Page 2

“Keep looking. I want her found.” I barely recognized the weakness in my own voice.

“I promise, sir, we will search the whole of the grounds for her.”

A soldier propped up my other arm, and the two of them dragged me to my rooms, stopping only to allow me to dissipate the wards to let them through.

“Not on the bed!” I howled as they tried to push me into it. “It still smells of her.”

Silver and Ebon Breaker said nothing as they laid me out upon the carpets and retreated.

She was gone.

Gone before I could tell her how much I cared for her. Before I managed the courage to make love to her the way she deserved. Gone before I could beg her to forgive me for everything I let happen to her while she was here.

She was human. Her heart was not as strong and steadfast as a Fae’s and I had been careless with it. I had held her and molded her flesh in my hands like I would a Fae.

She felt like a Fae, the way she burned brighter than the stars in the night sky. She felt like the living, pulsing heart of magic when she moaned for me, and even more so when she bit back at me.

Tears, cruel and bitter, burned in my eyes again at my own ineptitude.

I had failed once again. I had failed at the House of Magic to choose the right path. I had failed to keep my family safe. I had failed to keep my Cricket safe.

Unconsciousness was a boon that crept in, stealing away my sanity and will as I stared at the chair before the open window and imagined her there.

Silken gold strands were dancing over my naked skin. The gentle gust of hot breath washing over in equal rhythms across my cheek. I smiled as I slowly roused from sleep. I could smell her, jasmine, honey, tart milúll, and the crackle of raw magic curled around my heart and filled the void as I reached in my sleep to gather her to me.

But I gripped only air.

My eyes snapped open, desperation snatching the warmth of the memory of her scent as I saw only her empty reading chair.

I pushed from the carpets and dashed into the bathroom. I had smelled her. I know it. It roused me from the frigid depths of my slumber. She must be here but even the bathing area was empty, only my mother’s forgotten necklace greeting me to remind me of my failures.

Rage rushed in to fill the emptiness of my room and consumed me as I took the stool and flung it across the room. I found nothing else to stop me, nothing to fill the pit within me but the infinitesimal sputtering of satisfaction at the sound of destruction—so I kept going. Anything to fill the void. Anything to fill the emptiness of her absence. The armoire was next, the wood breaking apart against the stone walls. Then the tub that had lovingly held her naked body cradled in the warmth of its embrace.

The ear-splitting clang of the copper crunching against the stonework sank into my blood and for but a handful of moments, the agony, the keening of my fractured existence, fell silent. I let it soak into me.

It was not enough to silence the howling of the vacuum of her absence. It was not enough to fill the emptiness that my life was without her.

I tore through the room like the wounded beast I was. Shattering every single thing in my room, save the bedding that she had slept on, the pillows she had rested her head on, the mirror she had never looked into, until I was panting with the effort. I turned to the chair I had found her curled up on reading.

I reached for it but could not touch it. I couldn’t bear the thought of destroying the chair. It had been hers in this room, gifted to her as her throne whether she knew it or not. It would sit empty for the rest of eternity if she would not grace it with her twitching eyebrow and teasing smiles.

I brushed my fingers over the woodwork, caressing it as I would if it was her skin. I had longed to touch her, ached to have the courage to acknowledge what we had and embrace it. I was too much of a coward. Too terrified that if I gave in to her silken skin and her fiery eyes, I would not survive the conflagration long enough to fulfill my oath to magic. I had been too much of a craven idiot to sink into her heart and open my own to her, too scared that if I did, the hate and rage that fueled me for hundreds of years would finally go cold enough to grow new life in the barren soil.

“Fuck,” I whispered as the knowledge that it was too late now, too late for me to say or do anything to change the course of my fate. I had let the one and only chance I had at earning a place in her heart and the right to be loved by a woman of her caliber die without ever having reached for it.

I couldn’t even hope that my soldiers would find her. I knew.

I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was gone. She was dead. There was no other explanation for the stillness in my soul and the desolation living at the center of my magic. It would be there forever now, until I returned to the Well. Maybe even beyond that. She had been human; she would not meet me there when I went to it.

I fell to my knees and wept impotent tears over what I had allowed to happen. I had done this.

Once again.

Another stone to adorn the sepulcher of my soul. The gravity of this one would crush me. I would feel her absence for the rest of time.

Chapter 2

Cricket