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“Luv?”

But I don’t say anything, because I can’t say anything. That last bit he’d just imparted is a harness roping around my throat, my heart, my everything. Back then, he had seen many things about me, but he hadn’t seen everything.

He still hasn’t. And I’m tired of him not knowing.

I take Puck’s hand and slide it to my lower back, slipping his palm under my sweater. When I reach the tattoo, I settle us there. Although the marking has no texture to humans, his face transforms from quizzical to skeptical. The tips of his fingers traipse across the X of crossbow bolts, his Fae senses kicking in, somehow attuning themselves to the presence of ink.

His eyes narrow, then widen. The rest of his features follow, slackening. “You’re a…”

“Was,” I correct. “I was.”

The Faeries standing post have traversed farther into the tube trunks. They’re gabbing, perhaps out of boredom. The distance isn’t sufficient enough for us to speak freely, but it is enough to protect our whispers.

Yet no matter how hard I try to bolster myself, my voice comes out tissue-thin. “I was a trade poacher before we met.”

Puck gawks, his pupils jumping all over my face like a skipping stone. Then his visage crimps into fury. “What happened? Who did it to you?”

So, I tell him. My birth parents had given me up when I was an infant, and I was passed from home to home for the first six years of my life. Then one day, the family presently hosting me surrendered the responsibility and dumped me in a carriage headed for a workhouse in some far-off town.

I’d scurried out of the vehicle and into the forest. Eventually, a trade poaching gang caught me snaring an animal and saw an opportunity. I tell Puck about the years I spent with them, how they taught me to use a crossbow but forced me to exercise it in a way I hadn’t expected. I tell him it was either that or starve, or worse—andworsehad hurt a great deal. Sometimes they’d twisted my arm or pulled on one of my canines until it felt like the tooth would rip from my gums. But mostly, the threats were enough to scare me. They didn’t have to do much more.

I recall cackles slipping through the cracks of stained teeth. I recall orders spitting from a chapped mouth and the burlap texture of one male’s voice. I recall another set of eyes, the shade of a bruise.

I recall their tattoos—the same poacher marking that taints my lower back. I tell Puck about the last time I targeted a creature for them and how she’d had cubs with her. I hadn’t been able to go through with it, so one of the men had done it instead.

That’s when I’d screamed. That’s when my scream had turned into a roar. And that’s when I quit.

While the poachers had slept at our camp that night, I’d swiped the necessary provisions and bagged the animal. Then I went searching for the cubs and found them in their burrow. Together, we buried their mother.

I had stayed with them all night. The next morning, others from their pack came sniffing. To my relief, they didn’t reject the cubs, and I was able to leave them without worrying.

I’d stumbled through the wild for a few days until coming upon a house in the woods, just outside Reverie Hollow’s square. I took shelter on the property, inside an old wagon parked beneath a willow tree.

By sunrise, I awoke to the sight of a little girl my age, kneeling and staring down at me through a cloud of white hair. “Who the hell are you?” she’d chirped.

Those had been her first words to me. And because I would never let anyone look down on me again, I’d sat up, brushed a twig from my hair, and rolled my dignified shoulders. “I can spell seven words.”

Those had been my first boastful sentence to her. To which, she’d thrown back her head and hooted, then called out, “Papa! Can I have a sister?”

After that, I became part of a family. But I never forgot what I’d done for those men. I’ve since rescued hundreds of animals with my sisters, but it hasn’t atoned for the creatures I took down before that, the ones targeted for their pelts and claws, the rest of their carcasses left to decay.

I tell Puck all of this.

He’s quiet for longer than I’d thought him capable. “Look at me, luv.”

“I can’t,” I mutter around a congested throat.I can’t.

“Yes, you can,” he says. “You can do any fucking thing. I’ve seen that.”

“I can’t—”

“Juniper.” He frames my cheeks. “It wasn’t your fault.”

My face crumples. And I cry. The sobs wrack my form, quite tears pouring out between us.

“Ah, luv.” Puck holds me fast. “You were a wee sapling, and those men were a bunch of fuckwits. They gave you no choice. You had to survive.”

“I h-hurt them,” I choke out. “I h-hurt them all. The w-way they c-cried out from the b-bolts. The sounds they m-made in the tr-traps.”