This was my question, back when I found out Dane had been lying. What did he want withme? Why was he doing this tome?
“I don’t wantyou,” he says casually, like everything he told me since the moment I met him meant absolutely nothing, and like losing it hasn’t affected him at all. “I want what you can give me, and that’s the cure.”
I shake my head. “Anyone on this island can give you the cure. Why did you do this tome?”
“Sure, anyone can, but no one has, despite being here year after year. But then you came along.” He takes a slow step forward, like he’s stalking me, the ferocity in his eyes making goosebumps erupt on my skin. “I thought who better to get it than you? You’re smart, methodical, motivated. Who better to get it for Lyla than her own daughter?”
“You’re using me,” I say, my chest heaving as I take another small pace backward across the bed, but before I can blink, he’scharging at me. His hands slam into the bed on either side of me, his scowling face only a breath from mine.
“I would use anyone to heal her!” he yells, his voice a loud snarl, the volume causing me to stagger back, falling onto my hands behind me. “But when I saw you, searching desperately for an answer, I knew you were the one. I knew you could find it, and the island would help you. It has been years, and it has never helped me, but you? Her daughter? Saving the mother she never knew? That’s what Dawnlin is here for.”
“You came here for her…” I breathe, the weight of the confession hitting me like a blow to the chest.
Dane knew my mother. He knew her enough to try to save her, when he snuck onto the island expecting the cure and cheating the magic. Now the magic has been kept from him for all these years.
“I would do anything for her! She is everything, and he took her away from me!”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re taking about.”
“Of course you don’t. Who would tell you the truth? Surely not him. Not after he stole her. Waltzing into the city and throwing around his royalty, convincing her to leave her life and everything behind. For what? For him?”
My father. He’s talking about my father.
My lips seal shut, and I watch as his eyes become frenzied, as flashes of emotions flicker through them.
“She forgot about me. Forgot about everyone who had been there for her, who loved her. All she could see was him.”
Oh gods.
Was Dane in love with my mother? That is the only explanation that makes sense, how he’s held onto this hope for so long, why he was desperate for the cure when he arrived. Why he would kill for it.
“None of it was real,” I say, more to myself than to him.
“Of course it was all real. Everything is real. The island is real, the magic is real. But you and me? I did what I needed to do to get you here, to make sure you gave her another chance.”
My voice catches in my throat and I can’t say anything, my mind reeling back through everything from before.
Bumping into me at the library.
Telling me about Dawnlin in the tavern.
Assuring me I could trust him.
You’re everything I’ve been waiting for.
He’d been waiting for me the entire time. The Guardian of Dawnlin, trapped in the one place that could heal the woman he loved, the woman that wasn’t his.
And he used me.
“It was too easy. Remmington made sure of that, locking you up and starving you of attention. It was nothing for me to whisper what you wanted to hear, watch you fall even harder with every smile and touch. Every single word was nothing except to convince you to do exactly what I needed you to. You soaked up the love like water in a fucking desert.”
His words slice through me, the truth cutting through me as if he’d held my dagger to my skin, shredding any remaining thread of doubt deep inside me.
It was all a lie. The entire time. He used me, manipulated me, convinced me he loved me.
He doesn’t.
He never wanted me, never cared about me.
