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Everence smiled, but it was tainted with worry. “The fallow crown falls to your brother in four days. There is but one way she can be saved from him. Despite what you think, he will never allow her to return home, not now.”
My hand braced against the wall, and my face fell. “He’ll make me watch her die.” I fisted my hand. “Sun above, I have to stop him.”
Even as she nodded, a new sound reached my ears, and I whirled on the spot.
Talia’s bedroom door stood wide open. Leaning against the doorway, unkempt and dressed in my own ripped shirt, was my wife.
33
Talia
He’d said he loved me.
I braced myself against the doorframe with my uninjured side and stared at Rafael. My pulse pounded so loudly, I was certain he could hear it. Everence stood behind him, but I barely noticed her presence. For a long moment, no one moved. His chest expanded in rapid breaths, and his cheek bore the faint line of a tear stain. Was he crying?
The way he looked at me made standing difficult. Or perhaps that was just the throb in my side from a lingering knife wound. His fingers had touched my bare skin below my arm. The gentle way he’d administered the ointment had sent shivers down my whole body. And he loved me.
I blinked hard, breaking his gaze. Could this be a well-performed skit to muddle my emotions? To manipulate me into falling for him? Because it wouldn’t work.
I pinned him with a skeptical glare. “Talking about me?”
His throat bobbed. He said nothing.
Everence slipped around him, her magical glow a welcome distraction from Rafael’s stricken face. She lifted her hands toward me, ushering me into the room.
“Come, we must get you dressed for the journey.”
She placed a guiding hand on my back to turn me around, but my eyes lingered on Rafael. He’d deceived me once already. I couldn’t let his handsome face draw me in again. As Everence reached back to shut the door, I caught sight of Rafael leaning sideways so he could see me before I disappeared.
When his face vanished from view, I lowered myself carefully into the chair that had been scooted beside my bed. Bees hummed merrily to and from their hive. In mere days, the hive had blossomed with activity, as thousands more tiny creatures zoomed about. A few jars of clear, golden honey sat along the shelves, placed there while I was absent.
Everence spied me looking at the beehive. “It’s come alive again,” she said with a smile. Then she carefully dropped to her knees beside me and lifted my arm. I grunted and tried to pull my arm back, but she hissed at my objections and lifted the shirt aside to examine the wound. After she’d clicked her tongue twice, I rolled my eyes.
“Something wrong?”
He loved me. Focus. He was a murderer.
She stood, propped one hand on her hip, and tapped her nose with the other. “It should have healed by now. Mortal flesh mends as easily as it breaks.” Her head tilted. “But the blade did have dragon blood on it.”
“Dragon blood? That snake didn’t have any wings. Or legs.”
“Yes, a twice-cursed beast, that one. It used to have both wings and legs.”
I cringed.
“The poor thing never did have much of a chance at restoration.” Her face fell. “Rafael never gave up hope for her, though.”
Her? “That thing was a woman?”
“Used to be.” The blueish glow around her golden-white hair flickered momentarily as she stared at me with a pinched brow. Soon, she started bustling around the room, extracting items from the armoire, the bath chamber, and a squat trunk against the far wall. She piled everything on the unmade bed: dresses, bathing cloths, combs, tiny bottles, and little wooden boxes.
As she laid out one particularly stunning gown, silver as moonlight and studded with tiny, sparkling beads, she looked up at me again. “The longer a fae remains in his or her cursed form, the less they retain of their original mind. That one had been alive nearly seven hundred years in her dragon form, then another five hundred and sixty in that awful body you saw. There wasn’t much of her left. Only rage.”
Everence paused for a moment, her hands on either side of the elegant dress, then pivoted and strode around the bed to take something from the table beside me. It was the jeweled dagger Rafael had given me as a replacement for the one I’d lost—Zara’s dagger.
My eyes followed her, remaining fixed on it as she placed it on the bed too. Emeralds glittered on the golden hilt. “I don’t want that.”
She ignored me and kept packing.
