Page 66

The urge to claim her rises in me.She’s yours. Now and always.

Give her the wine. Cross over. Show her exactly what it means to be your mate.

I squash the thoughts as soon as they roll through my head.

This evening might kill me.

Callie’s gaze dips and she fidgets with her dress, looking both pleased and embarrassed to be wearing it. “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”

“Cherub, have you ever known me to do things I don’t want to?”

“How about my first wish?” she says.

Blood-soaked kitchen, blood-stained girl, dead monster at her feet.

I give her the side eye. “That doesn’t count.”

“Why?” she asks, and there’s so much weight on that one word.

Because I never actually minded.

I cock my head. “Is it just me, or are you particularly persistent with the questions tonight?”

She gives me a playful shove, smiling wryly. After a moment, her features sober, and Callie’s heart is in her eyes. She looks at me like I’m her own personal salvation. Sweet thing, hasn’t she figured out by now that though I rule the heavens, I’m hell wrapped in a man?

I give her my arm, and the two of us leave her room. We head out of the girl’s dorms and across the grassy lawn that separates Peel Academy’s living quarters from the castle proper.

Around us, couples mill about, the boys looking mostly stiff and uncomfortable in their suits and the girls preening in their brightly colored gowns.

Amongst them, my mate is in a league of her own. She’s ethereal and untouchable, and it makes my knees weak just staring at her. I’m not alone. For all of Callie’s insecurities, she’s collecting stares faster than she has beads.

My wings itch to reveal themselves. Even these meager adolescents are enough to set off my possessive instinct.

Those who aren’t assessing Callie are eyeing me. There’s a reason I’ve taken pains to mask myself when I’ve visited my siren. The Politia will be up my ass—and anyone connected to me—in days the moment they realize I’m here. I’ve been on their Most Wanted List for years. The second they catch wind that I waltzed around Peel Academy, they’re all going to blow their loads. Capturing me would be career-making.

And that would mean that they’d all come down on Callie, the girl I took to the dance. The same girl who harbors an acute fear of the supernatural authorities.

Can’t happen. I won’t let it.

So, without letting my mate know, my magic creates the most subtle of illusions. My ears round, and my fae features soften to something more mortal. To everyone but Callie, I’m Des in human form.

Tonight, she gets a normal evening. One where her date isn’t a wanted criminal, one where she’s not some outcast. Tonight we’re as we should be, two flames in the darkness, and all these people are the moths that bask in our light.

Tonight the world is as it should be. Tomorrow life will go back to the fucked up charade it usually is.

May, 7 years ago

The dance isall fine and dandy for about two point five seconds. Then Callie’s peers descend on her like flies to a carcass. Fake friends, fake enthusiasm, fake smiles. If I wanted deception, I’d waltz my way into one of the fae palaces. And if Callie wanted to spend her evening talking to these people, she’d have come here with them.

“Clarice, this is Desmond,” Callie says, introducing me to yet another classmate. Is this the fifth one, or the sixth? For a girl who has no friends, she has an awful lot of acquaintances …

Clarice is looking at me the way the last several girls have been, the same way that Somnia’s noblewomen always have. Like they wish to conquer and be conquered by me.

It’s annoying coming from fae women; it’s beneath my notice coming from human girls that aren’t my mate.

“Des, this is—”

Social hour, I’ve decided, is over.