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“You’re not keeping her,” I seethe, hands fisted at my sides. I stomp towards him, tension bound up tight in every muscle beneath my prickled flesh. “Do you hear me, Daein? I won’t stand for it!”
“I decide what is and what is not to be,” he says, unaffected, as he moves on to slip off his coat. He discards it on the floor where it crumples at his boots. His eyes find mine in the mirror, betraying the shimmer of anger brewing inside of him. “I have plans for her.”
My heart is starting to twist in my chest, rinsing out like laundry, and I feel dizzy from the nausea rolling over me. He’s never taken a lover before, not since he met me.
But how long could I expect to keep him with me and me only? He is, after all, a dark fae—a once-prince, at that.
Still, that shivering fury shudders through me and I sneer at him in the table’s watery mirror. My reflection is as warped as our love for one another.
“Then fucking change your plans,” I spit, my fist flying up from my side.
I sock him right on his unmoveable bicep. My knuckles throb instantly, and I doubt he felt a thing from my hit, but his face suddenly cracks in the mirror—
A squeal escapes me a quick moment before he’s snatching me by the throat, his grip choking me into silence. Daein whips me around in a blur, so fast that I can’t see much of his stone-mask face, and he shoves me up on the vanity table.
Things clatter to the floor. Faintly, I’m aware of the sound of crystals breaking as my hands scramble for the table edges to grip.
He kicks my legs wide, pushing himself between my thighs, and brings his hot mouth to mine. Fury turns his eyes into blue-tinted storm clouds.
Blood pressure pools in my head as his hold on my neck remains too tight.
Breath on my lips, he glowers down at me. “I am gentle with you because I loathe to see that old fear flicker in your eyes. I know our past haunts you. It is all I can do to keep you sane in your misery, April.But you are testing me.”
He loosens his grip some, enough to let me suck in a rush of breath that soothes the pulsing behind my eyes. I sag a little, still feeling the pinch of his fingertips digging deep into my flesh. Bruises will surely bloom there before the end of the Quiet.
Daein’s voice softens, though the anger is an undercurrent beneath the tones, “I can never make you happy—I once told you that. You must make peace with yourself. I can’t fill the hole inside you, as you carved it out yourself in the end. You must be the one to fill it.” He pauses, brushes his dangerous mouth over mine. “I gave you more than I could and it is still not enough for you. We spend more time in the light lands for you, April. I loathe to be here. I gave you Terry’s freedom, protection, marriage and I brought you back to life—I gave you all that you have asked for.”
His grip still firm, my voice comes out strangled, “Except my own life.”
Daein hesitates, his eyes flickering away from mine for a beat before he releases me and steps back. “You and your notions of freedom,” he spits bitterly, cutting like a freshly sharpened sword slicing through the air. “All that I have to offer you, and it is never enough because you ask for the impossible.”
My face crumples with a scowl. “I’m only asking that you don’t take a lover,” I grumble, rubbing my aching neck. “What would you do to me if I took one?”
The look that flashes in his suddenly-bright blue eyes stuns me to silence. In that briefest of moments, I saw my blood on his hands, my death on his dagger.
I know well what he would do.
Daein shakes off the thought and turns his back on me. He peels his shirt from his bronzed, inky body. “The concubine is a gift,” he says as he tosses his shirt onto the post at the base of the bed. It lands there perfectly, as though he’d folded and hung it with the care of a house slave. “She is intended for my brother.”
A frown digs deep between my brows, turning down my mouth at the corner. “Elden?”
All the others are married…
His silence is my answer—confirmation.
“W-Why?” I stutter, sliding off the table. My sandals make the softest of sounds on the grassy floor. “Why would you do that? He has a harem full of lovers—and he’s not taken one Halfling. He’ll kill her.”
“I have every expectation that he will want to.” Daein turns, lowering himself down onto the edge of the bed, his tired eyes finding me. I see the swim of drink in his gaze. “But she is on loan from a litalf prince. He will be bound by protecting our negotiations. Killing the half-breed is too risky.”
I advance on him slowly, my steps soft and cautious. My neck throbs as a reminder, don’t get too close, not yet.
“Butwhy, Daein?” I insist.
He merely watches me. No answer comes, not even in his silence that I can sometimes read better than his eyes.
As he often does, he keeps his secrets. Keeps me hidden in the dark…
With a sigh, I move to sit beside him and my eyes find the watery reflection of the mirror on the vanity table. The ripples move like a sea I would like to visit one day—a sea basking in light.
