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The woman staring up at me, her face so pleasant in its simplicity—no elaborate glamours to obscure her form—was now mine to protect. Of all the blazing words in the human vocabulary, they’d chosen that one to include in their marriage vows.
Mortals were selfish and frivolous, anchored only by their petty religions and deep-seated hatred of death—so, of course, a mortal man’s vows would revolve around protecting his wife as they marched toward the grave.
Hector’s gaze burned into me, but I couldn’t face him. In truth, I couldn’t face myself, or this woman, or her two loving parents, so I stared blankly at the dusty whitewashed wall over Talia’s shoulder.
She reached for my hands again, to continue this wretched wedding. I knew nothing about this woman except that she wasn’t afraid of me. She should be. If only she knew what she was doing. What I had done.
In a daze, I repeated the final words of her human vows. “To you, I promise my best efforts and my perpetual fidelity, my honest apologies and my greatest weaknesses.”
The words were dull knives, destroying me.
I met Hector’s gaze, and his expression chastised me like I was a child caught stealing.
Moments ago, watching her father press a comforting hand to his daughter’s shoulder, embrace her with such care, and cry over her sudden departure, had evoked a jealousy so deep that I had never felt such rage over my condition. Or shame.
Then, it was her turn to recite the vows. I spoke them carefully, slowly, for her to repeat each phrase. Her voice never wavered, never faltered. She was everything I needed—determined, unafraid, brave to a fault—and yet with each word she spoke, I hated myself more and more.
“I will take on your victories and your losses, your blessings and your curses…”
If I were a good man, I would have pressed a hand to her mouth and stopped the words, but instead I drank them in like tonic.
Her exquisite voice finished, “I will take of yours and make it also mine.”
When she’d finished her vows, I stared at her, memorizing the curve of her eyebrows, the angle of her nose, the color of her lips. Mortals weren’t lovely the way fae women were, but she was beautiful because what I saw was all there was to see—no mask, no glamour, no lies. There could be no atonement for what I’d just done.
In all my decades, all my centuries of life, I’d never once seen a fae father embrace his daughter the way this human man had hugged Talia. Never once had I seen a mother cry over the marriage of her begotten. Fae married and gave birth for one reason: to attain more power.
In all the fae courts, in all the realms of magical creatures I had visited or would ever visit, there would never be for me what she possessed in that single embrace. The ache inside me rekindled three hundred years of pain and, in an instant, set it all to blazing afresh.
From across the small courtyard, Hector’s words nailed my fate to me. “You are now man and wife,” he said, a gruff edge to his words.
I’d made a bargain, and she’d agreed to it. Hector had witnessed it and was bound by our world’s laws to hold me to it. There was no way out of this now. I’d married her so she could die, plain and simple. But her father’s little addition had thrown a stick in the smoothly turning wheel of my plan. To protect her, I had to hide myself from her.
8
Talia
Rafael’s hand slipped out of mine—more like yanked out.
A weight flipped over in my chest. All the days and hours I’d spent dreaming of matrimony had crumbled like rotten wood, leaving me much emptier than I’d ever imagined. Marriage was a union, a joining, a bringing together, yet I felt severed from what I loved most. My eyes lingered on my parents, then swept over the familiar façade of my childhood home. The windows I’d climbed in and out of countless times, both to the laughter of passersby and the scoldings of my mother. The straw roof we always had to repair after particularly heavy rainy seasons. The uneven stones in the courtyard that had been the cause of several skinned knees.
My mother wept silently beside Papá, and my chest threatened to cave in.
All I could manage to tell them was, “I love you.”
“We must be leaving,” Rafael urged.
“Why the hurry?”
He ignored me and walked over to his horse, mounting in one quick motion. When he’d turned his horse around to face the road, he reached a hand down to me. I didn’t move.
“Time is our greatest enemy now,” he said ominously.
“Fine.” When I reached for his hand, he gripped my forearm.
“Jump,” he said.
I did, then I was sailing over the back of his saddle, landing behind him. He glanced over his shoulder before clicking his tongue at his horse. The lurch nearly sent me tumbling to the ground, but I flung my arms forward, wrapping them around the stranger’s middle.
