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He opened his other eye. “I like listening to you read.”

I frowned. “I’m not reading it out loud.”

“No,” he agreed, propping himself up on an elbow. “But your breathing pattern and your heartbeat tell me where you’re at with it. And you pelting it at me tells me that you’re done. What do you think?”

“I think you’re an idiot.”

He rolled his eyes skyward. “Of thebook.”

“I think you’re an idiot,” I repeated, walking towards the bed. “This whole idiotic mess you made came from this onestupidbook.” I snatched it up and threw it down on the mattress again for emphasis.

Micael and Livia were mates.

The mating bond was exclusive to members of the High Fae, which made it easy to believe that there wasn’t one between the two main characters because Livia was constantly referred to as a Swapling—a completely different race of faerie. At the time, she was considered one of the Lesser Fae.

But Livia wasn’t a Swapling.

She was a fucking Princess of Faerie who had fallen from the Aboveworld at the start of the Dragon War to escape an arranged marriage with one of the Dragon Masters. She had cut part of her own ears off to make her unrecognisable, and simply never corrected anyone who accused her of being a Swapling.

Slavery was her hiding place.

When the Dragon Master sent spies down from the clouds to search for her, none of them bothered to look twice at a Cinderella-esque serving girl with small, rounded ears.

Livia was Micael’s mate.

He’d known it all along—because of some weird, territorial nonsense that affected faerie men more than women—so when the war ended and she returned to the Aboveworld to claim her rightful place on the throne, he followed her.

The Dragon Master’s surviving heir accused Micael of kidnapping the Princess, and she was chained to her throne while they tried and executed her soulmate.

“I always thought it was a true story,” Lucais murmured, reaching a hand out to stroke the book’s worn spine. “That one of the Secret-Keepers had managed to find a way around their bargain with the High Mother and tell the story of how the Aboveworld truly ended, by presenting it to us as fiction.”

I sat down on the bed with my legs crossed while he flipped the cover open and ran a long finger over the front page. He glanced up at me, tracing a circle on the empty space around the title.

“There’s no author,” I realised.

Lucais nodded. “I asked my parents when I found the book in our library, and neither of them knew where it had come from. I think I was meant to find it as a warning.”

Tilting my head to the side, I studied his face. His hair was clean and fluffed from sleep, the blond as delicate as starlight in the dawn glow, and he looked fragile. Breakable.

I’d never seen him like that before.

His golden eyes were haunted.

“Because history has a habit of repeating itself,” I finished for him. “You know, in the human world, we have a name for this. It’s called superstition.”

He flipped the lid of the book closed and shrugged, leaning back with his hands behind his head. The fragility had vanished, replaced by an arrogant smirk. “The Malum will do worse things to you than execution. What sort of a mate would I be if I let that happen?”

“You’re not my mate,” I reminded him, crossing my arms over my chest.

He snorted. “Yet.”

Before I could think of what to say next, my bedroom door flew open, and Morgoya appeared. She was dressed in a set of green velvet, and her hair was pulled back into a high ponytail. Her cheeks were flushed.

“Get up,” was all she said to the High King.

“That’s no way to speak to a man recovering from a life-threatening injury,” he replied indignantly.

She rolled her eyes as she stalked across the room. “Oh, please.” She yanked the covers back. “You were fully healed two days ago.”