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As I watched him, I went over everything in my head. Again and again and again.

It took me all morning to recall the exact wording of our very first encounter, and my frustration only magnified when I finally did.

“Who are you?”I had asked him.

A rookie error.

“You can call me Wren.”

And I did.

I had called him Wren ever since, and not once had I realised that nobody else ever did.

Lucais Starfire was the High King of Faerie. They made sure that truth sank in during the brief lesson they’d given me on how to word my questions, but I’d never thought to confirm their names and identities.

The references to Lucais and Wren had been blurry. It was always the High King and his Hand, or vague uses of their pronouns, or some other form of faerie trickery. Intertwined and overlapping, a scheme designed to keep me in the dark.

I just couldn’t figure out why.

And as I sat on the window seat while the gloomy day passed us by outside, my anger only increased. At him, at all of them, and at myself.

Lucais Starfire was the High King of Faerie, and he was recovering from locust poisoning in my bed.

His eyes were the colour of light. His hair was the colour of light. Even his skin was drenched in it.

The only time he ever spoke nicely about another person had been in the kitchen of my house in Belgrave, when he had told me that the High King of Faerie was handsome and clever.

He was talking about himself.Of coursehe was talking about himself!

When he bowed to his dark-haired friend that first day in the House before he’d given him a chance to speak, the gesture had thrown him off-balance. Then he had slipped up twice in front of me. Possibly even more often than that, and I was just too blind to see it.

When he was the first to serve up his plate at dinner, something felt off. Had they told me about the mating bond to distract me from prying into their true hierarchy?

I was too distracted with my own problems with magic to question anything else when I walked into the dining room and found him lounging at the head of the table like he owned it the day I met Morgoya.

And Morgoya—

My hands balled into fists.

She had accused him of saving me from the Banshee, claiming that he couldn’t possibly stand by and do nothing while I was attacked.

Because I am his mate.

And sheknewthat I was his mate.

She had said as much right in front of me. “Let’s just say, it leaves no doubt. You are his mate.”

She was toying with us when she told me to sit in Lucais’s lap—fake Lucais, my fake mate, while the real one simmered with rage beside me. The looks she had given us. The dress she had me wear. Thegold dressmatching the colour of his eyes. His favourite colour.

By the Elements, even the way he’d looked at me when I was wearing it should have told me that something was wrong, that I was being lied to.

He displayed immense power, unlike anyone else. Even the dark-haired man who let me believe that he was theHigh King, with nothing substantial to back it up outside of a fabricated story and feelings provoked by lies.

It had taken a fraction of the amount of time it took everyone else for him to find me in that field full of caenim.

A member of his Guard had slapped me for wanting to let him die that day. Because I wasn’t trying to kill the Hand; I was watching on as the caenim snapped and drooled all over the fucking High King of Faerie himself.

He’d threatened the man, punched him twice for putting his hands on me, and kept his inner circle away from me for that exact reason.