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Ash doesn't know me. If he did, he’d know that I don’t respond all that well to being told what to do among a whole host of other issues.
Callie nods assuringly. “Your father will do anything for his family. He sacrificed himself to buy us time. You’ve seen the apartment. They captured him, but he didn’t go down easy.”
“And then they captured you.”
“That was my fault,” she says again. “I know how to see through glamour. After I made my bargain with your… with Ninetroir, I was so relieved that I let down my guard.” She frowns. “He was wearing a cap. I thought he was a harmless kid.”
“Who?”
“The Light Fae who had the portal waiting inside of the damn Snack Shack. He let you go instead. You were just a child and he spared you. Your father and I… weren’t.”
No. They weren’t, were they?
I’m speaking more to myself than my apologetic mother as I murmur, “So that’s how I ended up an orphan in Black Pine.”
It all makes sense now. Why she was driving a stolen car alone—since she was on the run without her mate—and why she was speeding like a bat out of hell as she pulled up to the abandoned gas station. The way the black and white, grainy security cam footage showed the pretty blonde woman talking to an empty shadow, and how she managed to disappear off the face of the planet after she followed the gas station “employee” into the rundown convenience store.
I’d often tortured myself with that footage, watching it over and over again as I tried to make sense of the reasons behind her inexplicable actions.
I wasn’t abandoned. By making the deal with Nine, bartering my safety for a debt he owed my dad, Callie saved me from suffering the same fate that happened to her and Ash.
While I’m lost in my own thoughts, Callie looks confused, like she should know the name but can’t quite place it.
She should.
“Black Pine?”
“It’s where you left me,” I explain. “The town with the gas station.”
“Oh.” She pales. “I guess I knew that.”
“You do?”
“It seems like yesterday. To me, it really was.” With a soft exhale, she says, “But twenty years…”
For me, Black Pine isn’t just a place I knew from two decades ago when I was a baby. Fourteen years after the morning they discovered me in the backseat of a stolen Buick, I moved back to the small town in the middle of nowhere when my choice was between the asylum or jail.
“It’s more than that.”
“Zella?”
She let Aislinn pass. Just this one last time, I let her have Zella.
Instead, I tell her all about the asylum. It pours out of me. Not the magic part—not about how it’s a place where the fae stick troublesome humans to forget about them—but the sessions and the doctors and the therapy that, six years later, didn’t do a damn thing to help me.
When I’m done, I cross my hands over my chest, building a barrier between us. It hadn’t been my intention to show her just what a screw-up I am within hours of meeting me, but I couldn’t help it.
I don’t regret it, though. Especially since, once it’s all out, I think that Callie is finally beginning to see me. Riley. Not the baby that she lost, but the woman that I’ve become.
Whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together. From the moment Melisandre tried to use my long lost parents as a lure for her trap, I’m not just looking out for me.
Madelaine died because of me. Carolina… I still can’t believe she’s gone.
No matter what I have to do—no matter how strong I have to stand against my Light Fae father—I won’t let there be any other casualties of this stupid war between me and the Fae Queen.
Once I come up with a way to save Nine, that is.
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