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Tears sprang to her eyes at those words. It was exactly what she had always been fighting for. Not that Fae should be lesser. Only that humans and half-Fae should be raised up to an equitable place. All would prosper together. Rather than one at the expense of all others.
“I love you.”
He pressed a kiss to her brow. “And I love you, my mate.”
She shuddered at those words. “Can you still call me that when the bond is broken?”
“You will always be that to me. Bond or not.”
“But isn’t the bond important? Isn’t that what makes it real?”
Fordham drew her face up to his. He kissed one cheek and then the other. His lips drawing down her jawline and then softly to her lips. “I have lived a lifetime with that bond in my heart. I will live another without it so long as I have you.”
She pushed to her tiptoes, kissing him hard. “Good.”
“Did you think I would abandon you?”
“I woke up here, and you were gone.” She searched his face. “Only to find you’d been here months while I’d spent a few weeks at most here. It made no sense. Without the bond, I didn’t know what to think.”
“You share no bond with Tieran. Did you doubt him once you two joined together?”
“Constantly,” she said with a laugh, remembering the early days with her dragon. “But we learned to live together without it.”
“Then, you and I shall learn the same. I would have no one else but you.” Their fingers threaded together. “And you? Will you have me?”
“Forever and always.”
He pressed a kiss to her hand. Then, she threw her arms around him and kissed him properly, until they were both breathless from it.
A throat cleared noisily behind them. “Really? Kissing in the middle of all of this?”
Kerrigan broke away from Fordham to find Cleora standing behind them. “Sometimes kissing is necessary.”
Cleora snorted. “Well, now is not that time.”
Kerrigan laughed. “Fordham, allow me to introduce you to my spirit teacher, Cleora.”
“It’s a pleasure,” he said, bowing at the waist.
“Yes. Yes. Thank you. Let’s get somewhere more private before we continue this conversation. I don’t know how much time I have.”
“You never have time,” Kerrigan muttered under her breath.
“Then, don’t waste it.”
Cleora set the pace through the gardens and back into an area of the house that was blissfully empty. She navigated the corridors as if she had grown up here. Kerrigan had no idea where exactly Cleora had grown up. In fact, she knew little about the woman. She hadn’t even known that the university Cleora taught at was in Domara. Somehow that had never come up.
“You know your way around well,” Kerrigan noted.
“My presence is requested in Carithian often.”
“I didn’t know you lived in Domara.”
“When I realized you weren’t on the same plane as me, there was no reason for me to tell you anything about my world that wasn’t pertinent to our studies. We rarely had enough time to even cover what we needed to discuss.”
“No, we really didn’t.” She glanced at Fordham. “But you helped me find him again.”
“Only for us to be torn apart,” Fordham said.
“Are you going to tell me what happened to make you both end up here?” Cleora asked.
Kerrigan quickly explained the circumstances of their departure through a portal and how they had both ended up as tournament competitors. Cleora looked skeptical, but someone who spent as much time in the spirit realm as she did had to have a better understanding of how fragile the spaces between dimensions were.
“Can you make these portals yourself?” Cleora finally asked once they reached an empty room and closed the door. “Could you do it now?”
Kerrigan shook her head. “Not only do I not have any magic, but I also couldn’t have done it before. The portal we fell through had been in Alandria for thousands of years.”
“But you turned it on?”
“Well, yes.”
“Hmm,” Cleora said contemplatively. “Without magic?”
“I didn’t do anything. I stepped up to it, and it started working.”
“Plus, you stopped Tarcus,” Fordham reminded her.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t … I didn’t use magic.”
Cleora tilted her head. “What happened with the senator?”
Kerrigan explained how he’d used his magic on her in the gardens. Cleora sucked on her teeth in distaste, but her eyes widened when Kerrigan said she’d broken from the spell.
“Have you done anything else like this?”
She hesitated. “I mean … yes. The woman who first captured me said that I had magic resistance. I woke up from whatever her powers were hours earlier than she’d expected. And someone else tried to use magic on me.” She didn’t want to break Danae’s trust and tell them about her truthtelling, but it was more evidence. “She wasn’t in control of her magic at the time, but was trying to get me to reveal my past. I was able to stop her.”
