15

the night Daxeel first doubted Nari

TEN YEARS EARLIER

It was one week after I first met this vicious female that I laid the thorny roses at the foot of the lattice. Her window is levels above, but in the nights I watched from the shadows of the woods, I realized how often she climbs down that very lattice once her household is asleep.

Sometimes, she sneaks off to meet my cousin, Eamon, or to drink that sugar-syrup she calls honeywine in the fields. One night, I lost her scent.

I still don’t know where she disappeared to in these thinning woods. She simply vanished.

But the night I laid out the roses for her, it feels a decade ago, if it ever happened at all. Now that I have her, back against the harsh bark of the willow tree, my mouth traversing the curve of her neck, it feels as though she has always been mine.

I am no stranger to emotion. Rage, compassion, two opposite ends of a rope, and I hold both. My father’s treatment of my mother, of my sister; those memories have seared into me and forged steel. I have lived as a shield.

Around Nari, something else grows. Something new.

She found a bud of tenderness that exists within me, foreign, and took it into her cold, killer hands.

She nurtured it.

Now, there is a softness in me—for her.

But instinct creeps through me, and I graze my teeth over her soft skin.

Her wince is a sharp needle through her. Between me and the tree, her muscles smack to her bones and freeze.

“I won’t harm you—” My face splits with a grin against her neck. “—unless you ask me to.”

A hiss burrows in her chest.

Then the pinch of her nails bites my neck.

“I will,” she warns. “Even if you don’t ask.”

Her promise almost brings me to my knees. The shadows of darkness in her call to me.

There is darkness in her. More than I would have expected from a light halfling.

It is as intoxicating as her tender side, those afraid instincts that must warn her off me—ones she fights.

In that alone, she chooses me.

Now she must leave me. The night is late.

My farewell is a kiss to her jaw. I don’t risk taking it further than that fleeting tenderness.

Hidden in the darkness of the shade, I watch her run back to her home, climb up the lattice and vines, then slip in through the parted window. I always stay, always watch.

She never notices.

Never notices that each time, I wait for her to be safe in her bedchamber before I leave.

I take the trek back to my cousin’s home beyond the court borders, and it’s an hour before my boots are climbing the steps of the front porch.

The house is large enough that it hardly feels crammed with so many folk stuffed into it for the Fae Eclipse, there remains a sense of suffocation, not unlike sleeping with one’s head under the weight of blankets, and I can’t quite shake it.

I endure it.

I have lived decades in barracks, crammed into closets passing as rooms with a half-dozen other males.

It is the light lands that puts me on edge. My bones thrum with the sense of not belonging, always teetering on the edge of threat. My muscles ache with the constant air of light from the moon. And now, as I make my way through the house, my skin crawls—a warning of nearing dawn.

I avoid the drawing room, where the hearth with be crackling and my mother will be having tea with her sister. I take the stairs directly to the third floor. There, another set of thinner, ladder-like stairs ascends, narrow and rickety. They lead to what was once an attic, but is now remade into a blackout room. It was done for me, my visit to the light lands that could, in some rays of the sun, kill me. Sear me to the bone. A painful end, to die by light. A shameful one, too.

Dare has no need for the black paint that cakes the windows in the attic, nor the wooden boards nailed to them, and not the three layers of thick heavy curtains added for the sake of it. He can walk as freely in the sunlight as my cousin can, as any light male or hybrid can.

Still, Dare chooses to lodge in this arched room with me, just as he chooses the dark itself. And so that is where he is when I climb the stairs and duck under the short, squared doorway.

He stands at the mirror, free from the constraints of his armour, smelling faintly of bathwater and soap. Some droplets of water fall from his combed waves and trickle down his spine.

Eamon sits on the foot of my bed.

I spare him a nod of greeting as I make my way to the dresser.

I begin to peel off my leathers piece by piece, and as it always does, it feels something like removing strips of my own skin. I feel the loss.

“You cut it close,” Dare tuts. “That halfling is going to get you killed.”

At the reminder of the nearing dawn, my teeth bare. The threat swarms through me, worms in my veins.

“Our farewell lingered,” I dismiss and roll the tension from my shoulder. “It’s proving more difficult each time to leave her.”

The urges are getting harder to fight.

Eamon’s grumble is as sour as the look he slides my way, “To what end?”

I sigh a soft, weary sound.

Keeping my back to my dull cousin, I steal the washcloth from the soapy pot. The water is warm to the touch.

“Are you not optimistic?” Dare stretches his arms over his head and turns to look at Eamon. He flashes him a grin; one without the warmth of his light tone. “Do you doubt your cousin?”

I run the cloth over my bare body. “I will not stop in this chase,” I tell Eamon for what feels like the hundredth time. “I court her.”

Behind me, he scoffs, bitter. “And what you do you expect to come of it? That her father will decide to sign her away to you —because she is in love?” he spits the last words like too sweet poison, a ridicule.

The frown burrows into my face.

I toss aside the cloth, then turn to face him. “What else would be?”

Eamon’s shoulders jolt. “That you would darken his porch—and he would slam the door in your face.”

“This is evate,” I speak each word with purpose, my lip curling around them. “He will negotiate.”

But with a glance at Dare, I recognize that he, too, isn’t convinced.

My jaw locks, tight.

I look between them.

“He will not stand between evate,” I speak with the conviction that thrives within me.

The moment I learned of Brok Elmfield’s prejudices from my cousin, I took a step back and reassessed my approach. It wouldn’t have done well to take my offer directly to him, and with Nari not feeling anything beyond desire for me so soon, I would not have her support in my offer. It’s support I need. It’s her complaints in her father’s ear that will wear him down, and then free him to negotiate with me.

I needed to douse her fear of me first.

Without Nari in love, I have no audience with her father.

And though by my laws I can simply steal her away, the shame that will reflect on her family, the pain that will cause her, dismisses the option entirely.

My approach is better—with the best outcomes.

But Eamon does not keep the same faith as I do.

“Dokkalves.” Eamon’s eyes flash. The corners of his mouth tuck into his cheeks. “ Dokkalves would not stand between evate, because that is the dark culture. You are speaking of a light male, a once-noble, an ambitious racist—evate to him is nothing.”

I snatch a pair of black linen trousers from an armchair.

As I pull them on, I start, “What do you want me to do, cousin? Abandon my evate because her father has prejudice? He knows as well as I do—as we all do—that there is no true choice here. Only the illusion of one. If he will not open her contracts to me, I will have no other way but to take her. He will see this. So he will take the tocher.”

“And then what?” Eamon grits out the words. He pushes from the bed and starts for the door. “Lock her up in the Shadow Court with your sickly sister and scarred mother?”

My lashes lower.

I feel the air around me shudder with thickening darkness; those fleeting moments of a dormant power long lost in my bloodline. A shadow of a shadow.

Dare moves past me. Still as naked and soap-scented as when I entered, he fixes the curtains, though no light will penetrate the boards nailed to the window frames. I know him well enough to understand he busies himself to stay in the room and listen to every word shared between Eamon and I.

“Your home is hollow.” Eamon falls back to recline against the doorframe. “Nari needs life. Nari is life.”

Under his breath, Dare murmurs, “Is that why she’s always sneaking out of her dead home?”

He draws away from the thick curtains and makes for the narrow bed across the room. As he always did in our years at the barracks, he starts to batter his too fluffy pillow. Prefers them flat like boards.

I set my jaw. “Then I will keep her at Kithe.”

That home is often more vibrant than the one in the Shadow Court.

Aleana prefers it, since the town is just a wandering stroll away.

Dare’s home village is close, so he visits often.

Rune and Samick will lodge there, when they have the time to come.

And there is just enough garden space for Nari to fill with the creatures she thinks beautiful. Ghastly beasts, from faerie hounds that devour souls to pesky pixies if she so dreams.

Kithe will be her home.

Dare throws himself onto the bed. “Do you fancy the halfling, Eamon? For a same lover, you’re quite keen on keeping her for yourself.”

A fragrance of honey and milk whispers from him. From beneath the fresh soap, I place the scent to a female he was courting in lessons, some na?ve halfling too human for her own good.

It’s all in the chase for him. Then his interest will flicker, almost fade, and with that will come a crushing sense of depravation. Dare will close off, submerge himself in a mood that makes him a pain to be around for weeks—then the flicker will return for another.

An eternal search in vain.

Eamon throws a dark look at his fellow hybrid. “Not all love is between the legs. Something you might learn one day.”

Dare rolls onto his side. “Lights out.”

“Wear yourself out?” Eamon snarls the words before he turns and stalks out of the room. Just to be an ass, he leaves the door open and so, with a sigh, I push up from the wall and close it myself.

His back to me, Dare yawns. “You know why he fights this.”

In answer, I’m silent. Because no, I do not know why my cousin tries to keep Nari and I apart. But Dare is perceptive, more than any other I know. It is his future to read folk, since he will choose a particular career of secrets, daggers and shadows.

I drop onto the edge of my bed. And wait.

Dare pulls the fur over himself. “He thinks she’ll bungle. And that will incur your wrath. He is afraid for what her consequences will be when she either loses interest in you—or betrays you. It is Nari he doesn’t trust.”

For a long moment, I sit here. Hands on my knees, still, silent.

Then I dismiss it with a huff and roll onto the mattress.

I don’t sleep. I frown at the total darkness of the wall.