“People kept telling us that we’d move on, that eventually it would stop hurting, that maybe my parents should have another child. It was all bullshit, Haley. You don’t move on from something like that. You don’t stop hurting. I was a fucking ghost, and my parents?” I let out a shuddering breath. “They were never the same after that. My father practically went insane—caused a lot of trouble for the royals of Autumnshire, who refused to help search for my brother and eventually banished our family to the earthly realm. For years, my mother would call me by Evander’s name, and I didn’t know if it was because she’d simply confused us, or because she believed if she said it enough times, the fates would see fit to return him. Sometimes I wondered if she wished… if she wished I’d been taken instead.” My throat closed around ancient pain, the edges of it as sharp as they were the first night I realized Evander was truly gone—was truly never coming back to us. “I didn’t blame her. I used to wish for it, too, because then at least my mother’s suffering would end and Evander would be okay.”
“Elian, no,” she said softly, her voice full of sympathy, but she could no more talk me out of those old beliefs than I could talk myself out of them.
“As I got older,” I continued, because if I stopped now I’d fucking shatter, and I needed to hold on long enough to tell her the rest, to get us back to that night in Blackmoon Bay so I could make her understand, so I could ease her suffering even just afraction—a thing I was never able to do for my family. “I just… I assumed he was dead. How else could we go so many long, long years without hearing a word about his whereabouts? If he were still alive, I’d reasoned, he would’ve been an adult at some point, and he would’ve found a way to get in touch. To get back to us. So I tried, Haley. I tried to do what everyone said and move on with my life as best I could.”
“But you couldn’t,” she said softly. “That’s not how it works.”
“No. It isn’t. I was ready to give up, sparrow, I really was. But then…” A smile touched my lips at the memory, and I finally found the courage to look at her again.
She was sitting upright in bed, cheeks pink, her eyes bright despite the tears. “Then what?”
“Then I spilled coffee on some crazy, green-eyed witch on a pier in Blackmoon Bay, and she made me feel like life might just be worth living after all.”
She smiled at the memory, too. It would always be a good one, our first meeting. Me spilling that coffee. Her pushing me into the Bay. Everything that had come after.
“You were my light, sparrow. My reason. And no, it’s not fucking fair to put that on a person. But it’s true. As true now as it ever was, and I shouldn’t even tell you that, because even that confession feels like another burden I’m laying on you, but I don’t want to lie anymore. Not to you. Not about us. See, the pain of losing my brother never went away. Never even faded. But being with you… I felt happy in ways I didn’t think I ever would, and it just… You helped me learn to live with that loss. To believe that it was okay to keep both things in my heart—joyandanguish. Loveandloss.”
Haley nodded. Of course she understood.
When you lose someone you love, you’re never the same again. No matter how many years pass, no matter how many different ways you might find love with someone else—even in friendship—your heart never quite beats the same way after a loss like that.
Yet Haley was still alive, still shining like a bright beacon even after I’d put her through the worst kind of loss. No, she hadn’t gotten through it unscathed—if she had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
But somehow, she’d learned to live with both, just as I had.
“Wewerehappy, weren’t we?” she whispered, fresh tears slipping free. “I didn’t imagine it?”
“Sparrow, I was never happier than I was all those nights I spent in your arms. Our life together was… It was everything. If you take one thing from this story, one truth, please let it be that.” I moved over to the bed, sitting beside her so I could take her hand. “But one night, I got word from some of the fae in Blackmoon Bay—there’d been rumors from a pureblood Midnighter they knew, a smuggler who claimed that a guy fitting the description of my brother was spotted in Midnight. That he was taken from his home and enslaved as a child, passed around among the noble dark fae of Midnight. Then, somehow, he’d ended up in the dungeons after assassinating half the royal guard and making a play for Keradoc. They were going to execute him, but he escaped.”
Her eyes widened, a soft gasp slipping from her lips—not just from the news about Evander, but from the timing. I could practically see the wheels spinning behind her eyes. “When… when did you hear this?”
I tightened my hold on her hand. “Five years ago, sparrow. The last night I saw you in the Bay.”
19
ELIAN
Ifelt the change wash over her as the realization took hold, rooting in her heart like a poisonous seed that bloomed with a hundred new impossible questions, a hundred new impossible answers.
“Iknewthe story about Evander was true,” I said, sparing her the pain of having to ask me to go on. “I felt it in my heart, like our connection had just reignited after all those years. I could practically feel him calling out to me, calling for my help. Calling for me to come and find him. I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I just… I spent one last night with you, then I left Blackmoon Bay and traveled to the royal fae court in Summer’s Vale—my one-way ticket to Midnight.”
“How? How was that your ticket?”
“The royal family of Summer’s Vale used to be close with ours, but they turned their backs on us after Evander’s kidnapping. Eventually, my parents discovered that they played a role in getting us booted out of Autumnshire. So yeah, I already had reason enough to want them dead. But this? This was the final nail in that particular coffin.”
“What… what did you do?”
I took a deep breath. Held her gaze so she knew I was speaking the truth, because the story would only get darker and harder to bear from here on out.
“I assassinated the two crown princes in cold blood, right in the middle of a festival. Hundreds of witnesses. A crime so heinous, there could only be one sentence.”
“Banishment to Midnight.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, but she didn’t release my hand. “You left me. You murdered two innocent fae. All so you could save your brother.”
“Save him? No. I knew if Evander was really here—if he’d been here for that many years, decades, a child slave forged into a bitter killer—there would be no saving him. I just wanted to see him one more time. To let him know that I’d never forgotten him.” I turned away from her, wiping an errant tear from my cheek. “That I nevercouldforget him.”
“Oh, Elian,” she breathed, her voice as broken as mine, lost to this story, to this past. “God, I don’t even know what to say. This is… I’m sorry. I’m really angry with you, and I hate that you left me, and I hate that you killed those fae. And I hate that your brother was stolen from you, and that you had to grow up without him, and know that kind of pain… I can’t… Fuck, Elian. Just… fuck.”
I shifted closer to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her against my chest. “You know, as crazy as it sounds? After all that… I still believed I could find a way back to you. I left you that night because I had some blind, foolish hope that if I only tried hard enough, fought hard enough, I could make it back to you. And then I could tell you about Evander, and I knew you’d understand why I’d had to try, because family was everything to you—your Nona, and—”
