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thirty-six

Trying to think wasn’t working. Trying to understand when I got to this point, how I fell so far so quickly, was going to drive me insane.

I tightened my arms around my legs more. My forehead was numb from resting it against my knees for so long, so I turned my head to the side for a little while.

The silence was only disrupted by the sound of the horses galloping, and the wheels underneath the carriage turning with a weak creaking sound every few minutes. My dad would say they needed a good oiling.

And the thought of seeing my dad again wasn’t making my heart jump as it should have, as it did in the beginning.

A terrifying thought took hold of me— maybe I don’t want to go home.

And I didn’t understand when that had happened and how it happened so fast, either.

We must have been traveling for several minutes, maybe even an hour. I’d sat in a corner and had gathered my knees to my chest hoping to cry and get some release. Hoping to cry and finally have a clear idea of what I was thinking and what was happening and what was going to happen, too.

Instead, the tears wouldn’t come. I was still in some kind of shock, I thought. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Rune really might think he was nothing . If only he could see inside my head just for a minute. If only he could feel how painful every beating of my heart was right now.

“I’m sorry, Wildcat.”

At first, I thought I was hearing things.

I froze, raised my head, looked around the carriage as if I was expecting to find Rune had materialized in the red seats out of thin air.

Nobody was there.

Great. Now I’ve lost my mind for real.

And I was going to leave it at that, when…

“That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

Again, that same voice. Rune’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from inside the carriage.

It was coming from above it.

I looked up at the window in the ceiling but only saw the sky outside—the dark sky. We must have gone deeper into Blackwater territory because the sunlight didn’t reach here.

My body froze and a part of me still insisted that it wasn’t real, that voice, that I was just making it up because I was so damn heartbroken—and surprised to be so.

I waited, heart in my throat, for what felt like hours.

“Won’t you talk to me?”

A small white light slipped through the glass of the window and became brighter, growing wings while I watched with my mouth open. A moment later, my little bird illuminated every inch of the carriage as it floated down and landed right on my forearm.

“Hey, little guy,” I whispered, and the tears decided that they wanted to come now. They pricked the back of my eyes with urgency, but I blinked fast and focused on the bird. As much as I could have used the release, there was no more time left to cry.

Taking in a deep breath, I stood up and put my feet on the edges of the seats to reach the window in the ceiling. It had been a tiny bit open just at the edge, so I pushed it to the side all the way.

Raising on my tiptoes, I slipped my head outside, still half certain that I’d just heard things, but…

Rune was lying on the rooftop of the carriage on his back, his head turned to me.

Surreal.

“What…what the hell are you doing up here, Rune?!” I breathed as the wind blew against my face.

Raja was in the front with the reins of her black horses in her hands, guiding them down a very narrow pathway between dark trees. The lake was still there in the distance, glistening under the sunlight that only grazed a little bit of the sky over it. Mountains on the left and trees everywhere around us, and the wind blew my hair in my face, but I didn’t dare let go of the window frame to push it away.

“I’m trying to apologize,” said Rune, and he reached out his hand to move my hair behind my ear slowly, like he was giving me time to move away from his touch.

Just like that, everything just…changed.

Yes, I was still pissed, but suddenly nothing was as gloomy as it had been a second ago. I had no idea what the hell kind of magic this guy did to me, but he was talking, and he was apologizing, and I just didn’t care.

I was that screwed.

My eyes closed and I breathed in deeply, told myself that if Rune was lying up here, it meant it was safe. The rooftop of the carriage was made out of thick dark wood and there was this metal extension all around the edges like a railing where Rune was holding on. He wasn’t going to fall, and the carriage wasn’t going all that fast. It was safe.

And we were here now, weren’t we?

“For being a dick?” I said and regretted it the next second.

I didn’t want to do this. God, I didn’t want to do this at all.

Rune smiled a little. “Pretty much, yes. You didn’t deserve that. I’m sorry.”

There were a lot of things I could think to say right now, but I shook my head because his words were like fresh water for my burning soul.

“I don’t want to fight, Rune.” I didn’t want to even argue about anything. Not now.

He leaned a little closer, touched my cheek again, pushed more of my hair away. “Me, neither.” His finger traced my jawline, my lips. “But I meant what I said earlier. This journey is as good as over.”

Stabs at my heart. “Exactly. I want to be close to you while it lasts. I don’t want to fight.”

Rune leaned over all the way until I could see the blue of his eyes from the light of the bird over our heads. “You’re too good for me, you know that? For this entire place.”

Impossible not to smile. “Help me up?”

He did. He sat up on the carriage, and he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me like I weighed nothing. I screamed a little from surprise and even Raja heard me. She turned her head to look at us, but I was on top of a moving carriage, and Rune was gently laying me down next to him, so I didn’t much care about how pissed off she seemed. I cared about breathing in deeply as I looked up at the sky and the stars, held onto one of the railings on my left, and tried to convince my heart to slow down its beating.

Meanwhile, Rune turned on his side and put an arm around my waist, hiding his face in my hair, as comfortable as if we were lying on a bed.

My eyes closed. I focused on the heat of him. Rune was here. Even if I was going to fall off, he’d never let me. He’d catch me. He always did.

For a while, we just lay there near each other, touching and breathing and feeling one another’s bodies. Incredible how fast my mind had shifted from that chaotic mess it had been in the carriage. Now it was as calm as the lake in the distance.

“I was six when I got banished,” Rune eventually whispered in my ear. “My powers were sealed, and they took me to where they take all those who suffer the same fate—to die in a part of the Neutral Lands where anything goes. It’s a piece of land that has no name, and it belongs to no one because it was cursed centuries ago. Nothing grows on it, and no magic works properly, and everybody does pretty much whatever they want there. They eat whoever they want. Nobody lasts long in that place.”

My heart fell on her face. What in the actual fuck? “They put you there when you were six ?!”

“Yes,” Rune said. “I stayed there until I was eight.”

“My God, Rune.” I dug my fingers into his forearm because fuck!

“It was okay. I knew how to survive. I was fine,” he said, but that was bullshit. He had been six years old!

“But you were just a kid. Who could possibly be so cruel as to take a kid to a cursed land where he could be eaten ?!” That was far more cruel than anything I’d ever heard before.

“The Midnight King,” Rune simply said. “He banished me. And when I was eight, The Seelie Queen brought Lyall to see the no man’s land, to know it, to understand what it was and what it meant. She took educating him very seriously. Wanted him to see everything that existed in Verenthia since he was a child, too.”

I leaned my head to the side to look at him. “And?”

“And Lyall saw me sharpening a piece of stick atop a cave. Asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was building a trap for wild rabbits that ran around on the other side near the border with Neutral Lands. He found it fascinating that I’d built traps like that with nothing but dead pieces of wood and rocks, and he insisted I come back to the Seelie Court to teach him how.”

My eyes closed and those tears threatened to spill out of me again. Suddenly I wanted to get to the prince right this moment and hug the shit out of him. Thank him with all my heart for this.

“The Queen refused at first. When a fae gets banished, he’s…well, not seen as equal anymore, but as less. Much less.”

This, I couldn’t even imagine. Who could ever think of Rune as less ?

No wonder he thought he was nothing if that’s what he had been taught since he was six years old.

My God, people—and apparently fae, too—were really heartless.

“But Lyall insisted. Said he would stay with me right there if he couldn’t take me back, and the Queen has always had a soft spot for her only son. She eventually agreed, so I came back with them. I’ve remained in the Seelie Court ever since.”

Slowly, I let go of the railing and I touched his soft cheek, looked into his eyes. I leaned in and kissed him gently, tried to tell him what I couldn’t with words.

“I am so glad Lyall was born,” I ended up whispering—not because of me , but because of him.

Rune chuckled, warming me all the way to my toes.

Just like that, I was smiling.

“Me, too,” he said, giving me another kiss. “He’s a ruthless bastard when he wants to be, and the years have changed him, but I believe there’s good in him. I believe he’s a good man.”

“Then I believe it, too,” I said without hesitation. “You’re ruthless, too, though.”

“I am?”

“Well, yes. The way you killed those incubi was pretty ruthless,” I muttered because I hadn’t forgotten, even if I hadn’t really let myself think about it at all.

“I did,” Rune said, and there was no remorse anywhere on him, no hint of regret.

“Why? You didn’t have to, Rune. You could have just locked them up.” Instead, he’d torn them to pieces while keeping me shielded from all of it with his shadows.

“I could have, but I heard them speaking when you were in the bathroom. One of them was hoping I’d leave you in the cage so he could come down when I went to talk to Lorei.” His thumb trailed my bottom lip. “He wasn’t going to live, Wildcat. None of them were.”

My eyes closed and I tried to feel something, tried to be mad, or to stick to the belief that it had been wrong, but…

Then I imagined, just for a split second, that he had gone back upstairs, that those three incubi had come down to the cage. Nobody would have heard me screaming. I’d have probably done whatever they wanted me to do under the influence of their magic. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

So, in the end, I couldn’t stay mad at all. “I wish you didn’t have to get your hands dirty at all,” I whispered.

“It’s not the first time I’ve killed, and it won’t be the last,” Rune said, making my heart jump again.

“Who? Who have you killed before?”

“People who deserved it,” he calmly said. “I hate bullies, too. The fae Courts are infested with them.”

“Fuck, Rune,” I said, at a loss for better words.

“In Verenthia, it’s kill or be killed, Wildcat. And I’m not planning to die yet,” he said.

I closed my eyes and sighed deeply.

“Does that bother you?”

Did it?

“I don’t know—let’s see. Does it bother me that you killed some men who were planning to rape me? No, it doesn’t, if I’m being honest. Does it bother me that you killed people who…wanted to kill you first? Is that right?”

“Yes. All of them tried,” he said, and he didn’t look happy about it.

I wasn’t either, but… “Then, no, Mr. Moody. It doesn’t bother me a bit.” That was the whole truth, no matter what that made me. “You know what I want to know, though?”

“What’s that?”

“Everything.”

His lips stretched into a smile that made it impossible not to give him yet another kiss. Too perfect. Too kissable.

“ Just everything?” he teased.

“Yes. I want to know about all the creatures of Verenthia and what they can do, so that I don’t end up throwing us in a different place by accident.”

“Maybe you should,” Rune whispered, and my heart squeezed. “But you’re right.”

He let go of the railing and wrapped one arm around me so that my head lay on his shoulder, and his other arm was secured around my waist.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” I said. “This might be the most comfortable place in all the worlds.”

“The rooftop of a moving carriage?” he teased again, and fuck, I loved this mood on him.

I smiled and bit the side of his neck, which then made him growl. “Just your arms.”

He nudged my head up with his chin until his lips met mine. “And you’re the purest, most beautiful thing they’ve ever held.”

My toes curled and I leaned into the kiss, tasted his tongue on mine, and let him bite my lips as long as he liked. He was magic, this man. He really was everything.

“Go ahead, start talking,” I whispered when he stopped kissing me for a moment. I’d have loved nothing more than to keep going until the end of forever, but I really needed to know more about this place, and we needed to be aware of our surroundings while lying on the rooftop of a carriage. The rest would come a little later.