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How much he means to me.
Can’t, though. Still having an audience with Oberon who, with a knowing expression on his timeless face, has a pretty good idea of the lusty thoughts running through my mind.
I clear my throat. “Know what? Forget the money. If you can vow that the fae won’t come chasing after me ever again, I’ll consider us square.”
“Done,” he announces. “And because I won’t require it, I’ll still arrange for the wealth I accumulated to be brought to your home.”
“That’s—”
Too much. Way, way too much.
Another thing I learned?
Fae don’t do favors and, honestly, they don’t do gifts, either. Everything they do is with the aim of one-upping someone else, of having the power and the scales tipping toward them. I don’t ever want to be in a fae’s debt—especially not this fae.
Oberon holds up his hand. “Consider it repayment for the money you slipped my way when you thought I was nothing but a humble beggar.”
I might’ve thrown a couple of bucks his way when his glamour presented him as a homeless guy. If his boasting from the other day can be believed, it’s like tossing him a penny and getting back a hundred dollar bill.
Then again, it’s not like he’s going to use it…
Besides, it might have taken me a second to figure out what Oberon is really doing, but now that I’m paying attention, it’s super obvious. Whether it’s true or not, the Summer King believes that he’s in my debt for regaining his throne. It doesn’t matter that I’m the prophesied halfling in the Shadow Prophecy and that I was supposed to end Melisandre’s reign. He owes me.
No wonder he refused to help us when we confronted him in the human world. In his eyes, the balance would be lopsided in my favor. Of course he has to balance it out before he can let me leave.
I don’t say thank you, because that’s definitely an insult to the fae; that’s something else I learned a long time ago. So, instead, I tell him, “I’ll expect it as soon as possible.”
“Of course. Anything else?”
Nine flexes his fingers. Not so noticeably, and I probably picked up on it because I’m in tune with every flutter, every sneer, every shift of weight as he stands by my side, but enough that I know he’s dying to tell me that that’s enough.
Not because he’s trying to control me. I think my mate has finally figured out that the time for telling me what I can and can not do is way behin
d us. However, just because Oberon sided with me against the former queen, it doesn’t mean I can trust him.
He’s not only a Light Fae. He’s the freakin’ Summer King.
One small step and I go from balancing what he thinks he owes me to being in his debt—and that’s one place I never want to be. Too bad that I have to push it.
And I have to. Whenever I wasn’t obsessing over the conflicting Shadow Prophecies, Nine being a statue, or Melisandre hunting us down, I wondered over Rys’s fate.
No doubt in my mind that, if he could get to me, Rys would’ve popped up by now. He promised he’d always come for me. So what if I didn’t want him to? That hadn’t stopped him before, and it’s bothered me for a while now that he just… disappeared.
I don’t know how Nine is going to react, but I have to ask.
I have to know.
Epilogue
“Actually, yes. You probably don’t know… I mean, you just got here yourself… but do you think you could find out what happened to Rys?”
Oberon blinks slowly, puzzled. “Rys. I’m not familiar with that name. Seelie? One of mine?”
To be more accurate, he was probably one of Melisandre’s before he betrayed the Fae Queen and helped me to escape. Since I don’t want to tell Oberon that, I shrug. “I think so.”
“Is that the Light Fae whose brand you once wore?”
Nine’s long coat flares behind him, the shadows responding to his bad mood. Any relief he felt when Oberon appeared and fought Melisandre is long gone, and I’m even more anxious to get the hell out of here before Oberon makes good on his threat to eliminate another Dark Fae.
