Page 18 of Broken Hearted (Cursed Fae #3)

A drien kept his hand clamped around mine as we raced through the labyrinth.

Left. Left. Right. Left. Right. Dead End.

Right. Left. Right. Dead End.

Right. Right. Right. Dead End.

Anxiety churned in my gut as the minutes ticked by, and we kept hitting dead ends.

Finally, I came up short, forcing Adrien to stop. “This isn’t working,” I told him. “We’ll never find the right path like this. At least not in time.”

“You’re right,” Adrien said, running a hand through his damp hair. Worry was etched into the dips and contours of his face. Neither one of us knew what to do, but we had to figure it out, and fast.

I don’t know what made me think to do it, but I reached into my satchel and pulled out the Shadow Heart. My eyes grew when I saw a faint light in the middle of the black crystal. A spark of blue that pulsated like a weak heartbeat.

I took three steps forward, and the pulses quickened.

“Adrien!” I spun back to him, holding the Shadow Heart up between us.

“Keep going,” he said. He’d been watching over my shoulder.

I nodded and turned back around, heading in that direction. The light within the Shadow Heart started to intensify as well as the speed of the beats. I jogged past a turn and the glow dimmed, and so I backtracked and it brightened, seeming to urge me in the right direction.

My own heart rate started to pick up as I dared to hope that the Shadow Heart was leading us where we needed to go. Adrien stayed on my heels as I followed the crystal’s directions. We made two right turns, three left turns, and then another right and suddenly we were there, in the center of the maze and facing the large blue crystal I’d seen before we entered the labyrinth.

The Shadow Heart was now so bright that it cast a blue light over me. Its frantic beats matched my own. But now that we were here, what should we do?

The Wise Ones had been frustratingly vague in their instructions. They’d only told me to take the Shadow Heart to the belly of the sea and combine my magic with my mate’s. But I didn’t know any specifics. And all of this would only work if Adrien and I truly were mates.

Were we supposed to place the Shadow Heart somewhere? How did we combine our magic? Did we need to somehow push our magic into the Shadow Heart or just meld our magic together? I had more questions than answers, and that made me feel like even though we’d come this far, we were still going to fail.

As I stood steeped in indecision, Adrien was inspecting the large blue crystal, running his hands over the smooth and angular surface. He seemed to have found something because he stopped and called me over. I was at his side in an instant.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Right here,” Adrien said, pointing to a spot in the middle of the crystal I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like there was a chunk of stone missing. “Try to put the Shadow Heart there,” he explained. “It looks like it might fit.”

Lifting my hand, I placed the Shadow Heart in the spot, and it fit perfectly. But then nothing happened.

“What now?” I asked, looking at Adrien for direction.

“Didn’t you say we needed to combine our magic to unlock it?”

“Yes, that’s what the Wise Ones said. But how do we even do that?” I’d never tried combining my magic with another fae before.

Adrien shrugged. “Maybe we just need to both blast it with our magic, your ice and my shadow, at the same time.”

I nodded. “It’s worth a try, but can we use our magic again?”

Adrien shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

Stepping back, we both lifted our hands, ready to unleash our powers, but when I pulled on my magic, it still wasn’t there.

Terror ripped through me, and I glanced over at Adrien. The look on his face told me he was experiencing the same thing I was.

“My magic isn’t back,” I said.

“Mine neither.”

I chewed on my bottom lip. How could we possibly combine our powers if we couldn’t use them? It didn’t make sense.

Frustration and anger hit me like a wave, stealing my breath.

We’d come all this way and now nothing could be done?

I couldn’t accept that. Wouldn’t. We’d almost died. Some of Adrien’s men had died, and Kira and the other merfolk were at this very moment risking their lives. Giving up now wasn’t an option, but what else could be done?

“You need to kiss me,” Adrien said, and when I jerked my gaze to him, I could see that his face was as serious as ever.

“What? I can’t,” I said, shaking my head even as my body screamed at me for denying it what it truly wanted. But my mind was stronger than my body, overriding my urges. The cold truth of it was that my fear of Adrien actually being my mate and what that would mean was fiercer than my desire.

Adrien took a step toward me, and I was so at odds with myself that I froze. Half of me yelled to move away and the other half demanded I close the remaining distance, but I couldn’t force my body in either direction.

“I won’t push you into this,” he said, moving even closer. “I want you to know that I respect that you’re hesitant about what might be growing between us. This isn’t how I wanted this to play out, to pressure you. I’d planned to wait until you were ready. To wait forever if need be. You’re worth that.”

My heart stuttered at that. Was that true? Would he really wait forever for me?

Despite the internal battle I was waging, I couldn’t help but soften.

“But if we are mates,” Adrien went on. “Then there’s a chance the magic of our mate bond could bring our power to the surface. That might be the key to unlocking this crystal.”

“It could?” I asked and then licked my lips.

As Adrien nodded, his gaze dipped to my moistened mouth. His pupils flared, and my desire roared in response, demanding to match what I saw igniting in his eyes.

Adrien moved even closer until not much more than a sliver of space remained between us. “It’s your call,” he said, his voice soft as he gazed down at me. “It’s just one kiss, and then we will know.”

I shot him a look. “It’s not just a kiss, and you know it.”

He shrugged and moved even closer, dipping his head now. “Well, you did kiss my brother to find out if you were mates. It would just be like that.”

“That … was different,” I huffed instinctively, knowing that kissing Adrien would be vastly different than kissing Zane.

“Not so different,” he said and a small swell of panic rose within me. What if we kissed and nothing happened?

I didn’t know when it switched or how, but the thought of Adrien being my mate was no longer as terrifying as him not.

Adrien’s lips were inches from mine, teasing me, waiting for me to make the move.

“I don’t believe in mates,” I whispered, but the words tasted like a lie.

“Prove it.” The taunt barely left his lips when I lost all resolve.

My desires took over my common sense, and I crashed into him, our mouths seeking each other and opening the second they met. Warm tendrils of heat emanated from my chest and ran down my back.

Adrien’s tongue slid against mine, and I moaned at the rightness of this kiss. This was what was lacking with Zane. Passion .

As we continued to kiss, our mouths coming back together again and again like we were each other’s air, the heat in my chest intensified, turning into an icy fire that somehow ramped up my craving for him even more.

I dove my hands into his hair as he wrapped his arms around me and hauled me closer. We were ravenous for each other. He nipped at my bottom lip and then swallowed my gasp on another kiss.

He tasted like mint and sunshine, and I knew I’d never get tired of this.

I kept my eyes shut as he pulled back and moved his mouth to my neck, sucking gently on the tender skin there until a low moan forced itself free. I felt him chuckle at my response as he traced a path with his lips up to my ear and then playfully bit my earlobe, causing a rush of desire to shoot through me.

I felt weak in his grasp as his mouth finally made its way back to mine, and he gave me the best kiss I think anyone had ever received in fae history.

He smiled against my mouth, and my eyelids popped open.

Oh, stars.

He was right. Adrien was my mate.

A fine, rose-gold dust hovered in the empty air around us, dancing on our skin. I stared at it in awe as it slowly faded away.

But Adrien hadn’t just been right about being mates. I sucked in a surprised breath of air as power flared back to life in my chest.

“Adrien, my magic’s back,” I told him, breathless and reeling from our kiss and what it finally revealed.

“Mine too,” he said.

I’d lost track of how much time had passed since we first entered the cave, but it would be a miracle if ten minutes hadn’t already come and gone. Either way, we needed to hurry.

Adrien picked up on my sudden urgency, and with an arm still anchored around my waist he lifted one hand toward the blue crystal and the Shadow Heart embedded in it.

I followed his lead and gathered my power as I lifted my hand as well.

“Together?” I asked.

Looking into my eyes rather than at the Shadow Heart, Adrien nodded. “Together,” he said, and then we both unleashed our magic.

A wind funnel of black and white magic spun and swirled from our hands. Shadows from Adrien and snow from me. They collided and twisted together, creating a beacon above the Shadow Heart. I watched in anticipation as our magic was sucked inside the black crystal, and then it fissured, cracking in half.

I gasped as shock and sorrow rolled through me. “We broke it.” This was awful. How would we ever stop the curse now?

Adrien leaned forward, picking up one half of the heart and a small vial containing glowing blue fluid dropped out with a tiny, rolled parchment tied with string to the silver stopper.

“No. We unlocked it,” he corrected me.

“What is it?” I breathed.

The entire time the heart held a … potion?

Adrien held the parchment, no thicker than a green bean and no longer than an inch. He squinted his eyes and frowned.

“There’s … a name on it.”

“A name?” I plucked it from his grasp and held the impossibly small lettering up to the lightest part of the cave and gasped.

“Lorelei Maebry, Princess of Spring,” I read out loud.

A vial. A note. For Lorelei? How? It didn’t make sense. But neither did the Wise Ones and all of their knowledge. Had they known about this? I wanted to rip open the small seal and read it right now but it wasn’t addressed to me.

“We have to get this to Zane,” I told him, in a daze, but when I looked over at Adrien, he was still staring down at the piece of the Shadow Heart in his hand, a confused look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing, probably, but …” He shook his head and then glanced up at me. “It’s just that we always believed that the Shadow Heart is what powered our world. At least that’s what the old stories say. But now half of it is sitting in my hand, so how could that be true?”

“Maybe it’s what was inside that was the true source of power?” I offered, thinking about the mysterious vial. “Or perhaps the stories are wrong.”

I knew from experience how stories could be false. Look at all we’ve been told about the Ethereum lords. Most of that wasn’t true, yet we’d always accepted it as fact back in Faerie.

Adrien slipped his hand into mine. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. Let’s get out of here while we still can and we’ll see that my brother gets that.” He nodded down to the vial still held tightly in my hand.

Nodding, I handed the vial to Adrien who took it and the two halves of the Shadow Heart, and placed them into the satchel. Then we ran for the exit, my mind spinning the entire time.