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I flinch.

A hiss gurgles up her throat. “In your desperate attempts to meet any other fate but mine, if you so much as look at my daughter the wrong way, I will gut you.”

I snatch the plate from the bench, but I can’t find the strength to look at the dark female who watches me with eyes that reflect fiery embers.

“If Daxeel never existed, I would still love Aleana,” I say and scramble out of the chair. “I would want her as a sister. Like me she is overlooked and underestimated, and her ambitions are for happiness and nothing more. I respect that—Irelateto that.” Finally, I lift my chin to stare down those searing eyes. “I’m sorry you think so poorly of me. You’re right to say I have talents of seduction, and that I yearn for the protection Daxeel can offer me—but I feel I’ve proven my worth and more now.” I watch her eyes dim, her brow furrow. “Have I not proven that I truly love him?”

She only considers me.

A hefty sigh deflates my chest and I start around the corner of the table for the archway. My voice is a murmur, “Not that any of it matters. I lost him a long time ago and…”

Shaking my head, I find her gaze again, unreadable. “Daxeel has lost whatever he once felt for me. I am not so sure anymore I can win it back. What you say—what you feel—about this evate business… you are right. It is poisoned, and I poisoned mine by my own hand. Daxeel might never forgive me, and so maybe we will always be ruined and I’m chasing ghosts.”

I swallow back the swell of thickness that suddenly appears in my throat, that decides to burn my eyes. “So please, Melantha,pleaselet me at least keep my friendship with Aleana before she soon finds her peace.”

Melantha blinks—and she looks stricken as though I have just slapped her with a rotten slab of ham.

I don’t want her to see me cry. I turn my cheek. “I know she doesn’t have long,” I confess. “I love her better than I love my own sister. Aleana deserves more than she has gotten out of life. I will be her friend until her last breath—and beyond it.”

Melantha releases a long, steady breath as she sinks back into her chair. She studies me with a pensive silence, and it still isn’t friendly.

I doubt it ever will be friendly.

The best I can hope for with Melantha is civility.

So I bow my head and—plate firm in my steely grip—I stalk out of the kitchens. I only loosen the trembling breath that swarms in my chest when I’m in the foyer, a safer distance from the deadly beast lurking in the bowels of Hemlock.

For a few phases, I am either lounging around with Aleana in the gardens at the rear of the house, or hidden in the aisles of the library reading all that I can find about Kithe, the Mountain of Slumber, the Sacrament and evate.

And still, the hours are slow to pass.

The phases here are eternities.

I am a fae who sneaks out to field parties, runs off to explore the human lands, dances nights away at the High Court—but here, I am imprisoned.

So many parts of my life, of myself, have been stripped away.

I itch to go beyond Hemlock for a wander. Maybe stalk the streets of Kithe or sneak up to Comlar and join the dancers for a little while.

But Daxeel gave his command not to leave, and so I can’t.

Even just the thought of stepping out the front door has my muscles bolting to my bones, like they wouldn’t move if I begged them, like they fight the temptation rising through me.

Eamon should be my saviour of tedium. But I find he’s not in the house as much as I would like him to be. Maybe I regret a little that I guided him and Ridge together. Perhaps I should have waited until the Sacrament was done with, so I at least had Eamon’s undivided attention for this month.

Instead, this Breeze he’s off with Ridge to the Gloaming.

Maybe I would have been invited if Daxeel hadn’t commanded my confinement to Hemlock.

Fleetingly, I think of Melantha, of her confinement in a dungeon for the full two months of the Sacrament, then her imprisonment in marriage and evate. But I fast shove the thoughts from my mind as I wander out into the gardens tucked away at the back of the home.

Aleana is where she said she would be, and at the exact time we agreed to meet. But I don’t smile at the sight of her.

Rather, disappointment tugs my mouth down into a frown.

On the black swing bench, she’s sprawled out—and so deep in sleep that she’s borderline comatose.

The blue silk of her dress is bunched around her bruised knees, her sandals abandoned on the faint gleam of the muted stone beneath her, and she has her arm twisted at an odd angle to rest over her eyes.