Jack

I n my room, I slid the loose daggers Poppy had brought me into a leather belt around my waist. Poppy was a sweet little elf who had only glanced once at my round ears before making up her mind and welcoming me into their fairy rebellion.

It was the advantage I’d needed all along.

How I’d thought Leo, Grace and I could pull it off on our own, I didn’t know, but learning all Creig’s carefully laid plans over several years, I saw the futility in my efforts.

It was as if fate had brought Sav to me so she could bring me to Creig’s army.

I’d never thrown a dagger in my life, but there was something comforting about the weight of them on my hips. Like I was finally becoming the person I needed to be.

Sav’s beautiful hazel eyes on me in the war room flashed in my mind, making my chest ache.

The cut she left behind wasn’t clean—it tore every time I breathed.

Every memory of her felt like salt rubbed into a wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding.

None of it had been real. The stinging truth of her words sliced so deep I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover.

But I couldn’t reconcile her words with all the heated looks she’d given me or the electricity that sparked between us when we were near each other.

The memory of her warmth pressed into my side, beneath that tree, as she shared stories of her life in Faerie, and I rubbed her aching feet, mesmerized by the twinkle in her eyes, was burned into my soul.

All an act? No one was that good of an actor. No one could fake wanting me that well. Except maybe she had.

A knock sounded at the door, and I looked up. “Come in.”

The man in tweed, Lord Hawthorn, stepped in, glancing around before closing the door behind him. There was something especially other about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it. He looked more human than most of the folk I’d met, but his presence dripped with other worldliness.

Standing eye to eye, he was as tall as I was, maybe taller.

“Yes?”

“I’ve come to warn you—”

“I know Sav is only using me.” I cut him off.

He quirked a brow, lips tugging up at the corners. “I will take your word for it, but I was referring to your father.”

“What about him?” I slid another dagger in the belt at my hips.

Was six enough? There was room for several more, but how many daggers did a person need in a battle?

Fake battle, if things went the way we planned.

I’d only ever fought hand to hand in sparring sessions and I’d actively avoided learning to use guns.

Strangely, I didn’t have the same twinge of panic about harming Dane as I did with most other living things.

“He’s working with ISHFA.”

My hand hovered over another blade, and I looked up. “Explain.”

Lord Hawthorn tucked his hand into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone.

“Let me show you.”

I had never seen a fairy with a phone before. My mouth fell open as he swiped through images until he stopped on one of Dane leaning close to Janet Glassdon, president of ISHFA. The next picture on the phone was of Janet handing my father an envelope.

While I trusted these fairies with the plan to save the creatures Dane had kidnapped, I hadn’t been prepared to share more of my secrets with them.

Not yet. That they already knew this one made me wary.

What would they do with the information?

Could I trust them with my bigger plan? I wasn’t sure yet.

“So they know each other. New York isn’t as big a city as you think. ”

He swiped again and this time my father was entering ISHFA headquarters, a baseball cap pulled low over his head.

“Each time your father led an attack on the fae, he met with Janet either before—like in the photo above, with the envelope—or after, like in the last photo. We’ve traced large deposits to his accounts that we believe directly correlate to his attacks.”

Leo had come to the same conclusion when he followed the money trail. Hearing it confirmed from this fairy had something sinking in my gut. I’d wanted it to be a lie. With ISHFA backing Dane, it would be a lot harder to take him down.

When Lord Hawthorn left, I sank into a chair. There was no love lost between me and my father, but his single-minded focus had always been centered on one thing. Avenging my mother.

My memories of her had never aligned with Dane’s, though.

She hated drugs, medicine of any kind. Why would she have begun taking Xcess?

The drug had surfaced several years before our realms collided, but no one knew where it had come from.

It wasn’t until fairies revealed themselves that we learned of its origin.

Dane vowed that day to end the creatures who had been responsible for the drug that ultimately killed her.

When I was younger, I’d accepted everything my father told me as fact.

I’d believed that my whole life. But that strange vision on the path wouldn’t leave me—her flinching back, the gleam of that rusted pipe. The way his eyes looked. Cold; not broken.

Every day loved ones of those who had become addicted to Xcess arrived at AFF headquarters and though all their stories were unique, they all ended the same. The person became so dependent on the drug, they would rather die than go another day without it.

It cured illness, depression, and alcoholism.

Anything that ailed you could be healed with Xcess.

I knew the awful truth—only because my father had devoted himself to learning what it was and how it had fallen into my mother’s hands.

It was made using fairy blood. One drop was enough in the beginning, but like any other drug, eventually you needed more.

Addiction grew until it became too expensive or simply inaccessible.

But unlike many other drugs, there was no recovering from Xcess.

Once you had a taste, you would do anything for it.

It made you feel invincible when it tapped into powers humans never knew they had, granting enhanced senses and control over the elements for a short time.

The pain of being utterly human, the absence of all that power was just too much.

You would die trying to find that missing piece of yourself again.

None of it fit. Not the symptoms. Not the timeline. Not the truth I’d been fed.

But the alternative, this new idea tumbling around in my mind, didn’t align with it either.

Not to mention, my father would never raise a hand against my mother.

Not that he wasn’t capable of acts of violence.

I had seen him enraged to the point of murder.

But Aconite Clyde was my father’s whole world.

Before she died, I couldn’t remember a time he wasn’t smiling, laughing, doting on her.

My mother’s death had sent me into a spiral that had taken years to come out of, but it had broken my father. The man who loved her was gone. And maybe he’d been gone a lot longer than I wanted to admit. If Dane had lied about her death, what else had he lied about?