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“You didn’t imagine anything,”he said with a quiet chuckle. It echoed in my head as if bouncing off the trees.“Everything you felt that night was as real as you are right now. Every touch, every kiss was real, Kyre.”Chills covered my arms and my thighs clenched with the memory of his touch.
“We’ll talk about this later,”I said, letting out a long, tired breath.“In person, where I can see you.”
“Where I can touch you,”he finished for me. My cheeks heated and my belly flipped. I mentally shoved him out of my head, and to my shock, I felt him disappear.
"What are you doing out here?" Another deep voice startled me, and I jumped in my skin. Cadoc appeared in the shadows, his wings out wide as if he’d managed to somehow fly down and land without me realizing. "Plotting your escape, no doubt."
His dark hair blew in the chilly wind, shifting around his bare shoulders. I tried not to notice the way the moon played on his browned skin or the way the angles of his face in the shadows shifted strikingly, making him look terrifyingly beautiful.
I managed to give him a dry look, hiding my inner admiration for those multicolored, speckled feathers and the muscles he left on display. A part of me wondered how many shirts he even owned.
"It's all so quiet. You’d almost never know the Sluagh was on their way.” Well, except for the rapidly emptying cages that dangled in the far distance.
The Wild Hunt was preparing for bidding day, dressing up their bounties in paints, silks, and flowers, prettying them up for display.
"It was a taxing hunt. I imagine it will be calm like this for a while, at least until the bidding begins."
"What happened out there?” I scanned him from head to toe, searching for remnants of the blood I’d seen covering the four of them, but he was completely clean. Maybe he’d ordered some servant faerie to scrub him down. The thought of another female’s hand of any of them suddenly made me see red. I shook away the mental image as quickly as it came. “That’s the second time you've returned covered in gore. Is it normal for your bounty to fight back?”
I realized I’d never considered that the Wild Hunt might have to actually use those weapons they wielded. I supposed I’d just assumed everyone who was hunted took one look at the creatures that came for them and surrendered.
“Yougave us a good chase, didn’t you?” he said, raising a single dark brow. “And you barely even know how to wield a dagger let alone take on any member of the Wild Hunt.” His lips curled as I huffed.
“I’m not that useless,” I complained. “I know how to use a knife, and I’m pretty good at staying hidden. And I’m fast, too, if you remember.”
He laughed. It was the first real laugh I’d ever heard from him, and it warmed something inside of me. “Someday, we’re going to have to rectify that. We can’t have you walking around without knowing how to defend yourself. Even an erasu might get the upper hand on you.”
My shoulders sagged as my good mood receded. “It might not even matter now that I know I won’t be here for much longer. I doubt I’ll have the opportunity to learn anything once Kirsi takes me away.”
Surely, the Sluagh wouldn’t dress me in pretty clothes and give me a decadent room with every comfort I could possibly ask for. Surely, my…mother wouldn’t bother with trivial things like that. She was the commander of an undead host of evil-faerie monsters after all.
Cadoc sobered, rubbing the back of his neck with his clawed hand. “Kyre…” he paused, as if the right words were escaping him. As if there was something on the tip of his tongue. “Come,” Cadoc said after a heavy moment of solemn silence. When I looked up, raising a skeptical brow, he simply stood up straight and unfurled his massive wings. “Stop overthinking it. I just wanted to show you something. Perhaps it might take your mind off of these new revelations.”
Now, I wasreallyskeptical. I didn’t move from my spot on the bridge. “Why are you being so nice to me? I feel like I would be an idiot to trust it.” Especially since it was Cadoc who’d showed the most disdain for me from the very beginning. He wasn’t exactly approachable.
His eyes rolled in impatience as he stuck out his hand to help me up. “I might be a monster, but I’ve already had my hunt for the week, so any more bloodshed would just be overkill. Come, I promise I won't whisk you off to ravish you in the dark.”
His words said one thing, but the wickedness in his eyes said another. Despite myself, a laugh slipped out. I took his hand and let him help me up, tilting sideways for a moment as my wings fluttered behind me heavily.
“Sooner or later, you're going to have to learn how to use these,” he said as he turned me to face him, locking his strong arms around me tightly.
“We’re flying? I asked, my stomach lurching in both excitement and wariness. “What if you drop me? I can’t fly on my own yet.”
“It’s the only way to watch it,” he said as his wings flared out wide, his thick feathers flexing and spreading as they started to catch the wind. “And I would never drop you.” I stilled, craning my head back to look up into his eyes. His thumb stroked the small of my back as his arms tightened around me, pressing me in closer to his body. “I don’t enjoy seeing you in pain. I know you won’t believe it, but it’s true.”
“You have an odd way of proving that,” I muttered, remembering vividly how tightly that smoke rope had coiled around my body, nearly crushing my bones.
He had the audacity to look a little guilty. “I had a job to do, and you were unruly.”
I choked. “Unruly?! You—”
Before I could finish, Cadoc shot into the air. I screamed, latching on around his thick waist, but my fingers couldn’t reach each other to clamp tightly, so I was forced to dig my nails into his leather baldric. Luckily, his arms were impenetrable vises around my body.
We rose up higher and higher, the roof of the auction house falling away. It didn’t take long to breach the canopy. The wind flowed over my wings as we flew over a sea of seemingly endless trees. They fluttered and flexed, as if they craved the air after years of being trapped in a constricted body. I turned my face away from Cadoc’s chest, watching as the world rushed beneath us.
Above us, the clouds began to converge on the Void Wood, thunder crashing in the distance. Little drops of rain hit my face, quickly growing in power the longer we flew. Why had he decided to take me on a flight during a rainstorm? Was this some kind of sick punishment? I held on tighter, my hair quickly soaking through, chilling me to the bone.
“Look down,” he said as we dipped lower. He turned me in his arms with more ease than any mortal man could have, almost like I was weightless. He held me with only one arm now, but somehow, I wasn’t afraid. I knew he wouldn’t let me fall to my death… Somehow, I just knew.
