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Kai
At some point the night before, I'd passed out after raging in the guest room for who knows how long. The sound of a crash woke me, though, and even though my body resented me for the position I'd fallen asleep in, I still burst up from where I'd collapsed and ran to the front room. I was ready for battle, but I should have known I wouldn't find one. It was only stones that had been thrown through the windows.
Some of the stones had messages tied around them or scrawled on them. Bastard. Outcast. Traitor. The one that made me the angriest was one that said human lover. Because it was true. After everything I'd been through and had happened, I fell in love with a human.
To my people, humans were a destructive force of nature. They were a hurricane, a volcano erupting, a forest fire that couldn't be contained, a tsunami, and the only thing they ever wrought was pain and suffering.
They couldn't see, because most of them hadn't been to the origin realm, that sometimes humans were capable of good. All they knew was that our kind was hunted to the point of extinction. We were driven to the edge, to the point that we magically separated from the Origin Realm and became our own entity. But I had been to the Origin Realm, I'd spent time there, and I knew that humans were capable of kindness and bravery, and some of them, like Tessa, had an inner strength that some of my people lacked.
I didn't want to bring Tessa into this. I didn't want her to be hated for who she was or for being with me, but it seemed like I could do nothing to control it or stop it from happening. It was going to be what it was going to be. There was no other way around it.
I wasn't the only one that had heard the windows shatter and the stones fall, though the others were standing around with me looking at the other stones, all of which said some variation of the ones I had seen. When I turned around, I saw Tessa standing behind me in nothing but an oversized shirt.
She was stunning even first thing in the morning. The long waves of her chestnut hair looked even richer than normal, and her mismatched eyes captivated me just as they always had. I'd expected her to be looking at the stones or the damage done to the rooms, but she wasn't. She was watching me instead.
"Are you okay?" she asked softly.
"Yeah, I'm fine." I gave her a tight smile. "They can't hurt me that easily."
She glanced past me into the room that I'd come out of, telling me without words that she knew I was lying, that the barbs the other Agarthans threw at me did hurt me. I wanted to scream at her that we were all better than this, that she didn't deserve it, but my lips stayed stubbornly closed.
Tessa should be treated as a lady of the realm. She could have been a queen, but I was a bastard and an outcast, so none of that was possible, especially not now that she was going to marry me.
Ever so gently, she reached out and took one of my hands as though she was waiting for me to turn feral and run away from her. When I didn't, she grasped my fingers more firmly and tugged me with her into the back room where she had slept for so many days.
She walked me over to the bed and sat me down. The whole time all I could do was marvel at how small her hand was in my own. When she walked away from me, I almost thought she was going to shut me in there, keep me locked up like they did when they first killed my parents, but instead, she shut herself in the room with me.
Gently, she padded toward me across the carpet. Her approach was slow and steady, as though she didn't want to spook me, before she knelt in front of me. If I was doing the same to her, we would have been about level, but with me on the bed and her on the floor, the height difference between us was even bigger than normal.
"I know you're angry," she said as she put her hands on my knees, trying to comfort me. "What those bricks said may have technically been true for some of it, but it doesn't change the fact that you are an honorable warrior. You risked your life time and again to help save the realms. I know it's hard to be mocked and insulted and treated as though you're less than, that's what happened to me most of my life, and I want to help you, but I don't know how. I need you to tell me. I need you to open up just a little bit and tell me what I can do to help you feel better and work through this."
It killed me that she had been through something similar for most of her life. "Why were you treated like that?"
She smiled, but it was small and tinged with sadness. "Because my birth mother was batshit crazy. Because of this." She paused and held her hand up, the one with the burn mark that had contorted her fingers. "Because no matter what school I went to, no matter what I was doing, it always came out in the end that I had been in the system, that I wasn't even adopted; I just had a foster mother, that my mother had mutilated me, and of course, that she was some kind of religious fanatic. They never noticed that my foster mother was one of the kindest, most caring people in the world. That she would have done anything for me. And she did. She—" Tessa's voice cut off, and she frowned, looking down at the floor. "I know she did important things for me. Why can't I remember anything she did for me?"
"Maybe it's the missing memories again," I croaked, hating that there were gaps in her life now because she was helping us.
"Yeah, I guess," she mumbled. She took a deep breath and continued, "Anyway. I was always made fun of for it, always made to feel like my mother must have known something. I didn't know that this had been done to me for a reason, and I deserved it, even though I was just a child. So I know a little bit about what you're going through. Obviously, not all of it. I could never understand everything. But I do—I do understand some of it." When she looked up at me with hopeful eyes, it almost broke my heart.
"There really isn't anything you can do to help me other than for us to get through this wedding." I grimaced, but I immediately wished I hadn't because she caught it like she caught most things, and she looked at me expectantly, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her what I thought was about to happen.
"What is that? I know this marriage thing isn't ideal, but why did you make that face? And why did you go so pale last night when Timmon was here?"
This woman never missed a damn thing. "Something Timmon said last night upset me. It makes me think he's going to make this whole thing harder than it needs to be, and you're going to have to go through something unpleasant."
"Can you elaborate?" she asked, sounding unsure.
I flex my hands, trying to shake the dread filling me before I run my fingers through my hair. "I told you that marriage is very serious for my people, that divorce isn't really a thing. Part of the traditional garden wedding ceremony is a public claiming of your mate."
She tilted her head slightly to the side, making my chest constrict. "Mate, like Finn and I are mates or Griff and I are mates?"
"Kind of, but it's a chosen thing. Once you choose, there's no going back, though. There's no undoing it."
"And by public claiming, you mean what? Vows?"
I could see in her eyes that she suspected what I meant, but she didn't want to admit it. She wasn't ready to accept it. And just the thought made me uncomfortable, but it was better that she knew what we were walking into tonight if she wanted to back out and do things differently. "I mean, sex," I said more bluntly than I had originally intended.
She gulped. "So we have to have sex in front of everybody?" She paled slightly at the question.
