Page 12

Lach

I had outlived nearly every soul marked by the Wild Hunt. I was still breathing despite walking into the territory of two other courts without an invitation. But whatever fortune had kept me alive this long wanted no part of Cate ’ s anger.

“Let’s talk.” I pointed to a nearby chair, offering her my most tempting smile. “Sit.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not a dog.”

At least things still felt familiar between us.

Cate squatted to grab her dress, nearly tripping as she slipped it on. And now she was putting clothes on—the last thing I wanted after being torn apart for nearly a week. She continued to pace the room as she zipped it. I knew better than to stop her. Her spirit was what I loved most about her. It also made her slightly terrifying, and right now, she looked very…spirited.

She paused next to the window and began examining her wrist. Finally, she threw her hands up. “I don’t have one. Is this a…joke?”

She stumbled over the final word like she’d planned to say something else, and I flinched. Maybe it was the bond between us—the bond she was now questioning—but I knew what she’d intended to say.

Was it a trick? Was I toying with her?

I waited for the anger to come, for the red-hot fury that always blazed when someone questioned my integrity. But this wasn’t someone . It was Cate, and if anyone had the right to question me about anything—from the weather to my intentions—it was my mate. Instead, a heaviness crushed my chest, like the weight of every problem I’d been ignoring had been suddenly deposited on my shoulders.

“Take off your ring,” I said in a quiet voice.

She needed to know the truth. Not that the truth was going to win me any favors, especially when she realized everything I had kept from her. But if she was going to be pissed at me, she might as well get it all out in one go. Having the fight was the first step in making my mistakes up to her. Potentially, jewelry and flowers would have to get involved, too.

She blinked a few times before shaking her head like she was experiencing a glitch. “I c-c-can’t.”

“Can’t?” I frowned, pushing to my feet and moving toward her.

Red stained her cheeks as I approached, her teeth sinking into her lower lip as her gaze swept down my body. The attention provoked my own blood to rush to the spot. Not my intention but impossible to prevent. She turned her focus out the window, her blush deepening. “Will you put something on? I can’t think.”

I cursed under my breath as I swiped my boxers off the floor. That was the other reason for holding off on this serious conversation: no one believed in mates anymore. Probably because nobody knew a mated pair. But they’d existed once, gifting the fae lexicon with phrases such as “fuck like mates” and “breed like mates.” Slang that still existed today. Although humans had changed “mates” to “bunnies,” which raised some serious concerns, if you asked me. But the birds and bees were roughly the same. Newly mated pairs wanted to fuck. A lot. It was an impulse that was hard to control. Even now, some primitive part of me bellowed to throw her over my shoulder and deliver orgasms until she forgot her own name. I’d hoped to get some of it out of my system before it was time for this conversation.

That might have been a mistake. Just another one to add to my incredibly long list of things to atone for. I needed to start writing shit down.

“Are you trying to think of an excuse?” she asked.

Looking up, I realized she was staring at my moving tattoos. I could usually keep them in check, but with Cate around, they were the bane of my existence. She could always tell when I was thinking. “No.” I shook my head. “Just deciding where to start.”

Probably not with the fact that we were mates. That might be too big of a shock. It was better to work our way there slowly—one of the reasons that I’d latched on to married when she brought up Oberon handfasting her. Incidentally, another good reason to kill him. Slowly. But married seemed less intimidating news than mated .

I might have been wrong about that, too. But now that I had her back, I would do anything to keep her.

She crossed her arms over her chest, raising her chin as she prepared to give an order, but her lower lip quivered. “Tell me about the ring.” Her interest surprised me, until she added, “You used it to break the bargain.”

“Yes.” So she remembered that, despite the bloody chaos of MacAlister’s final moments. I took another concerned step toward her. “What do you mean that you can’t take it off? Did you try?”

I’d told her not to—warned her. Of course, she’d done the exact opposite. I loved her tenacity, but it was going to kill me.

“No way,” she said firmly, drawing a deep breath. “You’re answering the questions, and I have a lot of them.” As her eyes skimmed my bare chest, the redness on her cheeks blossomed again and she looked away. “I think something is wrong with me.”

It was going to be a long night.

“Maybe we should head toward the Avalon before we get caught trespassing.” She gestured toward the exit sign glowing over the nearest door. “Or at least get outside where I can’t…”

“Jump my bones?” I finished.

“Believe it or not, I have some self-control.” The way her throat bobbed suggested otherwise.

“Not,” I said with a sigh. Keeping the truth from her was getting us nowhere. I took a deep breath. “You don’t have any self-control because of the mating bond.”

Her eyes widened, and she took a shaky step backward, bumping into the wall. She braced herself against it as she continued to stare at me. Her heart rate sped up through the bond we shared. “Mating?” she said in a strangled voice. “You said we were married.”

“It’s kinda the same thing.” It was not remotely the same thing. I felt Cate in every atom of my being. She was as fundamental a part of me as the blood in my veins, my bones, my flesh. Every moment I wasn’t touching her was agony. Her taste lingered in my mouth. I craved her in a way that was so primal, I couldn’t remember a time I didn’t feel this way. She was my beginning and my end and every breath in between.

As though she could sense the lie, she pointed a finger at me. “Get dressed. We need to really talk.”

She grabbed my coat off the floor and marched out of the reading room. I threw the rest of my clothes on and followed, not bothering with buttons.

Cate was waiting on the large front porch, her attention focused on the lawn. It was warm for late October, even in New Orleans, but she clutched the jacket closed. She didn’t bother to look at me as I stepped out of the library.

Fog shrouded the avenue as we started on what was bound to be a very long walk home; even the moon seemed to flee behind the protection of a bank of clouds. The street was quiet, guarded by ancient oaks whose branches draped over the pavement in a protective canopy. Not a single light shone from the old, weathered mansions that lined the block as though every soul in New Orleans wanted to stay out of this conversation. But the air was heavy, damp with the smell of earth and autumnal decay as we made our way between patches of light cast by the iron streetlamps.

Cate paused at a broken bit of pavement and slipped off her impractical shoes. “Start. Explaining. Now.”

I decided it was best to begin with the basics and then prime her for the bombshell. “To the fae, handfasting shows intention to be married. It allows the couple a year and a day to decide if they’re right for each other.”

“I was at Ciara’s handfasting,” she reminded me. “So, this thing between us can be broken?”

The words were a knife to my heart. She had a right to ask questions, to be upset, to reject the bond if she so chose. But fuck…I’d rather take a bullet than consider that possibility. “Not broken, but you can reject it.”

“What do you mean that it can’t be broken?” She shook her head. “What happened to the trial marriage? How did this even happen?” Questions flooded from her, her voice pitching higher with each one.

“Do you remember the night we finally went to bed together?” Why the fuck did I feel embarrassed asking that? I pushed past it when she nodded and forced myself to continue. “And I tied you up?”

Time to rip off the bandage.

Her mouth fell open. “That? It wasn’t a handfasting.”

“I guess it was.” I lifted my hand to show her the mark of the mating bond again. “And the magic took.”

“It was just sex,” she blurted out.

I winced, each word stabbing me through the heart.

“And yet…” She might even be pleased that it was knocking me down a few pegs—if she could see past whatever homicidal fantasies she was currently entertaining. This whole situation was a lesson in humility. I deserved this. A punishment for how I’d lied and tricked her when we first met.

She remained silent for a full minute—the longest one of my life. “Did you do it on purpose?”

My pace faltered as I bit back a response I knew I would regret. Mating had been the furthest thing from my mind that night, even though I’d already fallen in love with her. The universe didn’t deliver gifts like mates to men like me.

“If you did, you can tell me,” she added. “I just want to know.”

The quiet in her voice affected me more than if she’d screamed it. Part of me wished that she would. Apparently, there was something worse than having my integrity questioned. It was knowing I’d disappointed her.

“I didn’t.” A breeze tossed my hair, the wind carrying us toward an uncertain future. “I don’t have any proof. All I have is my word.”

Her gaze fixed on me, something unreadable moving behind her eyes. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

She took another deep breath. “I believe you.”

“You do?” It spilled out of me. To my relief, she laughed. Not a true laugh. Tension laced this one, but it was a start.

“I was there.” She smiled as if recalling the memory. “We weren’t thinking clearly.”

My eyebrows shot up. “I guess not.”

“I mean, we were just…going at it.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Is it a bad sign that we’re better at fighting than talking?”

“We’ll get better at talking.” I took a step toward her, battling my instinct to reach out and take her into my arms, even as I eyed a sturdy-looking oak tree. There was no one around, and already my need for her was rising again.

“Because we’re stuck together?” The question snuffed my forming plans to make love to her there.

“You aren’t stuck with me.” Something twisted in my guts, like the words poised on my tongue were actual poison. “Just because magic sealed the bond doesn’t take away your choice in the matter. If you don’t wish to be mates, I’ll respect that.”

And then I would walk straight out of New Orleans so Goemon could put a bullet in my brain.

“Can I…think about it?” She chewed on her lower lip.

Was that a test or an opportunity? Probably best to view it as the latter. Because I couldn’t give up. Not on her. Not on us. I would never force her to accept the bond, but death would be a mercy if she did. The idea of walking around for the rest of my life with half of my soul…

“Take all the time you need.” She deserved that much, even if it nearly killed me to consider the possibility that she might reject me.

But her face was distant as she wandered under the glow of a streetlamp. We walked without speaking for another block before she broke the silence. “Now, tell me about my ring. Why did it break our bargain? I offered it to you the night I came to you about Channing. Why didn’t you just take it then?”

Had I thought getting all the bad news out of the way at once was a good idea?

I understood why she needed to know, but there was so much I was still trying to sort out.

We walked beside each other but separate, our footsteps echoing in the night. “It’s not the ring, exactly.” I hesitated. There was a reason I’d never told her the truth. Before MacAlister’s attack, I’d expected the right time to come along one day. He had forced my hand, and after I killed him, when I needed to break that bargain and sever the connection between us, I hadn’t paused to decide how to deliver the news. I’d had more important things to worry about. “First of all, the ring has to be given of your own free will. No one can take it.”

She twisted it around her finger, processing this information, but didn’t remove it. Finally, she nodded. “Oberon said the ring belongs to the Terra Court—to your mother’s court.”

Dread sluiced through me. I never should have arranged the marriage between Ciara and Bain. It was a mistake to invite the other courts into mine.

“Oberon recognized the ring?” The question sounded strangled even to my own ears.

She nodded. “I think that’s why he sent MacAlister after me. He called witches in to break the spell, but they helped me escape instead.”

Pieces began to fall into place. I’d risked her life by keeping it from her—another mistake I wouldn’t make again. That was if she was still talking to me at the end of this. All my poor choices were piling up. “Tell me what you know.”

I listened silently as Cate filled me in on everything that had happened at the Hallow Court: Oberon’s claims about the Otherworld, him taking responsibility for sending MacAlister, his plans to start a war.

“And I tried to look around the estate,” she continued. “He has a spell on everyone who works there so they can’t talk or communicate. And I found a room hidden in the basement. I heard sounds from inside it.” She shivered, her arms wrapping around her middle. “But it was locked, so I couldn’t get in to find out what he’s doing in there.”

That was a small miracle. If Oberon guessed what she was… But he couldn’t have. He had to think it was only the ring. If he had known the truth, he would never have let her go. He would have locked her away behind that door and done gods knew what to her.

I stared at the sidewalk, my head too heavy to face the path before us. More questions. More problems. More burdens to bear.

“It doesn’t make sense.” She shook her head. “Why would my mother have something from the Terra Court? And why can’t I take it off?”

“I’m not sure about that,” I admitted, frowning. “I can’t believe you were going to give it to him after what I told you.” If she had taken that ring off, Oberon would have figured it out.

It was all my fault. I had made that bargain, taking her away from her safe hiding place and thrusting her into my world.

But Cate didn’t shrink from me. “You didn’t tell me shit, Gage. And I would have given it to him to protect the Nether Court, to protect my friends and family.”

And I loved her for it, even though it would have put her in danger. More danger than she could have possibly known. Part of me wished that she had left New Orleans the night of MacAlister’s attack, that she had disappeared and I had never gone after her. Because there was no way to protect her from the truth or the burden it carried—a burden I’d carried alone since the day of my parents’ deaths.

I had to tell her now, and once she knew all of it—once she knew what I’d kept from her—I would let her decide if she wanted to walk away from the Otherworld, from the truth, from me .

I wouldn’t blame her if she did.

“The Terra Court wasn’t like the courts today,” I began as we started across a wide boulevard. “It coexisted with humans.”

“Coexisted? The humans knew?” she asked. “A few of them or all of them?”

“Most of them. It was in the center of the city. There was a special spell on it. Humans who left the city forgot it existed. Those who stayed worked with the fae. They were friends. They even married. It was the Axis Mundi—the central point that tied our worlds together. When it was lost, magic changed. It grew unstable. Every day, it becomes more unpredictable…”

“The darkness shadowing Oberon’s court,” she murmured, stopping in the middle of the street. “If it’s that important, why didn’t you reclaim it?”

I braced myself to deliver another bombshell. Blowback was inevitable. “Because I’m not the heir to the Terra Court.”