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“We should go,” Fordham said, reading her mood.
“Yes, I think so.”
Darkness had truly fallen in the village, but no one would be the wiser. Street performers had come out to dance and sing and play music. Taverns were open, and customers sprawled out onto the steps. A dance had started in the intersection to Painters Row. Merriment was had all around.
“I never knew anything like this existed,” Fordham admitted as they passed row after row of dancers.
“Is the House of Shadows so different? No dancing? No music?”
His eyes grew distant. “There is music and dancing, but it’s not like this. We have been closed off in our world for a thousand years. No one leaves, and only humans dare to cross our borders—and most do it by accident. We have made our own city our own realm.”
“That sounds isolating,” she admitted. Though she did not ask the question she wanted to know—how exactly had he gotten out?
“It likely helps that the majority of us do not know any different,” he admitted. “They have not seen the streets full like this. They do not know the joy of running for miles in any direction. They have not been permitted life.”
“That’s terrible. The stories… they make the House of Shadows seem like… like monsters. But this sounds like a horror that should not be bestowed on anyone. To be so isolated would be true torture.”
Fordham didn’t have to say anything for her to know that he agreed. Especially now, after tonight.
They returned to the mountain. Kerrigan realized she was still a little tipsy from the drinks. Waking up at dawn to run for miles didn’t sound tempting in the least. But she just enjoyed the lightness in her head as they headed back to their rooms. When they came to the place where their paths diverged, she stopped in anticipation. Not quite ready to say good-bye.
But Fordham gently took her hand. “I’ll walk you.”
Her heart thudded in her chest. He released her hand and they walked together, side by side, tension brimming between them. She had felt desire and obsession but nothing like this. Nothing where her entire insides squirmed and shivered at the mere touch. Suddenly, her mouth was dry. She had no words for how she felt in that moment.
When they reached her door, she expected him to release her and go. But he hovered there before her, and for a moment, she was too frightened of what she would find when she looked up. For all her bluster about not being afraid, about controlling her fear, deep down, she had never been more afraid. She could master herself in life-or-death situations because she had to. But this?
“Kerrigan,” he said.
Her body shivered at the use of her name. All this time, he’d never really called her by her name. And now, to hear it from him in this moment, her body turned to mush.
“Look at me,” he commanded in the soft, urgent voice of his.
Slowly, she pushed down all her trembling fears and met his gray eyes. They were the same eyes she had been looking into for weeks. The same face that she had wanted to see smile—really smile—so she had brought him for a poetry reading. The man with a dozen layers and a million secrets. She had no hope of unraveling them all, but somehow, she was pulling them back inch by inch. And he was doing the same. Despite her fear—or maybe because of it—she realized just how much she wanted this.
“Who are you?” he asked softly.
“Who… who am I?” she asked with concern.
“You are nothing like I expected.”
“Nor are you, princeling,” she said with a smirk.
He brushed a lock of her red curls out of her face and his finger ran along her jaw. She didn’t breathe for the length of that touch. She wanted to move into it, but they were on a precipice. As if at any moment they could plunge forward into oblivion or be wrenched backward. And she didn’t want to be the thing that scared him off.
“I mean it. I was raised to believe that humans and half-Fae were different than full-blooded Fae. No, not just different… they were an abomination. Lower functioning and barely capable of more than servitude. Fae were silenced for even questioning those basic teachings. So, when you were sent to me that first day, I assumed the Society was trying to slight me for bending their rules and finding a loophole.”
“But they weren’t,” she whispered.
“No, I see now that they actually sent their best.”
She laughed shyly. “I wouldn’t say their best.”
“You are the first human or half-Fae I have ever been allowed more than a passing interest in. And everything I was taught was wrong,” he told her plainly.
She swallowed, taken in by his confession. She had known that the House of Shadows had these beliefs, but hearing them told such made her heart ache. The lies that were spread about her people. It was heartbreaking.
