Cillian didn’t recognize the Fae staring back at him with his own blue-gray eyes.
Chapter Fifteen
“Hands down,” Ainmire said.
Bran blinked tears out of his eyes, head wrenched back, squinting against the light that haloed Ainmire. His fingers caught on the smooth threadsewn through his lips, blood coating his teeth and tongue. He wanted to gag but couldn’t, not if he didn’t want to choke. He swallowed blood, the metal taste saturating his mouth. Ainmire’s eyes narrowed slightly, and the next thing Bran knew, he was being shaken the way someone might scruff and shake an animal out of anger.
Because that’s what the Fae thought he was.
A pet.
Cillian never had, and he was?—
He was?—
Bran dropped his bloody hands to the floor, clawing at the hardwood instead of clawing at his mouth. Pain throbbed through his lips and across his cheeks from the effort of trying to open his mouth. Focusing on the pain was better than focusing on the horror rattling through his brain, the realization of what Cillian was.
The lie of it all.
Unbidden, his gaze went to the spot Cillian had collapsed on thefloor before being dragged out by Etain’s Fae. Cillian had sounded like he was dying from whatever magic Etain had performed. Bran had yelled futilely with his sewn-shut mouth, kept in place by Ainmire’s hand while Etain peeled off Cillian’s skin one strip at a time.
Peeled off his glamour until he’d looked—like a Fae.
Like those Bran had grown up believing were the enemy, except this wasCillian. This was his childhood best friend, his first love and first kiss and first broken heart all rolled into years of memories he’d never been able to let go, haunting him like a ghost. Years of growing up with him in Pelham, where he’d beenhuman.
Mortal.
But when he’d fallen to Etain’s feet, Cillian had looked like all the other Fae in the room with them—an otherworldly, eerie beauty that had been hidden from view gilding his body, blazing blue-gray eyes, and pointed ears.
Bran didn’t want to believe it, but the truth had been peeled open—literally—right before his eyes. Even knowing Etain’s title and the games Fae played, Bran had no doubt what was done was real and not a trick. What use would they have for tricking him? Bran was one witch, the last in the Gallagher coven, guarding some backwater way into the wyrding. His wasn’t a coven with ties to the Council of Witches; he didn’t have any connections that would be of note. There should be no reason he shouldn’t be dead, save for one.
Cillian.
Bran swallowed more blood, flinching from Ainmire’s grip or Etain’s attention; he figured it didn’t matter which. Not while he was on his knees, collared and bowing to the whims of whatever the Fae wanted.
All the teachings he had learned over the years, all the warnings he’d grown up with, had said to never trust the Fae. That they were the enemy and always would be. If Cillian was Fae, and if Bran was worth his coven’s witchmarks tattooed on his body, he’d find a way to escape and leave Cillian behind, exactly how Cillian kept asking him to. He’d leave and hope Jupiter found him so he could track down Aisling.
But this was Cillian, and despite the betrayal, Bran couldn’t leave him here to some unknown fate.
Every other witch would, Bran knew.
Etain walked over to him, looking down her nose at where Bran knelt. He stared up at her through the tears and the pain. If this was the only way he could be defiant—to look them in the eye—then he would. His heart rate felt too fast, chest aching with the need to gasp for air and being denied. He tongued at the thread pierced through his lips, no gap between them.
“If you wish to keep Cillian in check, the pet needs to live,” Ainmire said in a bored voice.
Etain waved off his words. “He has no memory of us, which means he has no memory of his power. As for this one, you give it too much liberty.”
“As you deduced, they care for each other.”
“And I suppose you want it out of revenge for what Cillian did to your face? You still have not forgiven him for the scar you carry.”
“If the Dagda allows it, I want Cillian to know what I took from him when I brand his pet with the mark of my House right in front of him.”
Bran tried to still his breathing into something that was less panicky, hating how the Fae talked over him, as if he weren’t worth their time.
As if he were an object to be used and bartered.
Etain hummed, staring at Bran, before dismissing him with an elegant little shrug. “We leave for Murias tomorrow. Your pet may come with us.”
