Chapter 7
Ash
“Ash,” Kestra rushes to catch up beside me as I begin to march down the hall.
I have no idea where I’m going. Only that I need to see my mom. And one way or another I’m going to find her in this forsaken castle.
“Ash, wait,” Kestra rushes beside me, her nails digging into my arm.
“Did you know he had my mom?” I swing to her, staring at this beautiful woman who has Kieran’s face looking at me with hurt.
Logically she didn’t capture my mom. Drag her here from Earth. But someone did.
“Nimah?”
“No. Not Nimah. Margaret Morgan. My mom,” I repeat, realizing she is thinking her father somehow has held captive the Fae whose DNA I share and not the woman who kissed my booboos. “The woman that raised me. The woman who showed up for me when she didn’t even have to.”
“The human woman,” Kestra says gently. She means well. But her words hold a double meaning I can’t quite see. “You cry for her.”
I swipe at a tear, looking down the long hallway knowing I have no idea where to go or how to even get to my mom. A human woman that this Fae, who I was beginning to see as an actual friend, refers to as the human woman.
Like there is a wall in her mind. Like a Fae couldn’t possibly care enough about a human woman to cry for her.
“She’s not human.” I sigh. “Just human plus. It’s a long story.”
“I’d love to hear about it.”
“How old were you when your mother died?” I ask instead of telling her the story, trying not to be angry at her when it might not even be her fault she doesn’t understand humans.
“I was just shy of turning two centuries.”
“Know what?” I shake my head and walk away. “Never mind.”
“Ash, help me understand.” She grips my bicep, her touch soft.
“Take me to her,” I counter, turning back to her. “Take me to my mom and I’ll explain.”
“I…” She nibbles her bottom lip and steps closer. “I can take you to her, but Ash, you cannot talk to her right now.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.” I rip my arm away.
“I’m serious, Ash. Please.” I pause.
It’s the please that gets me. See, Fae don’t have the same qualms as humans. They don’t apologize. Ever. They don’t lie. Their nature demands the truth of them at all times.
But to beg?
I give her a curt nod. “Tell me why first.” I gesture for her to lead the way.
With a sigh that could mean resignation, could mean she’s humoring me—hell, I don’t know—she loops her elbow in mine, leading me down the long dark corridor.
Light only exists in the spaces between steps where the glow of a double moon filters through.
The moons never leave that spot in the sky. Always there. Always watching.
I could ask about Kieran. Where he is. If exile means gone or just unreachable. If he ever asks about me.
I don’t.
Some answers are worse than not knowing.
“My father is a cruel man, Ash,” she begins, heading toward the usual tower, but she squeezes my arm when I tense up. Silently asking me to trust her. “His favorite game is manipulation, and you are currently his new favorite pawn.”
“That’s fucked up, Kestra.”
“I know. And I do understand, for the record.” She nudges me. “But human mothers are kind and gentle. My shock wasn’t that you felt that way, but that we have—” She swallows. “I don’t know how you will see me after I tell you this.”
“Tell me what?” My annoyance continues to grow as we get closer and closer to the doors.
Dread creeps up my spine.
“Then explain it. Be my professor. Please, Kestra.” I throw the word back at her.
This time her nod is followed by her opening the tower door.
My feet really don’t want to go in, but I do. Beneath her words the meaning is crystal clear. Her dad? He will hurt my mother in ways that make Amarantha’s cruelty nothing more than a paper cut.
But as the door closes behind us she presses her finger to her lips, and instead of going the entire way up the staircase, she pushes on a sconce and a hidden door pops out.
She hesitates, her hand on my arm.
“Ash.” Her voice drops to barely breath. “If my father knew I brought you here, he wouldn’t kill me.”
I wait.
“He’d make me watch him kill her first. Then the others. One by one until I begged him to stop.” She swallows. “Then he’d start over.”
I stare at this woman who wears Kieran’s face and an Unseelie smile and realize I’ve underestimated her this entire time.
“Why are you showing me?”
“Because you’re the only person in this court who looks at me like I’m more than his daughter.” She says the words as she turns away, heading into the passage. She pauses just inside, waiting on me.
I push past the cobwebs into the tight space and go in about ten feet. It’s like a space between the walls. A secret passage.
Behind me, Kestra closes the door and steps close, then passes me, leading me through the passage that’s full of webs and spiders.
I couldn’t care less. She’s bringing me to my mom. That’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter that we walk what feels like the entire length of the castle before she leads me to a small lookout.
She removes a slide but holds my arm before I step up.
Licking her lips, she swallows. “Human women are often brought in to raise Fae children.”
Brought in.
“Like furniture.” The words come out flat.
Kestra flinches. “That’s not what I —”
“Like pets? Accessories? What’s the word you use, Kestra?” I can feel thorns pressing against my palms. “What do you call stolen mothers in the Unseelie Court?”
“Nursemaids.” She whispers it like a confession. Like she’s handing me a weapon to use against her.
“Nursemaids,” I repeat.
She nods. Won’t meet my eyes. “Keep going.”
But it’s her expression that makes my sinuses burn and my eye twitch. “What?”
She gives me a soft smile. “I know how much this is going to hurt you right now.” Her voice is gentle. Like she’s mothering me. And maybe in a way she is, because she’s lived a couple human lifetimes already. “When Fae children are born —”
“Or burped up by the earth,” I mutter.
“Yes,” her lips twitch as she continues to whisper words that destroy my entire perception. “Fae women aren’t…they aren’t soft by the time they choose to have offspring.”
“Wait. Are none of you born?”
“Wild Court exceptions notwithstanding.” She laughs loosely. “Unseelie and Seelie Court carry pregnancies to term, but many of us aren’t fertile until our four-hundreds. And by then…”
“You’re no longer maternal?” I rub my temples as I finish her explanation.
I keep wanting to put this understanding into human terms, but it doesn’t exist.
I have yet to meet one Fae woman who is…soft. One besides Kestra, and it’s because she is still young.
“Fuck.” I score my face with my nails and blink rapidly.
“Human women raise our offspring, Ash.” She won’t look at me. “Mine was named Kathleen. She had freckles and a gap between her front teeth and she sang to me every night until I was forty-three.”
Her grip tightens on my arm.
“I woke up one morning and she was just...gone. No one told me where. No one told me why.” Her voice cracks. “I was ninety before I stopped looking for her in crowds.”
Flashes of nights with my mom reading me bedtime stories, and caring for me when sick roll through my mind on repeat.
“The only difference in your childhood and mine?” Now she looks at me, eyes bright. “Is location.”
Thorns press against the underside of my skin. My magic wants out. Wants to tear through these walls and burn this whole system to Ash.
I breathe through it. Shove it back down.
Not again. I already bled for an hour the last time I let it slip.
I turn and look at the rectangular hole in the wall. I need to know she’s okay, but I can’t unknow what I know now. There’s no going back.
Human women raise Fae children.
But there is one more thing I need to know before looking.
“The women,” I turn back to Kestra. “Are they willing?”
It’s in the way she purses her lips that I know I don’t need an answer. And goddamn, but that hurts the most. “Kidnapped?” I choke on the word.
She nods.
I turn away.
Because in that moment a chasm opens between us and I can’t fill it right now. Not that it will always exist. But it exists right now.
I look through the small space.
And there, on the other side, sits my mom.
She’s eating a sandwich. Laughing with other women. Human women.
But it’s the way she laughs that breaks me. Head thrown back, one hand pressed to her chest like she’s trying to keep her heart inside. She’s always laughed like that. Too loud. Too much. Like joy is something you have to grab with both hands before it escapes.
I used to be embarrassed by that laugh. At school functions. At my graduation. I’d shush her and she’d just laugh harder.
I’d give anything to hear it right now.
My hand moves before I can stop it. Palm flat against the stone. Fingers spread like I could reach through. Like the wall might dissolve if I just push hard enough.
Thorns erupt from my fingertips. Tiny. Sharp. Digging into ancient rock.
I could tear through this wall. I could be beside her in thirty seconds. I could—
And then what?
Lead Moros straight to her? Give him another body to threaten me with? Another blade to slide through her shoulder while I watch?
I pull my hand back. The thorns retract, leaving bloody crescents in my palm.
She’s right there. Twenty feet away. Laughing.
I’ve never been further from her in my life.
I spent two years ignoring my cousins’ calls. Deleting voicemails. Keeping everyone at arm’s length because it was easier than letting them see what I’d become.
And now I’m on the other side of a wall, watching someone I love live without me.
Turns out the Fae and I have more in common than I thought.
I can’t be here right now. “I need to…”
“Let me take you back to your room,” Kestra says gently. “A nap, perhaps.”
A nap. Like I could sleep after this.
But what else is there? I can’t reach for my friends, my family, or the guys. Can’t pull them into this mess when they’re already paying for my choices. Kieran exiled. Finnian gods know where. Orion probably burning through the borderlands looking for a way in that doesn’t exist.
They deserve better than me dragging them deeper.
I turn away from the wall.
Kestra stands in the dark passage, hands clasped in front of her like a child waiting to be punished. Like she’s already accepted that I’ll hate her for this.
And I want to. Gods, I want to.
But she didn’t build this system. She was born into it. Raised by it. Shaped by a woman who was stolen just like mine.
The bond pulses again. Warm this time. Almost like it’s asking a question.
I don’t answer.
But when Kestra reaches for my hand, I let her take it.
That has to count for something.
I look back through the hole one more time. Counting. One. Two. Ten.
Yeah. A nap sounds perfect.