Page 16

F OURTEEN

ESTRELLA

A wet, rough tongue dragged over my face. I raised a hand, swatting it away and peeling my eyes open slowly. The motion was too much, forcing me to acknowledge the pain on the right side of my face. I raised a hand to touch it, wincing when my fingers connected with the swollen flesh.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Brann said, shoving his back against the stone as he fought to push it up the hill all over again.

The fires had returned for the day, illuminating the valley and the way the Morrigan and the Cwn Annwn watched me warily, waiting to see if I’d be able to function. I pushed to sit up, shoving Fenrir and his wet tongue away as I gently wiped the slobber from my swollen face.

“Dogs lick their wounds. He thinks he’s taking care of you,” Macha said, pressing her lips together to contain her amused chuckle.

“How sweet,” I said, smiling saccharinely at Fenrir when he dropped to lay at my side. He draped his enormous head over my lap, the weight of it pinning me to the ground as I sat and stared down at him. There was little sign of any injury on him, just a few scratches and some claw marks where the creature had gripped his jaws and fought to crush them. I ran a hand over his snout gently, soothing him as much as he soothed me with his presence.

“Why are you in Tartarus?” I asked, leveling Brann with a glare. He paused, planting his feet so that the stone couldn’t roll back over him.

“I came here intentionally to find someone and convince him to help you,” he paused, seeming to contemplate how much I might already know about the truth of his involvement in my life.

“You mean the same person who appointed you as my guardian within the Lunar Coven? My father?” I asked, wishing Fenrir would move so I could get to my feet.

Now that Brann wasn’t in danger, I needed to smack the shit out of him for his secrets and deception.

Brann blinked, swallowing as it became obvious I wasn’t as ignorant as I’d once been. “My mate and I have had a number of revelations since you died ,” I snapped.

“You do not need to accept the mate bond as fact. You can choose to reject it,” he said, clearly hating what had come of Caldris and I in the time since he’d vanished from my life. “And I’m not dead,” he said, sighing. His chest sagged with it, leaving me to fully realize the level of his exhaustion. “I was pulled out to sea. I’m not human, so the fall wasn’t enough to kill me. There’s a secret entrance to Tartarus, and I was able to perform a ritual to separate my soul from my body so that I could enter. It was the only thing I could think to do to help you. Really help you.”

“Separate your soul from your body,” I said, considering those words. “I walked into Tartarus body and all. Why wouldn’t you have just done the same?”

“Only the main gates will allow a living person to enter in their physical form,” Macha answered, and I glanced over to find Nemain nodding silently. She smiled slightly, seeming to reassure me about the fact that she couldn’t speak.

Reassuring me. When it was my fault she’d lost the ability.

“So you just let me believe you were dead,” I said. Fenrir raised his head as he sensed my growing frustration, dropping it onto the ground beside me. He clearly wasn’t happy about it, the dirt much harder and less comfortable than my thighs.

“I could do nothing to protect you against the Wild Hunt. This was the only way. I never expected to get trapped here in eternal punishment. I didn’t think Khaos would hate me quite that much,” Brann said, the chains that kept him strapped to his stone clanking together. “The only way I can escape it is if I manage to get this stone to the top of the hill by the time the fires fade at night. I’ve tried, every single day.”

“You kept his daughter from him for years longer than agreed upon. Of course he’s furious with you,” Badb snapped, striding up to Brann and only stopping when I got to my feet. “You were supposed to return her when she was reborn into her final life cycle. There’s no telling what kind of damage you have caused by not allowing her to grow in the Cradle of Creation.”

“If Mab ever discovered she existed, she would have killed her. I made sure to get her away from the rest of the coven before the Veil fell. I protected her. I made it so she would never have to know the truth of her purpose and the suffering it would bring,” Brann explained as I strode up to his side.

“At the cost of everyone else!” Macha yelled, her rage palpable in the air. It was something I’d never thought to experience from the Morrigan, who seemed so detached from all things resembling human emotion most of the time. “She would have been safe in the Cradle.”

“If that was the case, they’d have allowed her to stay there in the first place. They chose to send her away. I raised her. Not him ,” Brann snapped, the words filled with a rage I hadn’t ever seen from him. He took a moment to compose himself, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “I can get her out now,” he said, his voice going desolate at the thought of me being in this place after all he’d given to try to keep me away. “Out the same way I came in. You don’t have to be here.”

“How is it that you think I came to be here?” I asked, tilting my head to the side as I studied the man I’d believed to be my brother. “I just happened to wander into the cove?”

He swallowed as I approached, his eyes shuddering against the judgment I cast upon him. Imelda had spoken of Brander with respect whenever she was willing to speak of him at all, unable to believe the crime he’d committed against his own people and the vows they’d made to return Fallon and me when the time came. “You escaped Mab. The Fates guided you here to serve their agenda.”

“Mab sent me here herself. She doesn’t have the slightest clue who I am aside from the fact that I somehow have the power of the Primordials at my disposal. I’m to collect a snake from the crown of Medusa and return it to her, or she will kill my mate as punishment,” I answered, watching as he winced.

“Then let him die,” Brann said, the hollowness of the words shocking me. He didn’t care for the pain that would cause me, completely ignoring the fact that I would likely be unable to continue on without him.

“Let him die?” I asked. For someone who’d lived alongside the Fae for centuries, he was a fool to the truth of the bond.

“If Mab has him, it would be a mercy,” he said, his gaze sliding to the side. He couldn’t be bothered to look at me, to witness the devastation his words caused with his lack of care.

I knelt in front of him, drawing my blade from the sheath. “I would burn this world and the next to the ground before I ever lived a day without my mate in it,” I snapped, glaring and grimacing in warning. Fenrir growled behind me, echoing the sentiment with his own rage. He might have belonged to me, been my familiar, but he’d been at Caldris’s side for centuries before that.

Over my fucking dead body.

“Estrella,” Brann warned, his gaze dropping to the short sword I held in front of me. He looked at me as if I was something to fear, as if he saw me for the first time, and it shocked me how much I reveled in that moment. All my life, he’d treated me as something to be protected.

Something to contain.

He was my prison.

Never again would I allow someone to make me small.

I shifted my sword to the side, raising it above the last bit connecting his chains to the stone. “If you free him, the Primordial responsible may require you to take his place,” Badb warned, echoing the warning she’d given me earlier.

Brann deserved to be punished for going back on his word, especially when we would never know what his choices might have caused. But he would suffer while he watched the world suffer at Mab’s hands, knowing he’d chosen to protect me against the best interest of everyone else.

I cracked the sharp edge of the blade down upon the chain, severing it entirely. “Let Khaos come and imprison me, then. I’d like to have a word with him,” I said, standing and making my way back to Fenrir. He stood but lowered himself to the ground so that I could ride him, leaving me to collect the sword from the dead creature’s throat. I yanked it free, staring into the hole it had created as Brann grimaced back from the squelching sound of it pulling out of flesh.

I shoved the bloodied blade back into my sheath, swinging a leg over Fenrir’s back and settling in comfortably. Brann would slow us down. I knew that, and yet I couldn’t exactly leave him behind.

Badb stepped up before me, her gaze weighted and heavy. “He wronged you,” she said, her eyes darting over my face. I knew she could see every emotion playing out within me, the hurt, the betrayal, the confusion, the rage.

“He was my brother,” I said with a shrug, downplaying all the ways I fought to understand if I could trust him going forward. I couldn’t decide if he was being honest or continuing to lie, if this was just another twist of reality and a way to attempt to manipulate me back into the cage he wanted for me.

If he’d put me there out of love or some selfish motivation.

“And still, he wronged you. Yet you forgive him enough to free him from his punishment for doing so, anyway, at risk to yourself,” she responded, tilting her head to the side in thought. “You have passed your second trial.”

“No more fucking secrets, Brander,” I said, using his true name to display just how much knowledge I had of him. Of the way he’d used magic to grow at my side, making it seem like he’d been a child growing up with me when he’d really just been using the moon and lunar magic to glamour himself.

“You know who your father is? And still you’re here?” he asked, pushing to his feet.

“I would do anything for my mate,” I said as Fenrir started walking in the direction of the river. “After a lifetime of being lied to, I’d also do just about anything for the truth, and I have a feeling Khaos is the only one who can give it to me,” I said, ignoring the way Brann stepped back from the accusation in those words.

I didn’t allow the guilt of them to sink inside me, telling myself he’d deserved my anger for all the things he’d kept from me over the years.

I was done believing in the value of secrets.