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“I am actually quite serious the majority of the time,” he supplied.

Scarlett blinked at him. That was a lie. Sure, he was serious when they were training, but even there, much of his words were teasing and flirting and—

She was pulled from her thoughts when he reached over and brushed some of her hair back over her shoulder. When he pulled his hand back, his fingers briefly traced her jaw before he brought that same arm to the back of the couch and propped his head on his fist, watching her.

“Do you really think we should tell them everything?” she asked, recalling what he had said to her in that little shield bubble he had created.

“We? Are you asking me to help you scheme?” he asked, his brows rising in surprise.

“You’re ancient. I’m assuming you have some ideas with all those years of experience,” she answered, taking a sip of the wine.

He gave her an unimpressed stare, but that half grin made a brief appearance before it was replaced by a contemplative look. “I think he does not trust me, obviously, and it is affecting his trust in you. If you are going to continue to ask him for help, you are going to need to include him and his guards because he is not going to be able to find what you need alone. He is royalty. I doubt he has ever had to get his hands dirty, so to speak.”

“You really want him to know about you being Fae?”

“I trust you enough to decide if you should tell him. I think you need toshowthat you trust him enough to tell him, especially since he sees you pulling away from him.” The last part of his sentence was said cautiously.

“Sloan wasn’t entirely wrong,” she said, fiddling with her wine glass and watching the liquid slosh along the sides.

“I know.”

“Thank you. For not trying to make me feel better about it,” she said, meeting his gaze once more.

“You made a choice to protect those you love. Maybe it has gotten messy. Maybe it was a bad call, but what is done is done. Now you decide how to move on from here,” he said.

“You speak as if from experience,” she said, bringing the glass to her lips.

“I am ancient, remember?” he said, flicking her nose. She hissed, batting his hand away. “I have made plenty of bad calls in my years.”

“Tell me of one,” she said, settling back into the sofa. She propped an elbow on the back, angling her body to face him as he was facing her.

Sorin’s face became serious. His gaze went to the fire in the hearth as he started to speak. “A group of my closest warriors and I went out on a mission to find a missing person. The queen had also sent two of her best warriors to aid in recovering her. We had been searching for her off and on for years,but we had been unable to find any clues as to where she had disappeared to. Many had given up, accepting she was gone, but I just couldn’t. Our people had lost so much, were experiencing too much other shit. I just… I neededsomethingto go right.”

Scarlett watched him as he spoke. Real pain entered his eyes, and his jaw clenched, a muscle feathering. She shifted her wine glass to her other hand and reached across the small distance between them to place her hand on his arm. His gaze flicked to it, studying her fingers gently resting there, and she couldn’t read the expression that flitted across his face.

“We had set up camp right along our side of the border. The next morning, we were planning to cross over into another territory. A mortal one. According to the information we had gathered, she was nearby. We would not have access to our magic, but mortals were still inferior in every way when it came to strength and speed. I was not worried. My Second-in-Command, however… He had been wary of the circumstances the entire time we had planned the mission. He felt it was a trap. That the information seemed suddenly too easy to find and that she had been gone for so long, there was no way she was just on the other side of our borders. That we had brought too many of our most skilled and important people to have us all cross the border. He wanted two, an incredibly powerful female and one of the queen’s warriors, to stay on our side of the border for recon in case things went wrong. I insisted whoever had taken her was clever to hide her so close to our border. We would never think to look there. The female was just as furious at the idea of being sidelined.”

Sorin must have noted the look of surprise on Scarlett’s face because he said, “I told you when we first started training that females fight alongside males on the battlefields. When will you realize that nearly everything I have ever told you has been a truth?”

“You lied to me repeatedly about who the queen was,” Scarlett pointed out drolly.

“No, Love, I did not lie about who she was. I may have withheld information, but I have never spoken falsehoods to you.”

“Semantics,” Scarlett scoffed, taking a sip of her wine.

“Anyway,” Sorin went on, drawing out the word. “My Second and I had an argument, but I eventually pulled rank, something I rarely ever did. He was furious, but could do nothing. We crossed the border the next morning. All of us. We tracked the woman to a cave, but my Second had been right. It had all been a trap. She wasn’t there and instead we found ourselves surrounded by a small clan of Night Children.”

Scarlett started. “What?”

“I will come back to how vampyres were allowed to be here, because yes, Love, they wereallowedto remain among the humans, but let me finish this story first. I had not been worried about mortal assailants, but Night Children are a completely different enemy. Their strength and speed are equal to the Fae, and Night Children have an ability called entrancing. They can use the ability to compel others to do their bidding.”

“But you cannot access magic in the mortal lands,” Scarlett argued.

“There is always a work around, Scarlett. Always. Night Children survive by drinking blood, the life forces of others. It is ancient, powerful magic that has been outlawed for centuries, but the Night Children exist, nonetheless.

“The powerful female that my Second had wanted to stay behind entered first with the two others. My Second, Third, and I were to wait for the all clear signal. We heard the clanging of swords and cries of pain from the men, and my Second rushed in. My Third tried to hold me back, but I broke his hold and raced in after him. Three of the vampyres had their fangs in the throats of the original three warriors. They were motionless on the ground as they drained them dry. My Second was fighting two of them and his rage was palpable. He killed them both before three more converged on him. My Third and I were engaged with two others. The three of us somehow, by the grace of the gods, made it out of that cave and across the border. The vampyres could not follow.

“We later went back and claimed every life of those other clan members. The revenge was not swift, and it was not merciful. It is acts like this that perpetuate the dark claims of our Court.But it was a bad call. I should have listened to my Second. Those lost were not just warriors, but dear friends. We were all incredibly close. We could have scouted more, verified more information, but I… I made a bad call, and it was costly. In more ways than one. The other two warriors lost were the Fae Queen’s, and it further strained an already fickle, unstable relationship with the Eastern Courts. Even more than that, our actions that day tipped off others that we were still searching for the missing female. A few weeks later we learned that she had been alive and well when we had come to ‘rescue’ her but that our actions had spooked others who had then killed her,” he finished.