Ignoring my rant, he closes my door with a soft click and leans back against it, arms folded across his chest. “You can’t keep running off like this, Drae. Dodging her just because you can’t deal with your feelings. You ever think about howshefeels? What you’re doing to her?”
I try to hold on to my anger—Jude’s usually a good target for it. But in this case, he’s right, and I don’t have the strength to die on this hill tonight. “I don’t mean to hurt her, Jude. You have to believe that.”
“And yet…”
I don’t respond. Nothing to say, even though he keeps on staring at me like he’s waiting for me to have some kind of epiphany.
The seconds tick by in uncomfortable silence.
I pace.
He remains motionless.
I pace some more.
“Jude, it’s not—”
“Bloody hell, Draegan,” he finally snaps. “You think I don’t know it, mate? You think I don’t look at her and see the end of days in her eyes? For fuck’s sake. Every one of her precious heartbeats is like a death knell counting down to our eternal darkness.”
“Then how can you stand there and ask me why I keep walking away from her? How comeyou’renot walking away?”
“Because I’m in love with her, arsehole.”
I scoff. “Then you’re a damned fool.”
“Fine. Then I’m a fool, Draegan. A damned fool who blatantly ignores everything smart and right his head is saying to him.” He jabs a finger hard into my chest. “So what do you call a man who ignores his own fuckingheart? A man who’d rather lock himself in a room inside his own skull with no windows, no light, no chance of escape, all because his head tells him it’s the right thing to do? A man who ignores what’s right in front of him because—”
“Because we’re going to leave her behind!” I roar. “We could be ripped from this existence at any moment, Jude! How do you think she’d feel then?”
“You don’t know how long we’ve got before—”
“A year? Still not enough. Months? It could be five fucking days for all we—”
“And I’d rather have five fucking days with her and all of you—our fuckingfamily—then a thousand more years without her. A thousand more hours, if that’s all we’ve got left. It doesn’t matter, Draegan. Can’t you see that? A day or a century… Life is too short to spend it brooding in the shadows and cursing the fates. We’ve already dealt with more than our fair share of shadows and curses. Now? I want the fucking fairy tale, even if I only get it for a little while.”
“She still thinks there’s a chance of breaking our curse. After everything I explained to her tonight, she’s still holding on to some blind hope.”
“And what’s wrong with hope?”
“You know what breaking the curse means for us! We won’t survive it. Not a chance. And even if we did, what then? She’s mortal, Jude. She’s got a long life ahead of her, yes. But not an immortal one. One way or the other, we will all be parted from her. So what’s the bloody point?”
He shakes his head, his jaw ticking. After an agonizingly long beat, he says, “She’s not mortal, Draegan.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. For all intents and purposes, witches are as mortal as mundane humans.”
“She’s not just a witch. She’s dark fae.”
“Yes, we already know she’s got a bit of it in her bloodline, but that’s not enough to—”
“Not a bit.Half. Half fae means she’s not a mortal. No, maybe not completely immortal, but she’s got amuchlonger life ahead of her than a human.”
I blink at him, certain I misheard. “But… her mother was a witch. And her father—”
“Is not the mage Brian Avery. Rook cracked the SSD card—it’s full of her mother’s diaries.”
“What are you saying?”
“Westlyn Avery,” he continues, “is the child of Madison Strauss and some bloody dark fae noble who tricked the woman into falling in love with him. Once she figured out his true nature, she escaped—barely—but apparently the monster haunted her in dreams, swearing he’d one day hunt down his child, reclaim her in the name of his court, and steal her out of the human realm for good.”
