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“But you left,” I say softly.

He stays rigidly in place. “I did,” he says, his eyes sad. “But I never meant to stay away.”

“Then why did you?”

He runs a hand through his hair, looks away, then takes a deep breath, his gaze returning to me. “You were so damn young,” he says quietly, his eyes searching my face. “And you’d been abused. And my heart chose you. I felt it that first night, but I didn’t believe it, not until the feeling grew until it couldn’t be ignored.

“I couldn’t stay away, I could barely resist you at all, but I didn’t want to push you into something. Not when you’d just escaped a man that took and took. I didn’t want you to think that was all men were good for.”

I can’t breathe. A silent tear tracks down my cheek. Then another.

Des wipes my tears away, his expression so gentle. “So I let you play your game, buying favor after favor from me, until the day I couldn’t take it. No mate of mine shouldoweme. But my magic, it has a mind of its own … like your siren, I can’t always control it. It thought that the more you owed me, the longer I could guarantee that you were in my life. Of course, that strategy came to an abrupt end the moment you cast your final wish.”

Tears are still dropping down my face as I rack my brain for the wish he’s referring to.

“That final wish of yours,” he continues, “it was bigger than either of us. You wanted me, I was falling for you and it wasn’t right, Callie. I knew it wasn’t right. Not when you were sixteen. But I could be patient. For my little siren, my mate, I could.”

He flashes me a soft smile, his eyes brimming with some deep emotion.

And I feel light as air. This is everything I wanted to hear all those years ago. And now it’s making me cry harder. I thought my scarred heart had fallen for the one man who couldn’t love me back.

His eyes go distant. “But that wish … I was a prisoner to it.”

“Whatwish?” He keeps mentioning this ominous wish, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Des’s focus sharpens. “Your last one. On the night of the dance—‘From flame to ashes, dawn to dusk, for the rest of our lives, be mine always, Desmond Flynn,’” he says, quoting the binding verse I spoke long ago.

My face heats. “You never granted that one.”

“Are you sure about that?”

My skin goes cold as his words sink in. “You … you granted it?”

“I did,” the Bargainer says, his eyes moving to my lips.

He’d agreed to be mine.My brain is exploding at that.

I glance at my bracelet. “But the beads never showed up …”

“They wouldn’t, since you were already paying them off. We both were.”

My breath catches, and a lump forms in my throat. “What do you mean?” I barely get the words out.

“A favor as large as the one you requested requires steep payment,” the Bargainer continues. “Do you think my magic would allow you to buy yourself a mate so easily? That kind of favor requires a good dose of heartbreak and years of waiting—seven years, to be precise.”

Seven years.

Oh God.

The Bargainer’s magic is subtle, if you aren’t looking for it, you’ll never notice it.

That entire time I’d tried and failed to move on, all that time I’d resented the Bargainer, it had all been part of the wish.

“Every day after your last wish, I worked myself raw trying to get close to you,” Des says. “And every day I was stopped by my very own magic, which had turned on me.

I’m shaking my head because I can’t speak. The binding verse I’d spoken out of sheer desperation. As that final evening seven years ago replays itself out in my head, I watch it from a new perspective—Desmond’s. I inhale sharply when I realize how the events unfolded according to him.

He’d been bound to my wish just as much as I’d been. I’d never realized he couldn’t just stop his own bargains.