17. MY SAVING GRACE
I gathered my breath next to my mate.
I wanted nothing more than to just lay tangled up with her for all eternity. My entire body shuddered as my shadows returned to me, disappearing beneath my skin.
My mind was calm for the first time in days. Auren had that effect on me from the very first moment I’d seen her lying amongst the tree roots, utterly exhausted.
The Woodlands were the last place I would have ever thought I would find my mate. And at Elandrew’s Lumeri nonetheless.
Every year, the High Lords extended invitations to one another out of respect, and for many years before this one, I had routinely declined the majority of them.
But this time had been different. Something had nagged at me from within.
Like a stubborn whisper, praying on my heart, telling me to accept the invitation.
I hadn’t stepped foot in Elandrew in decades, and yet I’d made last minute plans to attend Lumeri, all in order to find out what the tugging on my soul was about.
And gods I was thankful that I did.
I’d arrived early, catching Killian completely off guard. And then I’d found myself standing on the steps to The Woodland House, staring out into the woods. Soon after, I found myself at the footfalls of The Veil, scouring the damp land for what felt like a tether to my very soul.
When I saw Auren lying against the roots of that tree, I was overcome with a mix of emotions—curiosity, longing, fear .
. . The last one struck me. I didn’t know who she was, but she looked like she was dying, and that had sent a pang through my chest. And the feeling—that thrumming—was something I’d never felt before.
It overpowered, thrilled, and frightened me at the same time.
I had never encountered a human in all my years. She seemed helpless . . . or so I thought. And she was on our side of The Veil. That fact alone had set off more alarms in me than the pull I felt to venture out into the trees in the first place.
Aremis’s Aura had come with me. I had been about to speak to it over my shoulder, to ask him how this was even possible, but then Breck had shown up and all my plans went to shit.
The panic that flooded Auren’s eyes when that tree limb snapped behind her had me wanting to scoop her up and take her straight to the mountains, away from Killian’s greedy grasp.
But the more I watched her, the more I got the sense that she could take care of herself.
And though it killed me to leave, I promised myself that I would find her again.
Something within me had already decided that fact.
I knew for certain that Breck would take her to Elandrew, and it wouldn’t be hard for me to find her from there.
I’d momentarily questioned my own sanity as to why I was even so amused with a human in the first place.
But then I found myself following her scent through the hallways at The Woodland House on my way to Lumeri, and fuck if I couldn’t keep myself from being nosy.
The door to her chambers had been left unlocked.
She had already been escorted to the event.
So I let myself in and perused—lifted the lid on a wooden box that had been left on her bed, examined the craft of the sword that was propped against the bedside table.
Before I could browse further, though, the door handle turned, and I vanished, leaving the weapon against the fireplace hearth.
When I found her again at the edge of the dance floor, sampling fruits and sweet breads, the thrumming in my chest returned—a sure sign that she was more to me than I could fathom at the time.
I missed that thrumming the moment I left her. And when she spoke of feeling the same strange sensation in her chest after our heated moment at Firefall, I knew what it meant. It confirmed everything that I thought couldn’t even be possible.
She was human and I was fae. But somehow, we were mates.
And thank the fucking gods for giving me her.
For years I had struggled with myself, at war within my own consciousness about my morals, my past, and my future.
Auren was the only one who could render the enemy in my head silent.
She was the calm to my storm. But ever since Ramil invaded my mind with his poison and tricks, something was off.
I’d built walls to keep the pain and the memories and the fear of what courses through my veins locked away.
Whatever the bastard had done had weakened those defenses.
And since then, I found myself unable to suppress all those thoughts and feelings as easily as before.
Something changed within me in that dungeon cell.
There had always been something stirring deep inside me.
I’d tucked it away beneath layers upon layers of thick, heavy denial, smothered with a healthy dose of moral dignity, knowing that I was more than what I felt slinking around the core of my soul.
Whatever it was, I had vowed to never let it have control, because judging by the way it felt, I wasn’t sure if I could trust it.
My heart was good—that much I was sure of.
But that sliver of shadow, that darkness that always hung too close to my soul, like it was waiting for a weak spot to open up .
. . that’s what bothered me the most. My shadowfire was a form of darkness, but this other thing .
. . it felt more pure, more potent. Like it could consume.
It fed off my fears and the suffering I had witnessed.
The coals of that darkness had once burned so low that the embers were barely surviving.
But now, new kindling had been added. The hallucinations that Ramil’s poison had induced had somehow awoken it.
Just in the past few hours, there were moments where it stirred again, showing its face.
And the well of power within me was starting to get . . . curious.
Auren had glimpsed the darkness before—in my eyes. I knew she had. It tended to rear its head a bit more than usual when my emotions ran high. But then she’d called to it, telling me she craved it, and gods it was so hard to hold it back each time she said those words.
Before, the darkness was a thing I had learned to harness and control.
Now, it had been poked and prodded, and it chomped at the bit like a caged animal desperate for release.
Before, Auren had spoken as if it were a side of me she wanted to see beneath the sheets, which furthered my desire.
Now, when she spoke of it, the darkness swelled and answered.
My body wasn’t my own when she spoke the words a few minutes ago. I wanted to devour her, but so did that darkness. Not in a deadly way, but in a way that would lay claim to her and her power. And I didn’t like that feeling. Not one fucking bit.
Beside me, my mate hummed with satisfaction, drawing me out of my thoughts. She turned to bury her head between my shoulder and chest, and I gladly welcomed the contact.
“That was . . .” She paused, tracing idle circles just underneath my collarbone. “Intense.”
“Did I hurt you?”
“No. I loved it, actually.”
I grinned. “Did you now?”
She blushed in that adorable way she always did whenever I did or said something inappropriate. “I like when you take control like that.”
“Mmm, I’ll commit that to memory.” I let out a long sigh and stared up at the ceiling.
“Niall?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
I shifted to look down at her. “Of course. Why?”
“It’s just that, ever since we got you out, you seem . . . different. I can tell that something’s bothering you.”
Shit.
I didn’t want her to worry about me—to bear that burden. “The things that I’m working out in my own mind are things you should never worry about, love.”
“But I’m your mate. You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
I didn’t reply for a long moment.
I’d never had anyone that I could talk freely to about anything other than court duties and bullshit. My struggles had always been my own. But Auren was right. I couldn’t just shut her out and keep this all locked up inside.
“I feel different,” I admitted.
She immediately sat up. “Tell me.”
I blew out a breath and crossed my arms behind my head on the pillow. “Something Ramil used on me seems to have triggered everything I’ve worked so hard to suppress.”
Fuck. This all sounded so—
“You’re not weak,” she said in a stern voice, placing her hand over my heart.
She’d guessed my thoughts before I’d even given voice to them. And damnit if that didn’t make me fall even more in love with her.
“I feel weak though. Not physically, just . . . Maybe weak isn’t the right word. Vulnerable? I don’t know. It’s like my control slipped and I can’t recover like I used to.”
Her voice lowered to barely more than a whisper. “What, exactly, happened, Niall? Aside from the iron nails?”
I internally cringed at the thought of those spikes being driven into my inner thighs, but pushing away that memory only made room for one far more disturbing.
“He used a hallucinogen. It broke into the recesses of my mind and made me relive certain memories that I don’t like to recall even in my right state of mind.
Except . . . it warped them. It preyed on my worst fears and intertwined them with memories. ”
I kept the visions of her being tortured to myself.
She remained quiet. Listening.
“It felt so real; I had a hard time believing it wasn’t.”
Her brows furrowed together as if she was trying to imagine it. “When I found you, you were stuck in whatever trance he had you in. It took me several tries to pull you out.”
“I didn’t believe you were truly there when I came out of it. And I thought that if you were truly there . . . I . . . I didn’t want to hurt you.”
She smiled gently. “You could never hurt me.”
But I could.
Not willingly—never willingly. But my shadowfire, this dark power inside me . . . I’d always known what it could do and what it was capable of. And ever since Ramil fucked with my mind, it had clawed at the surface more than once, testing my restraints.