Page 42 of War of Her Heart

I knew it was because she was fighting the pull. Sometimes she let it bring her to me, like the night she let herself dance so closely to me, and sometimes she pushed me away. When she wanted to push me away, she must have thought of all the things I’d done and what I was capable of.

My gods, that night. It had played on repeat in my mind the past few days. Feeling her body on mine, how she melted into my touch, the things I wanted to do to her.

“The shadows, mind reading, and,” she paused as she glanced down to her feet, “the touch of death, like what you did last night.” Every time she looked away from me, I did everything I could to get her to look back at me. So I could see her beautiful brown eyes again.

“What you saw was only a glimpse of what I can do, love.”

“What do you mean?” she said as she looked back into my eyes. “You touched the paramic and it just misted into nothing.”

“My ‘touch of death,’ a name the scholars have come up with since they have never found another faerie with this gift, can kill any creature that I touch. But do you remember how I told you my shadows were an extension of me and my senses?”

“Yes,” she said, waiting for my response.

“I have learned how to use my touch of death through my shadows,” I paused for a moment as I listened for her heartbeat. I wanted to see how she reacted to the darkest parts of me. “Meaning, I can kill anything or anyone I want no matter how far away they are.”

I waited for her heart rate to jump or for the fear to come over her face again, but instead she said, “So I was right.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, taken aback by her response.

“Your shadows can consume others.”

I thought about what she said. My shadows do noteat, but from an outsider’s perspective, shadows circling a creature and then the creature disappearing may look like the shadows consumed them.

“I guess they do,” I said, smirking. She was so focused on learning everything she could that she wasn’t fighting the pull. She wasn’t forcing herself to think about how evil I was. Instead, she was hanging on every word I said, and I didn’t think she realized that she was slowly moving closer to me.

“What do you know of my parents?” I asked. I didn’t want to give her a chance to think about what she was doing.

“I thought Lilian was your mother, so anything I’ve read is probably wrong.”

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t let my hatred for Lilian ruin this conversation with Violet. I needed to stay around her for as long as I possibly could. To test how close she would get to mebefore either her relationship with Calum or her pills would pull her away from me.

“What did you read?” I asked.

“Why don’t you tell me the truth, and I’ll tell you if theMountain Realm history bookshave it right,” she said.

I smiled at the attitude she had given me. Without even realizing it, she was getting more comfortable with me.

“I killed my father,” I said as I held my breath.

“Maybe he deserved it.”

There was the pull. The bond that would make her believe anything I did was done for a good reason. I watched as her face immediately changed as if she was shocked that she said that. The pills seemed to fight the bond every time it tried to show itself to her. I knew the pills weren’t to suppress our bond. No one could have known we were mates when she was a baby. The suppression of our bond was just collateral damage to the pills suppressing something else inside of her.

But that was something I could deal with at another time. Right now, I needed her to trust me.

“Why don’t I tell you everything and then you tell me if my father deserved it?”

18

Chapter 18

Violet

I couldn’t believe those words came out of my mouth. Why would I try to justify Sebastian’s actions after everything I knew about him? Just because he’d saved me twice?

He grinned at my response, as if he had been waiting for me to say something so absurd, like a father deserved to die at the hands of his own son.

“Why don’t I tell you everything and then you tell me if my father deserved it?” he asked, seeing the regret on my face for what I had said. As much as I wanted him to leave, I wanted to know more. Ineededto know more, and he was going to use that to his advantage. To stay with me as long as he could.

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