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I curled up into the fetal position and stared into the darkness. No thought. No emotion. No pain could touch me. I was far away. I was off in another place and in another time. My mother’s voice kept coming to me in soft breezes across the meadow of my mind, and I finally fell asleep.

When I woke, it was to a radiating warmth. A blanket was tucked around me like a cocoon, and my head was pillowed on something hard but yielding. The lights in the rail of the room were lit but dampened to the soft whisper of a single candle’s flame.

The revealed room was torn apart. Every surface that my eye touched where it had once been neat and tidy was shattered or hacked into. Had I done this? I didn’t remember it. I didn’t remember anything but curling up on the bed. Had I unleashed the emptiness within me and shredded everything around me so that it matched? That felt fitting. That felt right. The mild annoyance of not remembering the act wriggled like a lazy earth worm in my mind.

Even the door was askew on its hinge.

“Where did you go, little bug?”

A jolt of surprise hit my dulled nerves at the gentle rumble of his deep voice.

“Out for milk.”

My voice was lifeless. Just as empty as I felt.

The arm that held me in place pulled me back into the hardness of his body. My eyes slid shut, and I let the warmth of him flow into me. It seeped into the cracks and corners of my emptiness. But it was a single tear in the dry ocean bed of my existence.

“Where did you go?” he asked again.

There was no blade to his voice, though. I expected there to be. His prisoner had broken out and went for a walk about without his permission. Shouldn’t he be mad?

I didn’t answer him. What was I going to tell him? I went cave diving, found a big fucking spider, and my mother. Did you know that my mother is the goddess everyone thinks is dead? Oh, by the by, she’s dead now. I killed her. Still didn’t try to kill your king, though. Oh, I’m Fae, by the way. How do your people feel about enslaving your own kind?

He let the silence between us draw out and settle in to make itself comfortable on the bed with us. He merely tucked the blanket tighter around me and notched my ass into the crook of his hips, arching over my body protectively. Our breaths synchronized, and we lay like that for hours, not speaking, letting him hold me.

It wasn’t until the well of my tears finally refilled and managed to break free from my stranglehold that he spoke. “You can tell me, you know, little bug.”

There was a softness to his voice that had never been there before. Not when he held me while I stabbed him. Not when he had flirted with me. Never. The vulnerability, the worry, the need, and fear in his rumble reached into me and clenched its fist around the ruins of my heart. The rogue tears were joined by a deluge.

He didn’t shush me, didn’t ask more. He merely rolled me over and tucked my face into the heat of his chest as both arms encircled me and pressed me into the layers of his clothing. His legs wrapped around me in my little cocoon, and I was fully engulfed by his big body. His head was the only part of him that did not directly connect with me, and I wished it did. I needed the circuit to be completed to find the grounding like the open, angry arc of lightning I was.

I had the bone-deep need to be held by him in this moment, skin to skin. I needed it like a fever dream. My arms struggled within the restraints of the blanket to get to him. To hold him. To touch him. I needed it like air, more than air I needed just to hold him. I got past the first layer of his tunic before his hands gripped the blanket and pulled my arms away.

“No, Sóna. Not yet.” The rebuke was gentle, reluctant even, as if it pained him to tuck me back into the blanket and turn me back away from him. It hurt me, though. Each word felt like a bullet ripping through me, finding the last little soft spots that hadn’t been hollowed out yet. “I’m sorry, little bug, truly I am. I ache to touch you, but I can’t. Not yet.”

My words refused to slip free, even though I wanted so badly to curse at him. To beg him to hold me. Just fucking hold me!

As if sensing it, too, he held me tighter, almost squeezing the air from me. “Tell me what happened, little bug. Please?”

“I can’t,” I whispered to the ghost who held me.

“Can you tell me how you got a giant hole in your shoulder, at least?”

“A massive spider.”

“Mmm, that makes sense. Were you in the tunnels?”

“Yes.”

“There’s plenty of them down in the dark. You’re lucky to be alive, little bug. They are deadly to even the strongest of Fae.”

His chastisement was a delicate brush compared to what I knew he was capable of.

“I’m not.”

“Then you are an especially lively ghost.”

“I’m pretty sure I died.”