“Here in Faerie, you mean?” he gives a sharp nod. “Yes.”
The certainty in that single word unsettles me more than it should.
“Careful, or I’m going to start teasing you about thoseinstinctsof yours. You sound awfully confident for a ghost with amnesia.”
His warm hand finds the small of my back below the backpack. “And only getting more confident by the minute.”
It’s not the warmth of his touch that unravels me, but the weight of it. The pressure of his hand is firm and intentional. His fingers slip under the elastic band of my stretchy pants, and heat spreads outward from the contact.
I tilt my head, forcing my voice to sound unbothered. “Should I be worried?”
“Only if you mind my company,” he answers without hesitation. We walk in silence for a few minutes before he adds, “I have this strange intuition. That this place remembers me more than I remember myself.”
“For me, it felt like coming home after a long voyage,” I admit, my voice thinner now. “Like the land was greeting me back to my rightful place. Did you feel any of that?”
“No.”
The word is flat. Final.
The longing in my blood pulses with every step we take, threaded with anger and want and the unfairness of it all—of him being able to touch me now, when he’s probably already inextricably bound to someone else. I can’t help but fear he might regret his feelings for me when the truth comes out.
The image of his hypothetical wife crowds my thoughts. A woman might be waiting for him somewhere beyond those mountains. A strong, beautiful Fae princess. Someone who once stood beside him, and who may be linked to him forever in ways I don’t understand.
Boasting a title I could never wear.
Ruling a kingdom that could never be mine.
Or worse—caring for a family that still mourns him.
The thought slices clean through me, and I shudder. E’s hand moves across my back, meant to soothe, but the reassuring touch only sets my blood ablaze.
Nick shoots us a look over his shoulder. “Are you two done whispering?”
I lift my palm innocently.
E’s hand slips inside my back pocket—deliberate, grounding, impossible to misread.
My pulse swirls, heat pooling low in my belly. My body doesn’t care about hypothetical crowns or wives. It doesn’t care about mistakes and consequences. It only responds to the new reality of him, to the way he touches me like I’m his welcome-home present.
Ahead, the trees thin as the river snakes around a small, barren island.
In the distance, the Solar Cliffs rise to the west. The impressive mountain range stretches high and uneven, its upper reaches swallowed by a heavy crown of clouds that hides how tall it is.
“Wow. How far do you think they go?” I say, mesmerized by the beauty in front of me.
E removes his hand from my pocket, and the loss is immediate. I press my lips together to stifle my sigh.
“What do they say?” he muses. “That you can never go home again?” He pauses for a breath. “Whatever home I had here,” he continues, “it’s not waiting for me. And I’m not the one who left. I won’t be going back to the same place, or with the same mind. And I’m not just talking about memories and amnesia. Decades go by. The land changes. You change. Irrevocably. So you can’t pick things up where you left off, and yet it’s not a clean slate either…”
I hear the fracture in his voice, along with the jealousies and insecurities I pretend not to feel.
Chapter 27
Third Wheel
E
Night falls in sluggish, cautious shifts over the forest. Amber and garnet leaves dim to deeper shades of wine, rust, and plum. The last ribbons of sunlight withdraw from the canopy, leaving the vault overhead bruised and shadowed. The river’s surface darkens to black, its current catching the first hints of starlight between the branches like scales on a snake’s back. Day birds fall quiet, replaced by the low, throaty calls of unseen creatures and the soft skitter of paws through the underbrush.
