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“She sounds lovely.”
“She was,” he repeats my earlier words. “Ridley has always been a troublemaker. Always out picking fights and flirting with the chosen mates of the men in our village.” Rafferty chuckles. “I let him get his ass kicked quite a few times before I stepped in.”
Laughing, I shake my head, completely able to picture the fae I’ve only met a handful of times causing trouble.
“And Taranus—” Rafferty lets out an angry huff. “I should have seen him for what he was even back then.”
“He was always an asshole?”
“Not quite. Just different. He was studious, always learning, wanting to study books rather than learn how to use a sword. He and Ridley never saw eye-to-eye. Quite a few times, I stepped in to keep them from fighting.”
Tipping my face up, I take in the hard angles of Rafferty’s face. “I like Ridley.”
Rafferty smiles softly, though it fades quickly. “Our mother was always defensive of Taranus. I truly believe her death was part of what drove him to such lengths.”
“How did she die?”
“She and my father were killed. Poisoned. I now know it was carried out by Odrahn, who had his eye on the throne even then. My father and Fearghas the First were quite close. I all but grew up in that castle. Killing my parents gave him the opening he needed to get to the royal family.”
“That’s so awful. I’m so sorry.”
“It was right after Niahm was killed. I was head of the guard already, had been for near a century, and Ailis and I had been mated a few years.”
My chest aches for his pain, for the agony he and his entire family must have endured when they discovered what had been done to their sister—their daughter.
“Ridley left Faerie shortly after and vowed to never return. Of all of us, I believe he took Naihm’s death the hardest.”
“So he went to live in my world.”
Rafferty nods. “I saw him occasionally, but we typically argued whenever he did show up.”
“About what?”
“Taranus,” he replies. “Ridley believed what I now know to be true—that eventually, Taranus would turn on me. Had I just listened—”
“Then we likely would never have met,” I reply. “Seeing as how I found you in Taranus’s cell.”
Rafferty grips my chin and tips my face up to capture my lips in a brief, tender kiss. “Fate would have brought us together, Ember. No matter how far apart we were.”
For some reason, tears mist my eyes at the thought of fate bringing us together under different circumstances. What would it have been like to fall in love under normal conditions? “You truly believe that?”
“Yes. Because even as I do not understand it, you and I are made for each other. And one day, when we find a way to break your bond with my bastard brother and the hold this darkness has on me, then we will spend eternity wrapped in one another. That, I vow.”
