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He doesn’t love me.

I frowned at the empty space between our hands. “You realise that you fat-shamed me to your horse?”

He lifted his hand, cupping my chin, and tilted my face up towards his. Lucais dropped his voice to a near-growl and said, “You realise that I’m a liar?”

A shiver ran down my spine, and I almost leaned into his touch.

The magic in my veins leapt with joy, ecstatic that the rest of me was finally catching on to what it had been trying to tell me all this time.

Every question I had was being answered. The confusion was clearing like a wind pulling the clouds from the sky.

I’d had no idea who he was, but I had felt all along that it wasn’t who he let me believe he was.

“Those wicked things I said to you were mostly part of the ruse, Aura. But I really don’t want you to like me. You felt it the moment we met. I saw it on your face, and so I spent the next few weeks trying to override those feelings, to convince you they were wrong.” His thumb brushed my cheek. “I tried to convince myself that they were wrong initially, too. But I realised early on that it was futile.”

I shook my head, making no effort to reduce the impact of my words as I whispered, “But I was attracted to Lucais—I mean Wren.”

Lucais’s grip tightened almost imperceptibly on my chin, but he said with intense calm, “You can be attracted to whoever you like, bookworm. The mating bond doesn’t mean anything.”

I slapped his hand away from me. He let it drop but gave me an exasperated look.

“Why?” I hissed. “Why would you let him use me like that?”

He arched a brow, a hard look in his eyes. “Use you? He tried tostopyou—”

Groaning, I threw myself face down on the bed and covered the back of my head with my hands. The things that I had done with Lucais—fake Lucais, real Wren—in the dining room, and in the room off the hallway, and even inmy mate’s bedroom.

Fake Wren, real Lucais had watched. He’d waited outside and listened and said horrible things to me in the hallway afterwards. I had a better understanding of his anger now, but it didn’t explain why he had let it happen in the first place.

When it became hard to breathe against the mattress, I rolled over and sat up. I was closer to the true High King than I had been before, and by the way his shoulders tensed, I knew he was aware of it too.

“You enjoy his company,” he said too quietly. “Does part of me want to snap his wrists? Yes. Are those feelings warranted? No. They belong to the bond, which answers to the stars, not the High King.”

I sighed. “None of it was warranted.”

“Wrenlock didn’t actually agree to the plan,” he confessed. “It was a foolish, split-second decision I made alone in Belgrave when I gave you his name instead of mine, and then I didn’t provide him with a chance to argue when we arrived back at the House. I figured if there was something real budding between the two of you—”

“Issomething,” I corrected.

“Then maybe,” he ground out, fists balling around the covers, “I could convince people that we weren’t mates, that the Oracle was mistaken somehow. And maybe being with him instead of me could save your life if you chose to stay with us.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “It’s not only the Malum, Aura. There are enemies among my own people, carrying around a centuries-old hatchet and waiting for the right time to use it.”

Because he freed the slaves.

Lucais, my fated soulmate, had started a war by granting freedom to faeries far and wide. It was the action of a High King, an action that had stirred affection deep within my heart, even though it put a bounty on our heads.

But what else did I not know about him? About his reign as High King, about his past, about his personality?

I sighed and turned towards him, the weight of all the truth becoming too much for me to bear. “You tricked me,” I stated.

Lucais’s golden eyes narrowed—not out of anger, but in preparation for the blows to come.

“Instead of letting me prepare myself to face the real enemies I may have, you had me believe thatyouwere one,” Isaid, keeping my voice even. I felt hollow like my heart had been carved out of my chest.

Lucais had haunted my dreams, and when I met him as Wren, I’d known that he was in that dungeon with me. I had been so sure of it, and the only explanation I could find was that he had been one of the men who had tortured my prisoner.

But he was the prisoner I’d screamed for all along.

How different would things have been if he had simply told me the truth from the start?