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Something flickers in her eyes, something alarming, something that looks an awful lot like fear.

Fear ofme.

Her throat works as she fights the words. But eventually she loses.

“Your father is Galleghar Nyx.”

Chapter 2

The Shadow King

254 years ago

“They’re coming.”Mymother slams our cavern door closed as she storms into our house.

“Who?” I close the book I’ve been reading and slide my ankles off the edge of the table. I’m not supposed to kick my feet up on our table, and normally I’d get chewed out for it, but today, my mom doesn’t even notice.

“Your father’s men.”

I look at my mother with alarm as she grabs my arm, dragging me towards the back recesses of our home where our rooms are. Every room in our house has a door or an artificial wall to seal the caverns we dwell in from those that lie beyond. The entire heart of Arestys is a maze of them, spanning nearly the length of the island. Not even I know all of the caverns by heart, and I’ve lived my whole life inside them.

“Why are the king’s men coming?” I ask, my voice deepening in alarm.

Control your emotions, I tell myself, though it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head. For fairies, power and emotion are all wrapped up together. Lose control of one, and you’ll lose control of the other.

And if the king’s men are coming, I can’t afford to lose control.

Since the day three years ago that my mom confessed my father wastheGalleghar Nyx, tyrant King of Night, I sealed away all dreams of reuniting with him. Better to be a bastard than his son.

Galleghar Nyx is a powerful man. A cruel, powerful man. The kind of man you hope never notices you.

“Someone saw your wings,” she says.

I swallow. My distinctive,damningwings. Fairies don’t tend to have the talon-tipped wings of dragons and demons. In fact, there’s only one particular line of fairies that share this trait—the royal bloodline.

I had the misfortune of inheriting my father’s wings.

“They must’ve reported them,” she continues.

Fear coils low in my stomach. I did this. Over the last three years, I’ve kept my wings hidden, but sometimes even my practiced control slips.

“I’m sorry,” I say, running a hand through my white hair. The words sound hollow. You apologize for a mistake, but this is so much bigger than a simple mistake.

Too many fights that I went looking for and too many pretty women I spent too long gazing after. I baited myself over and over again with the exact things that triggered my wings.

And there had been that village girl the other week … she’d seen them. She’d seen them and all but ran to tell the village elders. I was only able to stop her by striking a bargain—her silence for a bracelet made out of moonbeams and asteroid hearts.

I can’t wield magic, but I’ve gotten good at churning out deals.

So I whispered to the sweet moon stories about the sun until she shared a little of her light, and I let the cosmos taste my essence in return for the hearts, and it took four days, but I got the village girl her heavenly bracelet.

Apparently it was all for nothing. She must’ve told someone in those four days before I could fulfill my end of the bargain. After all, it’s not every day that you stumble upon the heir to the Night Kingdom.

“Don’t apologize for who you are,” my mother says now, refusing to allow me to take the fall for something that is surely my fault. She drags me to her room, shutting the door behind her.

“Your powers are still awakening?” she asks, changing the subject.

I nod. I was powerful before my wings sprouted, and even though I gained a huge portion of my magic that night, it’s been steadily burgeoning within me ever since.