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“Then I died for a good cause.” I didn’t miss a beat. “Why do you care? You wouldn’t remember our shared dreams in real life. You wouldn’t miss me.”
“Don’t downplay your importance. You matter to me, and I would feel your absence every time I closed my eyes and you weren’t there calling for me to find you. I would know something was missing, that you were missing, even if it was only in my dream.” He paced back and forth across my small room. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Over the years I wondered about this man and if there was a reason he was always lurking. At one point, I had convinced myself that he was not a real man. That he didn’t exist anywhere but in my broken mind. He was someone my lonely, confused mind made up. It hadn’t occurred to me that he was a real man or that I would ever meet him, but now that I had seen him, I couldn’t process that he was real. I sat in the middle of my bed as he paced once again. He was stressed out, but I didn’t understand why.
“I’ve seen you fight in your dreams. You’ll do fine.” He sounded like he was reassuring himself more than me.
“I’ll be fine. Besides, if I die then you won’t have to miss your big important meetings anymore,” I joked, but he didn’t laugh.
He swallowed hard as he stared at me.
“Don’t joke about you dying,” he whispered.
?????
Before I could respond, a loud clanging bell woke me from my dream. My eyes darted to the door when a loud commotion rattled it. The bell continued to ring out, and I got dressed quickly, leaving everything I owned in the room except my daggers. I assumed that this was part of the tournament.
When I slipped out the door, the other competitors were shuffling from their sleeping quarters and into the hall where the guards stood. I joined them just as the guard in black walked down the hallway with the most terrifying expression haunting his handsome face.
He was pissed.
His black eyes didn’t spare me a glance as he stormed into the men's sleeping quarters. Peering around I looked for answers as to how this was part of the tournament. Some of the men didn’t seem as confused. Some did. I couldn’t think of any possible reason for him to be this irritated so early in the morning. The answer revealed itself a few moments later, thankfully.
Two guards emerged from the sleeping quarters carrying the body of a dead fae. Someone died. No, someone was killed. Blood stained the white linens he was wrapped in.
It was the first night, and someone had already broken the rules. The guard came out a moment later, and I took a step backward at the sight of him. His golden eyes were solid black, and tendrils of shadows moved from him. They curled close to him in a menacing angry cloud. He could control shadows.
“I will only ask once for the coward to step forward. Who killed Vatlin?” His voice was deeper and darker than I had ever heard before.
A soft murmur rippled through the crowd, but I couldn’t pull my eyes from the guard, mesmerized by the way his shadows moved and tangled around his body.
Had I ever seen anything so terrifyingly beautiful? No.
His cold eyes turned to me with a sneer. I snapped my eyes away from him, wondering if he noticed how much I was staring at him. How much I was admiring the sheer power of him in that moment. There was a commotion somewhere in the crowd behind me before a man was shoved from the group. The fae was young with red hair and freckles, which probably made him look younger than he was.
“You?” the guard said skeptically.
The boy remained mute. No way he killed the fae who was twice his size without making noise.
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you in front of me?” his voice bellowed. “I’m not playing this game. I will start killing you one by one if the true killer doesn’t come out now.”
A faint murmur spread through the crowd assessing the Captain of the king’s guard’s threat. Whispers about the guard spread like fire, saying he would kill us all in less than a second. Others talked about him being a ruthless killer. I glanced behind me to the crowd. Men avoided making eye contact with him like he would kill them with a look.
“It was Tagon!” someone yelled. A fight erupted immediately, shoving me into the black stone wall chin first.
Damn it.
Blood covered my hand as I tried to stop the bleeding, but my curiosity had me turning to watch how this played out. The crowd parted as the Guardsmen walked forward to the two fae fighting. One I assumed was Tagon and the other was whomever called him out. Tagon was smaller than the fae who blamed him for the murder, but he was holding his own in the fight that had erupted. They stopped immediately when shadows erupted around us.
The force of the shadows knocked me back into the wall. Pain radiated down my back, but I didn’t dare move my eyes from the Guardsman with shadow magic.
“Tagon, I presume?” he spoke softly, which only magnified the power he had.
“He’s lying,” he snapped defensively. His brown hair glistened with sweat from the fight. “Kael wants me dead because I’m competition.”
The guard turned towards the other man.
