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“I lost the right to your love three years ago in a Dublin garret with another man’s name on my lips. Had I known you lay still in my future—” she shrugged. “I’m sorry, Aidan.”
“And if I choose to overlook it?” His words held an edge of irritation. His eyes flicking to her waist before meeting her stare for stare.
Hand splayed on the flat of her stomach, she smiled through a haze of tears. “You’d never be allowed to. Not for one minute. Look around you, Aidan. You need a wife who can bring more to the marriage than gossip and sidelong glances. You were right to court Miss Osborne. She’s the woman who can restore your fortune and your home. She’s your future.”
He reached for her again, but she evaded him with a move that sent her across the room. Safe from his grip. Safe from her indecision.
“I told you once I wouldn’t let you fall, Cat,” he argued. “Trust me.”
She opened the door. The cold solidity of the knob like an anchor against the persuasive, silken voice. She wanted to believe. Wanted to imagine a future beyond that of cosseted mistress. Sharing his body. His heart. His life.
“No, Aidan,” she answered. “In this, you must trust me.”
The sea shone like rubbed pewter, the line of the horizon indistinguishable from the gray skies above. Clouds flat and wide. A wind carrying the threat of rain to come.
He’d dreamt again. The Unseelie presence hovering. Building. Gaining strength.
Waking, he’d felt the frozen burn of his scar licking at his muscles. Throbbing with an ache drilling to the center of his bones. Luring him toward a face-off he knew he’d lose.
Had he meant what he’d told Cat? Did it matter whether Máelodor gained the diary? Found the sacred objects and brought Arthur back for another go at uniting the Other into a glittering magical army? Or would a world founded in Duinedon blood be a world worth having at all? Would his race have sacrificed their humanity in a vain attempt to grasp at a universe that had never existed except in story? The Lost Days not merely lost, but imagined?
The playing pieces had been gathered by his father—the Rywlkoth Tapestry, the Sh’vad Tual.
The game set into motion with the discovery of the diary. Cat’s translations.
Now he must choose a side.
He’d come here this morning, bleary and thick. Empty handed. No ropes. No axe. No anchors. No desire to attempt the cliff ascent. Instead, he plucked stones from the rocky strand. Tossed them out across the waves, seeking answers in the infinite ocean’s tides.
But even that effort had been abandoned by the time Jack found him propped against a fist of slippery rock revealed by the tide’s ebb. Spray silvered his hair. Crusted his cheeks like dried tears.
His cousin’s shadow stretched across the beach. Scattered the blennies skimming the tide pool’s surface. “Is it true? You plan on handing the diary over to Lazarus?”
He drummed his fingers against his thigh. “You’ve been speaking with Cat.”
“She’s worried.”
“She’s given up the right to worry, hasn’t she?” he snapped.
Jack sidestepped the loaded comment by ignoring it completely. “If you’re correct about what the diary contains, letting Máelodor gain possession of it would be catastrophic.”
Aidan rounded on him. “Weren’t you the one harping on Duinedon crimes against Other? Of the mortal world’s mounting mistrust and fear of any who possess Fey blood?”
Jack offered a shrug in response. “That doesn’t mean I condone war. The Lost Days are just that—lost. We can’t go back. Don’t know if I’d want to. Magic’s well and good, but I don’t know how comfortable I’d be with it around every corner.”
Aidan fed his remaining stones to the waves. Wiped his hands on his breeches. Stalked the beach, ignoring the painful stretch of knotted muscles as he worked off his mounting frustration. “Then we let the mortal world continue to label us demon spawn? Continue to drive us from our homes? Slaughter us?” He wheeled around. “With none to say enough?”
It all just rolled off Jack like water from a damned duck. “It didn’t work when your father and his friends tried it. It won’t work now. The Amhas-draoi will put a stop to it just as they did then.” He paused, his usual carefree gaze cutting with knifelike precision. “If you don’t put a stop to it first.”
A charged hush fell between them. The wind dying as if they stood within the hurricane’s eye. A sense that Jack was not the only one awaiting his decision.
Voices purred through his consciousness. A twining skein of emotions and opinions. Father’s pride. Mother’s patience. Sabrina’s conciliation. And drowning them out, Brendan’s forceful outrage. He’d surrendered his future to keep the Nine from launching their war. Could Aidan forfeit that sacrifice and hand the diary over without a fight? Render everything he’d done worthless?
Aidan fumbled in his coat pocket. Came up empty. No cheroot to stave off the nerves jumping beneath his skin. Bereft without the comfort of the habit. “Do you think the Amhas-draoi are right? Do you think Brendan is still alive?”
Jack cocked his head in thought. “He could always finagle his way out of the tightest corners. A bit of the Fey luck about him perhaps.” He laughed. “I like to think he’s somewhere out there.”
Aidan paced, reflections of the cloudy sky in every windswept rock pool. Inhaled the mingled aromas of sea and salt and stone and earth.
