Chapter 52
Fifty-Two
The door below still hung open, and the cries echoing from within were weaker now.
“The breaking of the casting hurts,” he said quietly.
It wasn’t enough. Not for what I’d seen.
Fieran descended first, cautious, and I followed close behind him. The corridor’s stench surged up, rot and metal and something older. When the dim glow lit the walls, my breath caught.
It wasn’t just a body hanging.
It was pieces. Mortal pieces. Arranged. Used. Enchanted to still move, twitching faintly as if remembering what they once were.
The caster lay on the floor, dragging himself toward the foul little nest he’d made of bones and stolen flesh. His eyes were wild. Shocked. He hadn’t expected company.
“Vile, even by Fae standards,” Fieran said coldly.
The caster tried to scramble back, but Fieran’s sword glowed into existence on his back. A heartbeat later it was in his hand.
A heartbeat later it was buried in the Fae’s gut.
The caster choked on a sound. His eyes went wide and empty.
Fieran withdrew the blade; it dissolved into air before the body hit the ground.“He won’t hurt anyone else, Cara.”
I couldn’t speak. My knees gave out, and Fieran swept me into his arms before I hit the stone.
I hated that I needed him like this.
Warmth surged around me, wind whipping past, and suddenly we were airborne, the ground dropping away as the night opened up beneath us. The sea glittered far below, black and endless. The wind roared in my ears, cool and sharp, but his arms stayed firm around me.
Then the cliffs rose to meet us, carved with firelit windows. We swept into the heart of Clan Bismyth, the world narrowing to torchlight and stone and the thud of Fieran’s heartbeat against my cheek.
“I have to tell you what happened tonight,” I told him frantically as we landed on the floor of his room.
“Is that so?”
“The queen had a trap for me. I need you to know what I said so you can be prepared.”
He gave me a look that was unexpectedly full of affection. I’d expected his disdain. But maybe it was yet another trap of his. “I know you told her whatever you’ve worked out. You won’t ruin my plans.”
I frowned at him, still waiting to trigger the volatile reaction I expected, the rejection. “She knows I think you’re going to use me to create a mortal army. That I think you want me to marry you.”
“I do,” he admitted, the expression on his face quizzical, as if he didn’t understand why I sounded like I was confessing.
“Fieran. Tay brought me there under her commands…my own brother…”
“I know how she can get one to betray another,” he promised me. “I’m not angry at you or at Tay. As much as I want to be angry because you were in danger…it was neither your fault nor his.”
It was all too much of a release of the tension for me. I felt myself dissolve, my body shaking with tears.
I never cried in front of anyone, and now I couldn’t stop.
“Come here,” he told me, as if he weren’t still carrying me.
He sat in the enormous arched window through which we’d entered. The curtains blew around us in the wind coming off the sea. He settled me into his lap, his arms wrapped around me. “You can go back to hating me tomorrow, and I’ll still deserve it. But for tonight, let me make you feel better.”
He rocked me in his arms, warm and comforting.
“I had some questions about marriage,” I told him.
“Is that so?” he asked in that damnable way he had, as if he already knew everything.
Maybe he did. Maybe he’d planted those seeds for me. Right now, I couldn’t hate his manipulations when I knew he was manipulating all of us against the queen.
“Is it true that marrying you wouldn’t just protect me but my family too?” I didn’t want to say their names, but then they fell from my lips anyway. “Tay. Lidi. One generation can’t kill another, even if by marriage.”
“The queen would be bound by the magic not to kill them.” He sounded troubled.
“Then marry me.” He had wanted me to ask—to beg, really, knowing Fear—and I would if I must. “What do we have to do?”
“Cara…” His tone was impossible for me to parse, and so was his face. “Let’s discuss this when things are calmer.”
“Isn’t it what you want? I thought you wanted to marry me.”
“I do,” he said.
“For practical reasons,” I added, and he smiled slightly at that. It made me feel as if I were obvious to him, too, as if I must be throwing off the impression that I had indeed fallen for him and now I was protesting the truth.
“Yes,” he said gently. “I want to marry you and know that you will survive and meet your full potential. I believe your potential to trouble the queen is near limitless once—”
“Don’t tell me,” I whispered against my own edge of curiosity. “Because I won’t be able to help telling her.”
His face shifted again, and I tried to read the flash of feelings across those chiseled planes in the moonlight. Was that relief? Victory? Wonder?
“I know,” he told me. “I can tell you everything after we are married, Cara. When you’ll also be protected from being enchanted.”
“And Tay will as well?” I seized on that possibility, hoping desperately it was true.
“Yes,” he admitted, sounding reluctant.
“Then why not tonight?”
“Because you might be making the right choice, but you’re not thinking clearly.”
“I am thinking clearly. I’m protecting my family. Like I always do.”
“You do. And I both admire that fierce protectiveness of yours and am growing to fear it.”
“Why? If you’re not a threat to them…why does my protectiveness of them make you afraid?”
“Cara, I fear you’re a threat to yourself.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “Tay thought he was freeing me to follow my dreams when he left with the queen.”
“Oh, Cara.” He sounded genuinely heartbroken for me, but was Fieran ever genuine? He stroked my arm gently, turning his face into my forehead to press a kiss to my hair. “What a painful night. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”
“How did you find me?”
He hesitated. “A tracking spell.”
“Of course.” I couldn’t even summon anger. I was grateful he’d been able to reach me.
“It alerted me when you left the barracks’ boundary. I was on my way to find you, and then, when you were so afraid, it alerted me again, and I was…” His jaw worked once. “Eager to reach you.”
He’d seemed pretty eager to kill that which threatened me, too.
“You could’ve told me. I would’ve understood the need, even if it nettled me.”
“I know,” he said quietly.
“Are all the secrets you keep from me necessary? Or is it just habit?” I searched his face. “Or do you want to keep secrets from me, specifically?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Will you stop keeping secrets once we’re married?”
“You’re probably right that it is a habit.” There was something playful and unexpected in his smile. “It might take some time.”
It was funny that he spoke of it taking time when we were married, as if it were not a brief waystop to secure his mission.
“You’ll tell me everything about the your schemes once we’re married?” I asked.
“Yes. But not tonight. I don’t want you to marry me in a panic.” He hesitated. “It’s a scheme, I know. A game we’re both playing. But I want you to choose to pretend. Not to feel forced.”
I took his hand in mine and began to work the ring off his finger, the one I’d thrown back at him after the fight with Ander.
“Be careful with that.” He watched me slide the ring off his finger with an amused look. “It takes so little in the midst of all this Fae trickery and magic to find yourself bound.”
“I want to be bound to you,” I said, and then, horrified—fearing he was horrified, too, though I didn’t see that on his face—I added, “while we work together.”
The thought of leaving this room without being married to him was a looming terror.
He nodded. “Listen. I’ll say my side of the vows. Then, if you are in danger, if you need the protection of our marriage, you only have to say your vows and slip on the ring. All right?”
“Yes,” I said tersely.
“But you never have to speak your side unless you—”
I put my hand over his mouth. His eyes widened, startled, and something in his expression flickered—surprise shifting into something darker, warmer. His breath warmed my palm.
The closeness of him hit me like a physical thing. The heat of his body, the controlled tension in his shoulders, the faintest tremor in the breath he drew against my hand. “I can make my own decisions, Fear.”
He lifted his hand, wrapped his fingers around mine, and drew my hand away from his mouth. But he didn’t let go. He was looking at me with that expression I couldn’t quite read, the one that might be wonder. “I know.”
Then he knelt in front of me, still holding my hand. “I will be at your side in the darkness and when the sun rises. I bind my shadow to your shadow and my light to your light. I weave your family into mine and curse your enemies to my blade.”
Fear spoke sounding fervent, intentional, and strange tears prickled in my eyes as he went on. “If fate marked us, I choose you freely; I choose you utterly even if there is no fate.”
“Is there fate?” I asked as he rose. It was a foolish question, but I was unsettled in a way I had never felt before, vulnerable and raw.
“If there was such a thing as fate, I would have already forced it at a knife’s point to marry you to me.” His lips curled up at the edges.
“For the sake of your plots.”
His mouth broadened into a smile. “For the sake of my plots, yes. But perhaps I am plotting to adore you until the end of our days.”
“Don’t be dreadful,” I said, and he laughed. “Do we need to…consummate? I wouldn’t mind.”
“I wouldn’t mind terribly, either,” he agreed. “We don’t need to now. Nothing happens until you speak your half of the vows.”
He always sounded as if he were mocking me, but his eyes were gentle as he looked down at me, and he brushed my hair from my neck.
I was the one to stretch up onto my tiptoes, wrapping one arm around his shoulders, and drag his mouth down to mine.
Fear’s lips was soft and warm and tender. I ran my hand through his hair, fitting my body to his as if we were made to be one.
He reached down and grabbed my thighs, lifting me up so my legs were spread to either side of his hips. He carried me so easily, the two of us trading ever-more-fervent kisses as he carried me across the room.
He deposited me on the bed. He moved back to pull off his shirt, slowly, revealing the lean lines of his chiseled body, those broad shoulders.
I reached out and gripped him through his pants. “Let me return the favor.”
His breath gave. “I never thought a mortal girl would hold so much power over me.”
“Regrets?” I asked, but I was cheating, because I was working my way down the buttons of his trousers.
“Never.”
I drew out his warm, solid length. Fieran’s cock was a thing of beauty, at least as far as cocks went. I touched my tongue to his tip, and he jerked in my hand.
“Easy.” I raised my brows at him.
“I am at the moment. I’ve been thinking about this for…too long.” His hands squeezed into fists at his sides, as if he were holding himself back. “Since before you liked me.”
“I still don’t like you.”
“Liar,” he said, sounding somewhere between desperate and fond, and I loved that tone, and so I licked my way around his cock.
He groaned and started to say something, and then I enveloped him with my mouth, and he cut himself off with a sharp groan.
I’d finally discovered how to shut his sweet, lying mouth, and I smiled around his cock.
I went on working his cock, running my tongue around his length as I took in as much of him as I could. He fought it, tensing his stomach and clenching his jaw, but his hips jerked as if he could barely hold himself back from fucking my mouth wildly. Another day, maybe I’d let him use my mouth.
I would marry this man, for the sake of our schemes, and sleep in his bed and savor his body and feel safe in his arms. He was looking down at me as if he loved me, but every man had that soft-eyed look in my experience during this kind of moment.
I flicked my tongue across the tip in a lazy spiral, then took him back in.
This time I used my hand, twisting in time with my mouth, and he lost control.
He bucked, once, twice, spilling the taste of seawater down my throat.
I swallowed without breaking eye contact, savoring the way his thighs trembled.
He threw himself onto the bed beside me before wrapping his arm around my waist. He was already somehow erect again. “You are entirely too dressed,” he murmured.
I stretched languidly. I wanted more of him but I also wanted to sleep.
He buried his face in my throat. “What do you want when all this is over?”
I thought of his accusation that I’d live my life on the farm, fading away while the fields bloomed.
“I want Tay well and Lidi’s magic restored and both of them safe,” I said. “And then I suppose I’ll figure out the rest. Right now, I can’t see the shape of my dreams through the darkness.”
“Well,” he told me, “I think you’ll light the way.