This was real. I had survived; I’d made it out.
Unless it was a dream—just a fever-dream in Amarantha’s dungeons, and I’d awaken back in that cell, and—
I curled my knees to my chest. Real. Real.
I mouthed the words.
I kept mouthing them until I could loosen my grip on my legs and lift my head. Pain splintered through my hands—
I’d somehow curled them into fists so tight my nails were close to puncturing my skin.
Immortal strength—more a curse than a gift. I’d dented and folded every piece of silverware I’d touched for three days upon returning here, had tripped over my longer, faster legs so often that Alis had removed any irreplaceable valuables from my rooms (she’d been particularly grumpy about me knocking over a table with an eight-hundred-year-old vase), and had shattered not one, not two, but five glass doors merely by accidentally closing them too hard.
Sighing through my nose, I unfolded my fingers.
My right hand was plain, smooth. Perfectly Fae.
I tilted my left hand over, the whorls of dark ink coating my fingers, my wrist, my forearm all the way to the elbow, soaking up the darkness of the room. The eye etched into the center of my palm seemed to watch me, calm and cunning as a cat, its slitted pupil wider than it’d been earlier that day. As if it adjusted to the light, as any ordinary eye would.
I scowled at it.
At whoever might be watching through that tattoo.
I hadn’t heard from Rhys in the three months I’d been here. Not a whisper. I hadn’t dared ask Tamlin, or Lucien, or anyone—lest it’d somehow summon the High Lord of the Night Court, somehow remind him of the fool’s bargain I’d struck Under the Mountain: one week with him every month in exchange for his saving me from the brink of death.
But even if Rhys had miraculously forgotten, I never could. Nor could Tamlin, Lucien, or anyone else. Not with the tattoo.
Even if Rhys, at the end … even if he hadn’t been exactly an enemy.
To Tamlin, yes. To every other court out there, yes. So few went over the borders of the Night Court and lived to tell. No one really knew what existed in the northernmost part of Prythian.
Mountains and darkness and stars and death.
But I hadn’t felt like Rhysand’s enemy the last time I’d spoken to him, in the hours after Amarantha’s defeat. I’d told no one about that meeting, what he’d said to me, what I’d confessed to him.
Be glad of your human heart, Feyre. Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.
I squeezed my fingers into a fist, blocking out that eye, the tattoo. I uncoiled to my feet, and flushed the toilet before padding to the sink to rinse out my mouth, then wash my face.
I wished I felt nothing.
I wished my human heart had been changed with the rest of me, made into immortal marble. Instead of the shredded bit of blackness that it now was, leaking its ichor into me.
Tamlin remained asleep as I crept back into my darkened bedroom, his naked body sprawled across the mattress. For a moment, I just admired the powerful muscles of his back, so lovingly traced by the moonlight, his golden hair, mussed with sleep and the fingers I’d run through it while we made love earlier.
For him, I had done this—for him, I’d gladly wrecked myself and my immortal soul.
And now I had eternity to live with it.
I continued to the bed, each step heavier, harder. The sheets were now cool and dry, and I slipped in, curling my back to him, wrapping my arms around myself. His breathing was deep—even. But with my Fae ears … sometimes I wondered if I heard his breath catch, only for a heartbeat. I never had the nerve to ask if he was awake.
He never woke when the nightmares dragged me from sleep; never woke when I vomited my guts up night after night. If he knew or heard, he said nothing about it.
I knew similar dreams chased him from his slumber as often as I fled from mine. The first time it had happened, I’d awoken—tried to speak to him. But he’d shaken off my touch, his skin clammy, and had shifted into that beast of fur and claws and horns and fangs. He’d spent the rest of the night sprawled across the foot of the bed, monitoring the door, the wall of windows.
He’d since spent many nights like that.
Curled in the bed, I pulled the blanket higher, craving its warmth against the chill night. It had become our unspoken agreement—not to let Amarantha win by acknowledging that she still tormented us in our dreams and waking hours.
It was easier to not have to explain, anyway. To not have to tell him that though I’d freed him, saved his people and all of Prythian from Amarantha … I’d broken myself apart.
And I didn’t think even eternity would be long enough to fix me.
CHAPTER
2
“I want to go.”
“No.”
I crossed my arms, tucking my tattooed hand under my right bicep, and spread my feet slightly further apart on the dirt floor of the stables. “It’s been three months. Nothing’s happened, and the village isn’t even five miles—”
“No.” The midmorning sun streaming through the stable doors burnished Tamlin’s golden hair as he finished buckling the bandolier of daggers across his chest. His face—ruggedly handsome, exactly as I’d dreamed it during those long months he’d worn a mask—was set, his lips a thin line.
Behind him, already atop his dapple-gray horse, along with three other Fae lord-sentries, Lucien silently shook his head in warning, his metal eye narrowing. Don’t push him, he seemed to say.
But as Tamlin strode toward where his black stallion had already been saddled, I gritted my teeth and stormed after him. “The village needs all the help it can get.”
