He blinked. “You practiced.”
I rose from the table and walked away. “I had nothing better to do.”
That night, he left a pile of books by my door with a note.
I have business elsewhere. The house is yours. Send word if you need me.
Days passed—and I didn’t.
Rhys returned at the end of the week. I’d taken to situating myself in one of the little lounges overlooking the mountains, and had almost read an entire book in the deep-cushioned armchair, going slowly as I learned new words. But it had filled my time—given me quiet, steadfast company with those characters, who did not exist and never would, but somehow made me feel less … alone.
The woman who’d hurled a bone-spear at Amarantha … I didn’t know where she was anymore. Perhaps she’d vanished that day her neck had snapped and faerie immortality had filled her veins.
I was just finishing up a particularly good chapter—the second-to-last in the book—a shaft of buttery afternoon sunlight warming my feet, when Rhysand slid between two of the oversized armchairs, twin plates of food in his hands, and set them on the low-lying table before me. “Since you seem hell-bent on a sedentary lifestyle,” he said, “I thought I’d go one step further and bring your food to you.”
My stomach was already twisting with hunger, and I lowered the book into my lap. “Thank you.”
A short laugh. “Thank you? Not ‘High lord and servant?’ Or: ‘Whatever it is you want, you can go shove it up your ass, Rhysand.’?” He clicked his tongue. “How disappointing.”
I set down the book and extended a hand for the plate. He could listen to himself talk all day if he wished, but I wanted to eat. Now.
My fingers had almost grazed the rim of the plate when it just slid away.
I reached again. Once more, a tendril of his power yanked the plate further back.
“Tell me what to do,” he said. “Tell me what to do to help you.”
Rhys kept the plate beyond reach. He spoke again, and as if the words tumbling out loosened his grip on his power, talons of smoke curled over his fingers and great wings of shadow spread from his back. “Months and months, and you’re still a ghost. Does no one there ask what the hell is happening? Does your High Lord simply not care?”
He did care. Tamlin did care. Perhaps too much. “He’s giving me space to sort it out,” I said, with enough of a bite that I barely recognized my voice.
“Let me help you,” Rhys said. “We went through enough Under the Mountain—”
I flinched.
“She wins,” Rhys breathed. “That bitch wins if you let yourself fall apart.”
I wondered if he’d been telling himself that for months now, wondered if he, too, had moments when his own memories sometimes suffocated him deep in the night.
But I lifted the book, firing two words down the bond between us before I blasted my shields up again.
Conversation over.
“Like hell it is,” he snarled. A thrum of power caressed my fingers, and then the book sealed shut between my hands. My nails dug into the leather and paper—to no avail.
Bastard. Arrogant, presuming bastard.
Slowly, I lifted my eyes to him. And I felt … not hot temper—but icy, glittering rage.
I could almost feel that ice at my fingertips, kissing my palms. And I swore there was frost coating the book before I hurled it at his head.
He shielded fast enough that it bounced away and slid across the marble floor behind us.
“Good,” he said, his breathing a bit uneven. “What else do you have, Feyre?”
Ice melted to flame, and my fingers curled into fists.
And the High Lord of the Night Court honestly looked relieved at the sight of it—of that wrath that made me want to rage and burn.
A feeling, for once. Not like that hollow cold and silence.
And the thought of returning to that manor with the sentries and the patrols and the secrets … I sank back into my chair. Frozen once more.
“Any time you need someone to play with,” Rhys said, pushing the plate toward me on a star-flecked wind, “whether it’s during our marvelous week together or otherwise, you let me know.”
I couldn’t muster up a response, exhausted from the bit of temper I’d shown.
And I realized I was in a free fall with no end. I had been for a while. From the moment I’d stabbed that Fae youth in the heart.
I didn’t look up at him again as I devoured the food.
The next morning, Tamlin was waiting in the shade of the gnarled, mighty oak tree in the garden.
A murderous expression twisted his face, directed solely at Rhys. Yet there was nothing amused in Rhys’s smile as he stepped back from me—only a cold, cunning predator gazing out.
Tamlin growled at me, “Get inside.”
I looked between the two High Lords. And seeing that fury in Tamlin’s face … I knew there would be no more solitary rides or walks through the grounds.
Rhys just said to me, “Fight it.”
And then he was gone.
“I’m fine,” I said to Tamlin, as his shoulders slumped, his head bowing.
“I will find a way to end this,” he swore.
I wanted to believe him. I knew he’d do anything to achieve it.
He made me again walk through every detail I had learned at Rhys’s home. Every conversation, however brief. I told him everything, each word quieter than the last.
Protect, protect, protect—I could see the word in his eyes, feel it in every thrust he made into my body that night. I had been taken from him once in the most permanent of ways, but never again.