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I wasn’t sure if Mylo’s warning was predisposing me to see trouble where none existed, or if Guyan’s friendly helpfulness really did feel more sinister than I’d noticed before. The way he’d offered his help, and then abruptly been distracted by this year’s karkin hatching, and then the nobles inside Sirun, and then which cooks remained, and then rearranging the hall for a dance seemed like an ominous foreshadowing of an idea I wouldn’t like. He’d given just enough to get me curious and then jumped from one topic to another until the meal was over.

Guyan strode to the front of the dais, spread his arms, and sent his voice across the hall on magic sound waves. “Lords, ladies, and everyone else who has joined us tonight, thank you for such a gracious welcome. It has been too long since I’ve enjoyed the hospitality of Sirun’s Dining Hall.”

Normally, I’d think nothing of him addressing our court. But after talking to Mylo, I wondered what he was planning. I shook my head. He hadn’t given me any real signs of trouble. He’d treated Callista as less than he should have, but many elves would have made the same mistake.

Caution was different than judging without reason. I refused to misjudge my cousin simply because he gave off mischievous vibes. Robin had always been mischievous. Koan was a known-trouble maker. And I trusted both of them. I could watch Guyan for signs of trouble without assuming he was trying to undermine me.

Plus, I had legitimate suspicions about Acantha. If she’d arranged for the accident that killed his parents on the bridge, he deserved even more latitude. If that was true, and we ever found evidence of it, it would break his heart.

Guyan organized the elves in the hall to clear the tables to the edges of the room while the musicians who’d provided background music during dinner took a short break. When they came back to play, the dance floor was ready.

“Will you dance with me?” I asked Callista.

Her big, blue eyes lit up. “I’ve never been to an elven dance.” A quick blush ran across her cheeks. “Or actually, a human dance. I used to dance with my father and brother, but I love the idea of dancing with you—if you think it’s something I can do without practice.”

“Callista. If you can hold my hand, you can dance.”

She smiled with her whole face, and I felt that burst of happiness flood through our bond. I hated that bond. I hated myself for putting it on her. But I loved the insight it gave me into her emotions.

I escorted her to the dance floor, wrapped one hand around her shoulder blade, and lifted her right hand in my left. She settled a hand into my bicep, ready to follow wherever I nudged her. We held that position while the musicians played a test note, and then for a few more seconds while I felt the pacing of their song. A three-count ballroom dance. With the next downbeat, I swept Callista away.

She flew with me, easily staying in step, while her hair tossed and her dress spun around her. I twirled her, testing her comfort with the movement, and catching her easily between her shoulder blades. She threw her face up and laughed, pouring more joyful emotions into my soul.

I spun her again and again, feeding off her delight like a sparrow in a sunflower patch. She threw her free hand out to the side, and I lifted her into my arms, tucking her legs to my right side. She tipped her head back and spread her hands like wings. I kept one arm around her hips and my other hand in the middle of her back while we spun again.

And for a moment, we were not dancing in the Great Hall after a feast with hundreds of nobles watching. For a moment, we were the only two people in the world. I held her, and she moved with me, and nothing else mattered. I was as close to her as I was to my own heart.

We came out of the spin, and I brought her back to her feet, pulling her close in a standard position again. With another downbeat, we traveled across the floor, and I thought I sensed new emotions in the bond. Not actually new, but emotions that she might have felt before in smaller amounts—now they were abundant enough that I knew exactly what I was feeling: excitement, hope, and anticipation.

A wild grin broke across my face. If she was hoping for an exciting dance, I would give her that. “We can do better than that,” I whispered.

“Go for it,” she breathed back.

Her confidence in me took my breath away. “You trust me? ”

She laughed and slid her hand off my bicep and onto my neck, where she nudged my head closer to hers. “You’ve carried me hundreds of feet off the ground in your claw. There’s nothing you can do on a dance floor that would frighten me.”

A reckless abandon rushed through my heart. “Nothing?” I asked, drawing her closer.

“Nothing.” Her breath hitched halfway through the word.

My hands dropped to her waist, and I hoisted her high above my head. She spread her hands again, as if she could fly, and—while the music built to a crescendo—I tossed her in the air. As she fell back to the ground, I caught her with an arm around her waist and another across her back. I tucked her legs to my side again, and she wrapped her arms around my neck. I used her momentum to throw us both into a spin. When we slowed, I lowered her to her feet, caught her hand, and twirled her two more times.

The music slowed, so I tipped her down in a dramatic dip, resting her hips against my knee. She flung her hands out above her head, panting with exhaustion, but radiating a joyful pleasure I had never seen in her before.

I pulled her back up to her feet, took one hand, and bowed over it. I dropped a quick kiss on her knuckles before I stood back up. She held onto my fingers, but fell into a gracious curtsy. My heart pounded at the sight, and I lifted her up as quickly as possible.

Applause exploded around us. The fools had never seen me dance with such uninhibited energy. “Thank you,” Callista breathed as I escorted her back to our table.

“Oh no, Firehawk.” I stopped walking and brushed a wild lock of hair away from her face. “Thank you .” I brushed her glowing cheek with a thumb. “That was the best dance of my life.”

She blushed and radiated more of those heady emotions as I led her back to my table. An elf could get drunk on those emotions. I’d entered dangerous territory—a new addiction—where all I wanted to do was make her happy enough to radiate enough delight that I could feel it through the bond.

After Callista caught her breath and had some more lemonade, Koan approached the dais. I turned slowly to face him.

He bowed with a cheeky flourish. “Your Majesty, as the D’Aeran house representative, I was hoping to offer a dance to Callista.” He winked. I was tempted to light his jacket on fire, purely for entertainment value. “And as a friend, of course,” he added. I restrained myself. We were friends now, after all. As a high noble who was finally acting like the adult he was, he should be sitting on the dais with me.

I nodded with a smile as gracious as his. “Upset her at all, and you will burst into flames.”

His smirk grew into a genuine laugh. “Fear not, Your Majesty. I will do nothing to warrant spontaneous combustion.”

Callista laughed back and squeezed my hand as she left her chair.

I watched Koan guide her between other couples, most of whom were extra careful not to bump into her. I was not sure if they recognized her as the fae I’d paraded in front of them months ago, or if they had simply caught on to the way I’d presented her as my equal tonight.

Guyan leaned closer to me. “Are you afraid Koan will steal your half-human?”

“Not at all,” I answered. “But it does make me nervous to see her so close to so many people when I do not know how they will respond to her.”

“And if someone did try to attack her?”

I smirked. “One of the advantages of my power is that I can incinerate people from a distance.”

He laughed out loud. Flames, I’d missed my cousins and their light-hearted responses to my more serious nature. But my thoughts drifted back to Callista and her brother almost immediately. “Is her brother really out there still?”

Guyan sobered. “Yes. What do you really intend to do?”

“How do you know I won’t do exactly as she asked?”

“Because you have a ponderous look. It’s the sort of expression you wear when you’re considering your cursed sense of justice, and it usually precedes an announcement that I won’t like.”

I sighed, wishing he was not right. “I’ve missed your bluntness, Guyan.”

He dipped his chin. “Happy to serve, Cousin.”

When we finally left the Dining Hall, more than half the night had passed. Callista was so tired that I felt it. My mind worried over the decisions I’d weighed all night—too much to say anything while we walked back.

Once I closed the bedroom door behind us, Callista turned on me. She planted her hands on her hips and said, “What’s bothering you? Is it that I danced with other elves tonight?”

I chuckled. “No, it is a tradition for heads of noble households to dance with the queen. The way we presented you as my equal opened the invitations. ”

“Then what is it?” She tapped the middle of my chest with a finger. “I can feel your anxiety.”

“What?” That was impossible. The mistek bond only extended one way.

She shrugged. “I can feel stress coming from you. At first I thought I was imagining it, but—” She rubbed her heart. “I can feel it right here, like a wave coming from your direction.”

“Can you… feel… anything else from me?”

She tipped her head. “Maybe? I thought I felt you enjoying our dance, but I had so many emotions myself that I could have been projecting them on you.”

My heart stuttered. How was that possible? “Anything else?”

She glanced at the floor but then raised her eyes to mine. “Maybe I felt a… a tenderness threaded through passion when you sang to me?”

“You shouldn’t feel anything from me. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not how mistek bonds work.”

“Could… could we have changed it somehow?” she asked hesitantly.

“I don’t know.” I took her hands. “Regardless, there is something I need to say. To do. And I need to do it and say it before I overthink it and lose the nerve.”

“Go on, then.”

I squeezed her hands. “Callista, we agreed to keep the mistek bond so that I would know if you were in danger, because we couldn’t free you properly. But if your brother has been waiting for you, just outside the border, this entire time… it would be wrong of me to keep you here. I… I think we should break the bond tonight, and I’ll fly you to your brother tomorrow. He can open the barrier for you.”

Hurt. Overwhelming sadness rushed through the bond, choking me. I had said the right thing. It was the only just and kind way to handle this information. It tore my own heart in pieces, but it was supposed to heal hers. Somehow, though, it had hurt her emotions more than anything else I could remember.

“I… I thought you wanted me here,” she whispered.

“I do.” I tightened my hold around her hands. “I want you more than anything else I’ve ever wanted in my life. But it’s not right to ask you to accept me when you’re already bound to me in an agreement you made based in fear. I…”

The words on the tip of my tongue would make me appear weak, more pathetic than anything else she’d seen yet, but…

But she deserved the truth. “If I had the power to free you, but I kept you, bound one moment by a mistek bond you didn’t want and then the next by a marriage bond you thought you did, I will always wonder if you really chose me. Was it really a choice to come here when your brother’s death was the alternative? Was it even a choice to keep the mistek bond when your own life was threatened by its removal?”

“Of course it was a choice!” She whispered, but her words rushed in urgency. “I could have chosen to allow Alastor to die. I could have chosen my own freedom. I picked—”

“You picked one terrifying thing because you thought the alternative was even more terrifying.” I managed to get all the words out without gagging on them. “You said so yourself. How can I live with myself if I know you chose me when you considered me terrible?”

“Maybe it was terrifying when I chose it. That doesn’t mean it’s terrible now.”

“Or maybe—” The thought burned a hole in my heart as I said it, but the truth demanded my admission. “Maybe you just became so accustomed to the terrible that the familiarity of it blinded you to its horrors.”

“So that’s it?” she spit out. “You decide that my leaving is better for me, and I have no choice?”

“No,” I whispered. “It’s always your choice. I will never force your decision again. I will plead with you to see the logic in leaving a kingdom that you were coerced to enter. And your brother. Do you truly think he will believe anyone if a messenger comes to tell him you are happy? Are you really satisfied with him spending the rest of his life feeling guilty over your fate? If nothing else, perhaps you’ll do it to give him peace.”

Her eyes glossed over. “I thought we were finding peace together.”

My eyes burned. “You’ve brought me more peace than I ever thought existed. It wouldn’t be fair to keep you caged after you’ve done so much for me.” My voice caught. “A firehawk needs to be free.”

She blinked a few times, dropped my hands, and spun away from me.

“Callista—”

She froze, but did not turn around.

“May I… touch your back? To break the mistek bond?”

“Yes.” She did not look at me.

I lifted my hand to her back, but paused right before I touched it, staring at my own fingers. It was the hand of a monster, perhaps in elf form, but this was the hand that had made the talisman that killed her mother. This was the hand that had brought pain and fear to so many in the name of justice and safety.

I settled my fingertips between her shoulder blades. At least now, this monster was doing something right. I could not love her in a cage when the key dangled in front of us. I could not ask her to pick me over her brother.

I bowed my head and wrapped my magic around the mistek bond. The cursed magic was easy to find—it had been alerting me to Callista’s feelings for months. I snapped it, ripped it right in half, before I could change my mind. The straggling remnants of the magic dissolved, separating us, and leaving a void where I’d grown used to feeling her emotions.

I missed it already.

But it had been wrong. I was, perhaps, even more of a beast for missing a presence that I had forced to be near me.

“I will stay with you,” I whispered, “all night. You will be safe. In the morning, I’ll shift outside so that I can take you to the border.”

Her head jerked down in a rough nod, and she walked away, leaving me more alone than I’d ever thought possible.

“Callista—” I didn’t have any words for what I felt, and what I felt was not fair to put on her shoulders.

But she stopped. I had to say something. “I… I’m sorry.”

She nodded again and ran to the washroom. Literally ran.

I still felt the sorrow in her heart, like a phantom memory reminding me how comfortable I’d grown with feeling her emotions through the bond.