Page 131 of Fae Farewells

York pulled out, hot cum hitting my back as his groan mixed with Novak. I was ready to cry exhausted tears by the time they came.

I didn’t move, just sat on top of Novak for a full minute before I felt York wipe my back off with a t-shirt.

“I think we broke her,” Novak told him.

I snorted. “I’m so sore right now. Not even fighting has made me this sore.”

“Fighting who?” York inquired.

“Any of them,” I answered. “All of them.”

Novak tipped me over, and I hissed at him. He chuckled as he curled against my back. York lifted my head, crawling under me before placing my ear over his heart.

After a few minutes of silence passed, I flipped over onto my stomach, and shimmied myself down the bed so I could look at both of them.

“Vaughn and I were talking about something last week, and now it makes more sense to me.”

“Do you use sex to clear your mind?” Novak asked. “Or were you thinking about that the entire time?”

“Sometimes I use it to clear my mind,” I confessed. “It gives me something else to focus on, and then I circle back to my problem with a fresh mindset.”

York propped his chin on his palm, the edge of the blanket draped over his hip. “What were you and Vaughn talking about?”

“The quote is: Eventually, the romancer of such twisted tales ties their hands. It’s a tangled web of treachery and deceit, tenacious and imperceptible before mistakes are made. The spider thinks itself invincible until it becomes the bird’s prey.”

“What did he say?” my vampire prompted.

“That’s the problem with all the lies and half-truths. We haven’t been able to see the web because we’ve been the ones who were stuck. Now, we’re getting a bird’s-eye view…” I shook my head. “But we weren’t, not like we are now.”

My druid furrowed his brows. “What do you mean?”

“I need you to help me dream,” I told him.

“Okay,” he drawled. “I need a little more to go off of than that.”

I sighed. “The dream that I’ve been seeing is what happened before you came into the dungeon to get me. I want to piece them together, but I need you to do that. We don’t really know what Alric looks like, but what if you saw him too? What if you passed him as he was leaving?”

“We don’t need dreams to fuse those memories,” York explained. “Not with the vampire laying here. I’ve seen your dream, interpreted it into my own words. The rest I was there for.”

“No, we don’t need dreams. But if we get the answer I’m expecting—”

“You’re going to want to force a dream, try to control it while you search for who’s in your head.”

Novak gnawed at his bottom lip. “If you do that, it’ll tear those locks down, Trouble.”

“I wasn’t expecting them to hold this long. They’re already falling apart.”

“And then what?” he pushed. “We can’t pop them back into place.”

“And then I fight,” I whispered. “This way lets me know who I’m fighting in my head, so I’m not going in blind.”

My vampire nodded, though he wasn’t happy with my response. “Show her your interpretation of the dream, York. Start with that, and travel through the timeline. I’ll pull her in so you both can focus on what you’re doing.”

York’s mental essence was a ground weight that leisurely floated through my mind in shades of green. When Novak’s chaotic red energy joined the mix, my druid slowed him down, too.

I closed my eyes, tuning everything out except the memories.

“Where are you, Sweetheart?” A male tried to entice Sloane in her hellish dreamscape.