Page 24

She clucks her tongue. “Desmond Flynn, you know better than most that if you want answers, you have to first pay.”

How does she know my real name?

… She knows many things …

She reaches out to cup my cheek. I stare at her, not sure whether I should turn and leave, or linger and hear what she has to say.

She doesn’t give me a choice.

I feel a tiny bite of pain as one of her sharp nails slices through the skin above my jaw. I push her hand away just as she presses her thumb against the cut.

She laughs, the sound like bells, as she backs away from me. A few droplets of my blood coat her thumb. She rubs it between her fingers then slides her bloody thumb along her tongue.

“Mmm,” she says, briefly closing her eyes. “That’sunusual.”

I breathe in her magic.

Some sort of prophetess.

Her eyes open. “Perhaps I should call you DesmondNyx, heir to the Night throne, the son who should’ve died.”

Instinctively, my hand moves to the dagger at my waist.

Her lips curve. “Was I not supposed to know that?” She presses a finger to her mouth, tapping it twice. “Fine, Eurion Nova, bastard-born whoreson, you are a nobody from nowhere who will do nothing with your life and the slave you’re soulmated to. Is that what you want to hear?”

Soulmated to … a slave?

No. Gods’ hands,no.

“You lie,” I say.

The fae woman cocks her head. “About what? Your mother being a whore? Or you being a bastard?”

“I don’t have a soulmate.” Fae or otherwise.

“Oh,that.” Her eyes flick over me and she smiles. “I thought you’d be happy to hear you have a mate. Not all fairies do, you know.”

My stomach bottoms out at the possibility. Can a fairy evenbemated to a human?

She must be lying.

The woman studies me, her pleased expression growing. “So the mighty Desmond Flynn is okay freeing slaves but not marrying one?” Shetsks. “Awfully hypocritical for the man who was raised powerless and penniless.”

I taste a bit of bile at the back of my throat.

“You lie,” I repeat, my voice hoarse.

She gives me a pitying look. “Oh My Lord, what that I were.”

What this woman says is lunacy.

“I’m not a lord,” I respond, swallowing.

I’ve never even bedded a slave. To take one as my wife, mysoulmate…

“Right,” she says saucily, “you’re a bastard. I forget, we’re still playingpretend.”

I watch her as she begins to circle me.