “I’m…fae?”
“Partly, yes. Your faerie blood is at odds with your humanity. In time, with me, I hope that you will shed it and be reborn, fully fae, fully eager to spend an eternity at my side.”
An eternity…with him? As a faerie?
“I’m fae,” I echo, focusing on the sensations that knowledge awakens inside me. Shock seems an underlying emotion, mostly because having it confirmed that I am other makes…sense. I am partly human, and partly fae.
“You’re a rare creature,” he continues. “One that evolves and grows without becoming something else. I assume when the hatchling sprouted from your chest, that is when first your faerie blood began to battle for purchase, evolving within you, giving you your ability to see and hear beyond humanity. The blood of our kind taints many humans, but given the compulsion to fight it, shove it down, or strive to fit in with the normal, for many nothing comes of it. It dulls and weakens, and eventually shatters as the frail human life slips from this plane of existence.”
“Frel…appeared when I first started seriously considering running away, when I first thought that maybe everything could be different, and I could be free. It still took me months to act, but…that was when I first truly thought freedom might be attainable.”
“Yes, that makes enough sense,” he murmurs. “That would, I assume, be why her name means freedom.”
“Does it?” I ask.
He nods. “It does. She’s born of you. Her origin—a faerie’s birthplace and core of existence—lies in your desire to be free.
She’s come out unseelie because the very idea of freedom to you is bitter.
You long for no restraint, but when you are not subdued into it, that longing is heavily mixed with spite. ”
My stomach knots, and I turn away from his hand.
“And anger.”
I swallow.
“And suffering.”
I whisper, “After she appeared, while I was running, I saw other fae, creatures I’d never seen before. I ignored them, because Frel taught me that many fae are dangerous.”
“The imbalance of your blood had tipped. As I said, the evolution had begun.”
“If it continues to tip, I’ll become fully…like you?”
“Yes, love. You will.”
Fully fae. Fully powerful. Fully me.
“Castor?” I manage a shaking breath, then I take his hand. “Will you teach me magic? Will you teach me how to be strong?”
A wry smile touches his mouth. “Will I teach you not to need me?”
More daring than I’ve ever been, I say, “Yes.”
His mouth meets mine, hungry and sudden, pulling sounds I didn’t know I was capable of from my chest. Once he’s stolen my air and whatever remained of my sanity, he pulls back, sharp smile fixed in place, and says, “No.”