Page 61 of Why Broken Wings Fray

With a defeated sigh, Raegan sank back into his chair and rolled his eyes. “What is the alternative? Would you like me to surrender Choilltean and Cluaineach to them? What then?”

I knew the answer – they want Raegan dead. It was that simple. Raegan would die and Saoghal would resume.

As much as I loved the pixies, as much as I loved Saoghal, as much as I loved Choilltean and Cluaineach, I would not settle for such an outcome. If losing Raegan meant saving Saoghal, some growing part of me wanted to wish them all luck and whisk him away where they could not find him.

It wasn’t me. I would never wish harm on another. I would never wish for the rise and fall of Saoghal. Yet the thought of handing him over, the thought of watching them take him from me – it boiled something vicious and vile within that was prepared to destroy all who suggested it.

So much so that, fists clenched, I shot upright from where I had been sitting. The silence that had stretched because of Raegan transferred to me as all eyes pivoted their attention. The whole room was left to watch as I turned on my heel and stormed out of the dining hall, overflowing and near combustion with so much confusion that all I could do was run away from it all.

28

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After storming out of the dining hall, tripping and stumbling down hallways as rage pushed me to implode, I found a balcony and threw myself out onto it.

I had only five minutes of peace before the doors behind me opened and I refused to turn to acknowledge their presence.

“I thought I reeked,” I said as I stood on a balcony similar to the one I had once stood at, watching as Raegan sauntered out and to my side.

“Seems like you’ve bathed.”

I said nothing. It was somewhat infuriating that he could tell.

“Why are you out here? They’re moving on to dessert in there, and if Killian has his way, there will not be much left soon.”

I let his sarcasm roll off of me like I was oil and he was water.

“I see,” he said, his voice even as he met me along the railing. As one, we looked out across the world, just like we had before. Except it was not Choilltean that we glanced across but Cluaineach. The sun was ready to give up for the night, lingering on the horizon as if it was waiting for something.

“How long did it take?”

I snapped back at his words, tearing my focus from the eerily quiet Cluaineach full only of fireflies and to its King at my side.

“How long did what take?”

“For you to regress. You mentioned it before you left, but we never spoke more about it. How long after leaving Saoghal–”

“Three days,” I admitted.

“Ah,” he said. “An hour, for me. Watching you go was not so dissimilar to watching a cloud slide over the sun. Except the storm endured with every moment I spent in your absence.”

I begrudgingly looked at him.

“I know that you do not like to talk about it,” he began, his face so open and welcoming that I wanted to melt. “But I would very much like to hear it.”

“It’s not that I don’t like to talk about it.” I paused only to take a seat on the bench nearby, pulling my knees up to my chest where I set my chin on the tops of them. “It’s just that I’ve been talking about it for… so long. So very long. There’s nothing new for me to say. There’s nothing I can say that I haven’t said a hundred times before.”

“Not to me, though,” he said, blinking slowly at me as he followed and sat at my side. “And I wish to learn of it. Because right now all I have are assumptions and I want to do better than that. I want to give you the understanding that you deserve.”

“I don’t know what to say anymore. I don’t know what to say that might make someone listen. I talk to my doctor and he tells me that I need to exercise more, so I run every morning and every evening until my body is on fire. I talk to my gynaecologist who tells me that it is my hormones that are out of whack and that it is normal for women, so I must take multivitamins catered to women, which by the way cost twice that of the generic multivitamins. I go back to my doctor and he says that it’s my diet, that I’m eating too much of this or too much of that which makes my brain short-circuit, so I work with a nutritionist and I eat so many green things that I am sure my blood runs green, now. I talk to my parents and they tell me I should get out more, so I go to events during the week until my body is so rundown with exhaustion that I sleep on the train home, and then I go to the bars at the weekend and drink until I can’t feel my soul within my body anymore. And I talk to my coworkers and they say–”

Raegan silenced me as his hand found mine. His grip was soft as he placed it atop of my hand, his expression unreadable as he glanced at me. It was then that I realized I had been rattling off nonsense, my lungs burning as my body begged me to breathe.

“I am listening, Olivia,” he said, his tone something grounding and necessary. “I will listen. I promise you that – I have no idea what any of what you just told me means, but I am not them. I am here to listen.”

I knew that was true as I looked at him. I didn’t need to make excuses like I did to strangers, I didn’t need to sugar-coat it like I did to the people that cared about me, and I didn’t need to hold back like I did at the doctors. I could tell it to him, the dark parts and all, leaving me raw and vulnerable before the King of Talamh, and he would look at me the same way he had always looked at me.

This was the version of Raegan that threatened to ruin me. It wasn’t the charming allure that came with his fox-like expressions, nor the shy intrigue of the power within him and his title, nor the shy attraction that I felt whenever I looked at his sharp features or his strong body.