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He looked so strangely small all of a sudden, hunched over, wings drooping, chiselled face a battlefield of shadows in the moonlight – just a single shattering fae prince beneath an endless sky, the indifferent forest stretching out for miles and miles around him. I wanted nothing more than to wrap my arms around those rigid shoulders, kiss that haunted face. Press him against my chest and hold him closer, closer, closer – close enough for my love to seep into his flesh and bones and wipe away the memories burned into every fibre of his being.

But he knew I loved him.

Just not, it seemed,why.

‘Yes,’ I admitted slowly. ‘Some people do.’

He drew in a slow, shuddering breath. ‘So that means—’

‘Thatdoesn’tmean my feelings are conditional,’ I interrupted, voice rising. ‘That’s the Mother’s kind of love you’re thinking of again. Not mine.’

‘But there’salwaysconditions – thereshouldbe conditions.’ An entirely new edge crept into that rich, warm voice, suddenly – a brittleness I’d never heard before, cracking along with his heart. ‘If I climbed into my bed tomorrow and refused to ever get out again, youwouldget sick of me sooner or later, wouldn’t you? So—’

‘But that’s not what we’re talking about here at all, Creon!’

‘You were the one who started the hypothetical suggestions,’ he managed, breathlessly. ‘I’m just trying to make the point that feelingsareconditional.’

‘Fine, they are – on the condition ofyou.’ An exasperated laugh escaped me. ‘If you never got out of bed again for no bloody reason at all, the problem wouldn’t be that you were useless – the problem would be that you were no longer behaving like yourself.Which is an entirely different point from … from …’

A bitter twist of his lips. ‘Me being unable to protect you the way I always have?’

He threw the words at my feet like a triumphant conclusion. As if I’d gasp and freeze and realise he was right after all. As if I’d suddenly agree that indeed, he should stay at home during the battle tomorrow, and that once I realised I could not count on him to survive, the fire of my love would start quelling itself, all sparks of passion smothered by the growing recognition of his ineptness.

‘For the bloody gods’ sakes,’ I said.

He swallowed. ‘Em—’

‘No,listento me!’ A frustrated gesture silenced him as if I’d slapped him in the face. ‘You’re operating under the assumption that I love you because you keep me safe – do I understand that correctly? Because you are dangerous and powerful and youwould do anything for me– you’re assumingthoseare the essential parts of you upon which my feelings hinge?’

He could have been a statue, the moonlight playing over his frozen features as he stared at me in bewildered shock.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to kill something.

‘Let me make this very, very clear.’ As if I was explaining to a child how to darn a sock, simple step after simple step. The shivers running down my back had nothing to do with the cold autumn breeze caressing my bare legs and face; they were all fury, all heartfelt frustration. ‘First of all, you’re so far removed from the concept of uselessness that it never evenoccurredto me to think of you in any such way. You’ve been the only person keeping me sane for weeks. You forced Thysandra to see who the Mother really is. You prepared for her information and saved us hours of organisational trouble. None of that required a drop of magic, and all of it was invaluable for tomorrow’s fight, alright?’

The way he closed his eyes told me he was about to object. ‘Yes, but—’

‘However,’ I crisply interrupted, silencing him again, ‘none of that is even remotely relevant to the core of the matter, becauseI don’t care, Creon. It’s not your battle prowess that made me fall for you. It’s not your magic or your blades. If you lost your legs and your hands and your wings tomorrow, I would still love you to death – hell, if all you could do for the rest of your life was justlookat me the way you look at me, that would be more than enough. Do you understand that?’

He was so very quiet, eyes like bottomless pools as he gaped at me – drinking in every word I spoke like a male dying of thirst.

Did he understand? Was he even capable of seeing himself the way I saw him – of defining himself not as the merciless killer with an accidental heart, but as the fractured, many-faced male I’d found beneath that shield, gentle and ruthless and brilliant and brave and always, unerringly,mine?

‘I know she made you believe you were good for nothing but bloodshed,’ I whispered, stretching out a hand, cupping the smooth edge of his jaw. He sucked in a sharp breath at the touch. ‘Which isn’t a lie just because there’s so much else you do and do flawlessly. It’s a lie because you don’t need to be good for anything in the first place. You just need to be. You just need to love me and feel like home in this world I can never make sense of on my own, andthat’ – I bent over to kiss his forehead, tipping up his face with my hand still below his chin – ‘that doesn’t have the faintest thing to do with anyone’s bindings, broken or otherwise. It doesn’t have anything to do withuse.’

That last word, quiet and treacherous, hung in the air for one fragile moment.

And then he was crying.

Not the single restrained tear I’d seen from him once before, the night he’d returned half-dead and hurting to the pavilion,but raw, broken sobs that tore from his throat like poison, ripping the last of his desperate composure to shreds. I let go of his face, sank down onto the stone beside him. He curled into my lap like a young boy looking for shelter, and for one heartbreaking moment, he was no longer Creon Hytherion, Silent Death and fae prince … Just the child tortured into becoming a weapon. The child so many had wanted to smother in his cradle before he’d even learned to walk.

I held him tighter, tears soaking my knitted sweater as decades of despair spilled out. Ran my fingers through his long hair again and again, drew gentle circles over his shoulders and the roots of his wings, until finally he went quiet in my arms, shivering slightly in the cold of the night. I wrapped my scarf around his shoulders. He gave a muffled sound of gratitude without lifting his head from my lap.

‘And just so you know,’ I muttered, bending over to kiss the rim of his ear, ‘you’re still coming with me tomorrow. I’m not accepting objections to that part of the plan.’

He groaned but hauled himself upright, cheeks glistening in the moonlight. ‘Em, we might die.’