Chapter 22

The Whole Sordid Tale

P haris

How had we even gotten here, on the subject of my greatest shame?

Raewyn had a habit of ferreting out my weak spots and piercing them with pinpoint precision.

“I wish you would talk to me,” she said.

“We are talking.”

“About food.” She rolled her eyes impatiently. “I meant about real things, and you know it. For the gods’ sake, we’ve faced life and death situations together more times than I can count now. Why can we not have a real conversation?”

Reaching across the blanket, she placed her soft hand on top of mine and folded her fingers so the tips of them slid in between mine.

Of all the physical contact I’d ever shared with a woman, this felt the most intimate.

I pulled my hand away and picked up my wine glass for another gulp I definitely did not need. Lowered inhibitions around Raewyn were not a good idea.

“Unroll from your protective ball and let me in past those pangolin scales of yours,” she pleaded. “I’m not a stalking mountain lion, Pharis.”

No, she was something far more dangerous.

“I told you my painful story last night,” she reminded me.

She had, and it had nearly ripped my heart in half.

I’d been touched that Raewyn had decided to reveal such a private detail of her life, choosing to share it with me of all people when she’d told no one else.

Then I’d gone and acted like a child, pouting about her refusal to share a bed with me. The truth was, I’d been consumed by jealousy.

Jealousy I had no right to feel.

Knowing Stellon had shared experiences with Raewyn that I craved for myself burned me. But she’d been right about observing the rules of propriety for the girls’ sake, and it was for the best—I knew that.

Having those experiences with her would only make it harder to leave her once we moved on from Havendor and I got the Hennessey family settled in their new land.

And I had to leave her. Didn’t I?

Honoring Wyll’s request that I leave him and the girls here and go on the run with Raewyn, just the two of us, would mean permanently leaving behind the rest of my life as well.

Could I really do that?

I certainly felt like I could happily spend every day for the rest of eternity with her. Now that I knew she was half-Elven, eternity was a legitimate possibility.

But giving up my connection to Stellon and Mareth? Never seeing them again?

It seemed unthinkable.

Anyway, I had no idea if Raewyn would even be amenable to such a prospect.

“Please, Pharis,” she said. “I’ll never tell a soul, but it might make you feel better to talk about it.”

It wouldn’t. But for some reason, I decided to do it anyway.

“Fine. You want me to talk? You want the truth? Her death was my fault.”

Blunt, but accurate. It was a truth I’d never shared with anyone, not even my brother and sister.

“Oh Pharis,” Raewyn whispered, shaking her head slowly. “I’m sure that’s not the case. You were still a boy when she died.”

“A very dangerous boy,” I agreed.

And then the whole sordid tale came spilling out of me.

“It happened during the battle of Alteria. My mother was a fearsome warrior—that was her glamour. I was seventeen and quite impressed with my own strength and battle skills. I was cocky, overconfident in my training and my recently developed physique. Stellon and I had been forbidden to take part in the battle. Mareth was too young to even consider it, but I wanted to prove myself, to do my part, to be ‘a man.’”

A bitter laugh escaped me as I remembered how confident I’d been that day.

“I didn’t want to be a ‘coddled prince’ and stay behind the palace gates in my ivory tower while the other young men my age went out and had ‘all the fun,’” I said.

Raewyn’s eyes softened, and she nodded, though I didn’t want her sympathy.

I didn’t deserve it—now or back then. By the end of my story, she’d understand that.

“I snuck out, armored up… rode off and right into the thick of things,” I told her. “All the training in the world can’t prepare you for what real battle is like. Very quickly, I got myself into trouble.”

Even now I could vividly recall the confusion and terror that surrounded me, the ungodly noises of suffering and death.

“Everything was moving so fast, I could barely think,” I recalled aloud. “It was only dumb luck that I was on the same part of the battlefield as my mother. Lucky for me… unlucky for her, as it turned out.”

I stopped and swallowed down the enormous lump that had formed in my throat. I might not have continued, but Raewyn took my hands in hers.

She’d moved close to me at some point during my storytelling.

“What happened? Tell me,” she urged.

I took a breath and went on, pouring out the details of the worst day of my life.

“She spotted me about to be killed and came to my defense. She used her glamour to fight off my attackers, but more came. We were outnumbered, and she couldn’t protect her own body and me as well. There were too many vulnerable angles to cover. One of the human soldiers got in a strike through the opening in the side of her armor.”

Tears dripped onto Raewyn’s cheeks, and her hands left mine to stroke my arms.

“I’m so sorry,” she said again and again.

Perhaps I should have stopped there, but once I’d started talking about the horror, it seemed to take on a life of its own, forcing itself out of me like water pouring through a crack in a dam, widening it, tearing it open.

“There might have been a chance for her to make it back to safety and healing if she’d retreated at that point,” I said.

“But she couldn’t. Not unless she wanted to leave me to fend for myself. And of course she didn’t. The enemy sword had hit its mark. The wound was a lethal one, but she kept fighting, trying to shield me as long as she could. When it became apparent her strength was giving out and mine wasn’t enough to save me, she commanded me to—”

I stopped, my chest heaving, my breaths loud and rapid as I struggled to keep from flying apart into a million scattered pieces.

Raewyn leaned forward, nearly draping herself on top of me.

“To what, Pharis?”

“She ordered me… to take her glamour for myself. ‘I’m going to die anyway,’ she said. ‘Do this for me. Make my death mean something. I would gladly die for you a thousand times, my son.’”

Here I had to stop—I couldn't go on.

My voice could no longer make it past the spiked ball in my throat, and my bottled up emotions were on the verge of erupting and coating everything around me with the shameful poison I’d carried inside since that day.

Raewyn embraced me, going up on her knees to wrap her arms around me and bury her face in the juncture of my shoulders and neck. At first I stiffened, resisting the comfort she offered while at the same time, craving it.

When I felt her tears soak through my shirt, my self-control broke. I let my arms wrap around her waist, accepting her compassion.

It felt wrong. It felt weak of me. But it also felt like a soft, soaking rain following a drought, and I was so, so thirsty.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not your fault. You were just a boy.”

“A Gleaner,” I corrected. “That’s what I was—what I am. A taker. A thief.”

Raewyn raised her head and drew back to look at me, keeping her arms wrapped around my neck. In this position, we were eye to eye. Hers were clouded with confusion.

It was time to clear it up for her. She needed to know just what kind of man she was dealing with.

“I took her glamour, just as I took my shadow glamour from someone else I got killed,” I explained. “That’s what a Gleaner does, siphons glamours from other Fae. That’s what the symbol on my foot—and my chest—represents. The mark my father hid from the world? I had it reproduced at the grandest scale I could manage, in a spot that could not be overlooked, especially by me. I see it every time I take my clothes off, every time I pass a mirror.”

“You did it to punish yourself,” Raewyn whispered in understanding.

“Nothing my father has done to me—or will ever do—could come close to what I deserve for killing her and taking away his eternal bond-mate, not to mention causing my siblings to lose their mother.”

Raewyn’s small, cool hands came to the sides of my cheeks, holding my face as we shared searing eye contact. I couldn’t look away as she spoke.

“You lost her too, Pharis. She might have perished in that battle anyway, even if you hadn’t been there. It is not your fault. You did what she commanded you to do.”

My head shook back and forth, but Raewyn didn’t let me go.

“I shouldn’t have,” I said. “I shouldn’t have even been there. I’ve avoided going into battle since then, though I’m certain there are those who consider me a coward—or lazy—for not doing so. I never wanted anyone to see that I have her glamour now in addition to mine. I never wanted my brother and sister to see the evidence that I caused our mother’s death.”

Blinking rapidly, I tried again to turn my face away, not wanting Raewyn to see the threatening tears. She refused to allow it, holding me in place with her hands and her exquisite brown eyes.

“Don’t you see?” she said through tears. “It’s evidence of your mother’s love . She is part of you now—and you will always have a part of her inside you. That is a beautiful gift.”

Unable to stem them any longer, I felt hot tears spill over and stream down my face.

To my shock, Raewyn leaned forward and kissed them. Then she began unbuttoning my shirt.

I looked down, my breath deserting me in a whoosh of shock.

“What are you doing?”

Raewyn didn’t answer me, only kept at her task, and then she bent her head… and pressed her lips to my chest.

For a moment, my mind went utterly blank. I was no longer a thinking being but a creature of pure physicality and sensation.

I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears as blood rushed to the surface of my skin, making it hypersensitive.

A trail of fire burned in Raewyn’s wake as she moved across my pectoral muscles and upper torso, kissing the tattoo, showing me the forgiveness and acceptance I could not give myself.

And then she started moving downward, following the spiral shape of the glamour mark as it narrowed and descended toward my lower abdomen.

The shock and wonder shifted to blazing desire.

As innocent as she was, Raewyn had no idea the reaction her sweet mouth was eliciting.

Everything inside me wanted to let her keep doing it, to see how far she would follow that shameful mark’s path.

The last shred of decency remaining in my body impelled my hands into action. I grabbed Raewyn’s shoulders and hauled her upwards again. For a moment, I just held her there in front of me, my mind wiped clean and struggling to process rational thought.

Then the irrational took over.

I surged forward and kissed her, the motion pushing Raewyn over until her back was on the blanket and my body covered hers.

While the blindfolded kiss earlier had been erotic, this experience was mind-altering.

Beautiful, sweet Raewyn was beneath me, in a position I’d sworn never to allow again after the sparring incident, and it felt even better now than it had then.

This time, there were no small children to interrupt, no ailing father to worry about, no one to see, as a small knoll hid us from the village’s main thoroughfare.

And this time I was kissing her, claiming her sweet mouth the way I’d been dying to do for weeks now.

Obviously, I should never have started that foolish blind-feeding game. It was flirting with disaster.

Watching Raewyn’s pretty lips taking in and tasting the various foods, I felt like I would literally perish on the spot if I didn’t taste her .

And so I had. After that first delicious slip-up, I’d managed to stop myself and reel it back in, but that restraint must have used up the final vestiges of my self control.

It was almost gone now, slipping farther and farther out of reach, like the end of a rope trailing behind a runaway stallion.

If Raewyn wanted this to stop, she was going to have to be the one to do it.

Something had been set loose inside me. I could barely manage to break away from her for even a second to take in oxygen.

When I did, I looked down at her flushed face, mussed hair—impossibly beautiful.

“Gods, what are you doing to me?” I asked and kissed her again before she could answer.

This had to have been why the matchmaker’s glamour had told me Raewyn was my perfect match.

Being with her in this way felt like placing the final piece into one of those intricate puzzles Mareth sometimes persuaded me to do with her.

Suddenly all the myriad moments of my life when I’d been overlooked and overshadowed and pushed aside no longer mattered. Because they were more than made up for by this , something—someone—who was uniquely mine , made just for me.

It felt like being immersed in one of the frequent dreams I had about her, except much, much better because this was real.

It was happening. At last.

And it was wrong.

No matter how right it felt, I knew I should not be kissing the woman my brother loved.

I should not be falling this hard. But I couldn’t help myself.

I could stop myself though. With great difficulty, I broke the kiss and pulled back.

“Are you okay?” Raewyn whispered, apparently reading the guilt on my face.

“Better than okay.” A lie, followed by a truth. “You taste as amazing as I always knew you would.”

“Always knew?” she asked and gave me a shy smile. “When did you start thinking about it?”

“When did you?”

“I asked you first,” she said.

“Honestly, I’ve wanted to taste those heart-shaped lips from the moment I saw you outside the ballroom entrance. But Stellon slapped my hand away from the candy jar, so to speak.”

“And you let him,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like you.”

“He’s the Crown Prince,” I said, giving the justification I’d accepted all my life whenever Stellon had received preferential treatment.

“But honestly… I wouldn’t have let that stop me if I’d believed you had even the slightest interest in me,” I admitted. “You rejected me so thoroughly though that when he insisted on monopolizing your attention, it felt like I had no other choice but to allow it. It was like receiving the best birthday gift of my life—then having it snatched away and given to someone else.”

“I wasn’t rejecting you, Pharis. I was scared of you,” Raewyn said.

My head snapped back. “Scared? Of me? I was being nice—at first anyway.”

“Yes, you were,” she said. “You were so charming and persistent… and so incredibly good-looking… I was overwhelmed.”

She paused, and her face pinkened further. “I was undercover, as you know, and I was afraid I would let my secret slip in the first ten minutes of the ball… because I was so dazzled by you.”

Warmth spread from my chest throughout my body, making it even more impossible to move from our precarious position. I smiled down at Raewyn.

“And Stellon wasn’t scary?”

“Well, I was afraid of letting my secret slip with him, too, because I’m such a bad liar. But… no. He never scared me the way you did.”

The warm sensation turned into something like exhilaration. It might have been the happiest I’d ever felt.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I purred in her ear then moved my mouth to her neck. “Come here and let me ‘scare’ you a bit more, Wildcat.”

Forget what I said—I couldn’t stop with her. I was never going to stop wanting Raewyn for the rest of my immortal life.