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“You think I’m angry when I’m with you. I’m not angry. I’m hungry for you. I’m meant to lure mortals into the shadow realm and feed on their dreams and fantasies…meant to seduce them into coming back every night, and yet not so much that they don’t wake up.”

The truth burns, finally unleashed. For weeks now, I’ve been thinking about Nell’s white blonde hair, her perfectly smooth skin, and her bright smiles… But not in the way she envisions.

I’ve been daydreaming about wrapping her braid around my fist as I thrust into her, about kissing the valley between her breasts after I’m done, and drinking in the shape of her lips as she begs for more.

I stroke the back of her ear with my thumb. “But not you. You, I’d keep for myself. If things were different, I would steal you away from your puritan of a father and worship your body until you belonged to me forever. You’d never be allowed to leave.” I pull her forward until our lips are a hair apart. “But I can’t.”

“Because I belong to the king,” she breathes softly, and her nails scratch a tantalizing path down my chest. “Well… the king isn’t here. And I promise not to tell if you don’t.”

My face falls at her certainty. If only.

At the last second, I take a giant leap back and turn my back to her. “You’re not hearing me. We’re done.”

Morpheus be damned. I said all those things to scare her senseless, to make her understand exactly how dark my soul is. We could never be friends, not the way my body has been howling for her.

Why did she look like she was about to consent to whatever scenario my dirty mind came up with? She was raised in a world where the very mention of sex is frowned-upon. Where women who give in to any pleasure are vilified. How did this happen?

Truth be told, I’m ready to break all the rules for her. Fuck the curse! I’m tempted to throw away my mask and spill all my secrets.

If I haven’t been struck by one of Devi’s arrows, it means I have no excuse for my behavior. It means I’m dangerously close to betraying my promises—my very self—for a woman I vowed to destroy. For a stupid crush I never asked for. For pleasures I can no longer enjoy, broken as I am.

Luckily, I can still win the bet without Two finding out about this disaster. I can still save the realm, but not without breaking Nell—and what’s left of my soul—beyond repair.

Chapter 24

Homecoming

“Focus your mind on the place you need to find,” Two says on a heavy sigh, his tone so different from One’s—impatient and dry.

The runes I’ve drawn on my wrist should allow me to return home. I ply the glass of the sceawere between my fingers and my lower arm but only manage to glimpse at the wrong bedroom, my queen-size bed undulating beyond the surface of the glass. “That’s my room here in Faerie,” I say, frustrated.

Two lets out a low chortle. “You used ‘Fae’ and ‘Faerie,’ are you really surprised?”

I shake out my shoulders and grip the handle of the inked paintbrush, quickly drawing “a lack of” next to the other runes and switching some things around.

Two clicks his tongue, his annoyance palpable. “That’s sloppy at best. Dangerous. You’d probably end up anywhere in the old world or the new.”

“What should it be, then?” I snap. “Teach me.”

He shakes his head. “What it’d be for me is immensely different to what it’d be for you.”

“How does that make sense?”

“If you sang a song longing to return home to the castle you grew up in, how could it be the same song I’d sing to visit a drab building in a strange land filled with superstitious fools?”

I punch his upper arm as hard as I can, but my obnoxious tutor only flashes me his teeth.

“Come on, now. Focus.”

I stop trying to make a sentence and think of music. Music isn’t brains, it’s guts, and so I hit “heart” and “flame” and concentrate on Cece.

The mirror in front of us ripples into the basement of my father’s castle. Yes! Victory!

Two blinks a few times, clearly surprised by my breakthrough. “Hmm. Not bad.”

“That seems to be the only compliment you know.”

The grumpy pout on his face is sweeter than chocolate, and I do a little happy dance. The new inked rune smudges my arms, the ink we use for runes clearly not as magic as the one used on paper. “I get why I don’t have tattoos, but most of the others only have a few. It’s clearly a pain to redraw the runes every time, I’m sure.”