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I could be her lifelong companion, I want to say. I would never leave her side.
“Alienor—”
“Ouch!” She winces, and tiny cuts burst open across her skin. It’s a latticework of scratches and slashes and scrapes, each seeping with droplets of blood.
I lurch forward and catch her before she falls. “Alienor!”
“Oh, shit,” she says with a broken sob. “Leaving Grandma’s house must have sapped the healing magic.”
I scoop her up into my arms, carry her through the kitchen, down the hallway, and into her bedroom. There are no signs of damage on the pristine white walls from my earlier visits, but guilt still twangs at my heart for causing her so much grief.
“Would you allow me to tend to your wounds?” I lay her on the white quilt that’s draped over her bed.
“Why would you help me?” she asks.
My brows pull together. “You don’t know?”
She shakes her head. “I banished you. That had to be painful, and—”
“Alienor?”
“What?”
“You belong to me, and I take care of what’s mine.”
She lowers her lashes for a heartbeat and then meets my gaze with an intensity that makes me straighten. It is almost like she is reading my soul.
I search her eyes, wanting her to see the truth in my words. She is mine, and I am hers. My lips part to express the words, but she speaks first.
“Are you even a healer?” she asks.
“My saliva has healing properties.”
She frowns up at me, her pretty lips parting with a question.
“You know that I imprisoned my wife for the curse she placed on my cock, and how she struck back with her magic?”
Alienor nods.
“I was on the brink of death, coughing and choking on blood and sputum, and a monstrous dog appeared at my bedside.”
“The Barghest?” she asks.
I nod. “He offered me immortality and the power to get my revenge.”
“In exchange for your soul?” Alienor asks.
“He also wanted my body, my heart, my throne.”
Her breath catches. “Then why are you still alive?”
“Just after I made the bargain and gained the power of the Unseelie, witches banished every being even related to the fae to another realm,” I say with a sigh.
“So the bargain couldn’t be fulfilled?”
My jaw tightens. “It took decades to claw my way back to the human world. By then, my wife was declared long dead. Her magic called to me every century or so, but nothing so significant until three years ago.”
“When I turned eighteen.”
