Page 23 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers

He peered at me over one broad, muscular shoulder and elegantly arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

He was still holding my lingerie up to the light, so I took advantage of his distraction and reached around to swipe it out of his grip. He lowered his arms to his sides but didn’t turn his body back towards mine.

“I thought you were being snarky earlier, but I’ve seen what you can do, so I don’t want to hear any bullshit about you not being a bloodsucker or anything else. Make them forget the caenim, and the Malum, and everything that’s happened tonight.” I hesitated, feeling the increasing speed of my heart beating in my chest. “Including me.”

Finally, he turned around. “Are you quite sure?”

“Yes.”No, no, no, no. But…beasts with teeth and tongues for eyes and political faerie assassinations and portals and who knows what else. “It’s safer this way, as long as you can remove my scent from the house.”

His eyes were glowing like rays of sunlight through the dark, and they studied me with that same predatory intensity from earlier in the night. “You catch on quickly. Perhaps you are part-faerie, after all.” He sighed. “If I refuse?”

I rolled my eyes. “Then I guess I’ll just have to stay here and pine after you until the day the Malum come to claim me.”

He parted his lips, tongue skating over the edge of his top teeth as he stared into the kitchen through the glass door and considered. “I have one condition.” With preternatural speed, he snatched the white lace negligee from my hands and held it up to me. “You let me keep this.”

“That’s my mother’s,” I lied.

He gave me a crooked smile. “No, it’s not. I said that your scents are similar, not that they are the same.”

I truly was horrified, even as something heated and clenched in my lower belly and my toes curled in my boots.“You’re disgusting.” Looking away from him, I rolled my shoulders back. “Fine. Just…be nice about it.”

Wren shrugged, stuffing the lace into his pocket beneath a dagger. “I really can’t imagine why you don’t seem to think I’m nice. Wait here.”

I did as he asked, holding in the word that my mother and I had both heard coming.

Goodbye.

I turned my back on the door as he slipped through it and tried not to quaver at the enormous amount of trust I was bestowing upon such a cruel, apathetic creature.

Wren had saved my life and the life of my mother, but it was only to win my loyalty for his High King. It was dumb luck that he was tracking the caenim while they were stalking me and that he’d been ordered to eliminate them. Any glimpses of kindness he’d shown me in between insulting and degrading me had been the acts of a trickster. After all, he’d had no interest in me—or in shielding me from long-term danger—when he thought I was entirely human.

Maybe he pities me a little bit.

He had such a low opinion of humans and half-humans. Perhaps my father’s act of cowardice had stirred some deeply buried semblance of sympathy that I’d been born to him, whether by blood or name.

It didn’t matter.

Even as I glanced over my shoulder when Wren finally exited the townhouse to check that my mother and sister were still alive, the voice in my head whispered words of solace and relief. Brynn was yawning in our mother’s arms. I turned away before they rose from their seat at the kitchen table, but not before noticing that there were suddenly only two chairs.

The washing line, too, had been magically cleared of all my clothing. I knew that Wren hadn’t used his powers to fold it and put it away in my bedroom.

No, it was gone. Like it had never existed.

LikeIhad never existed.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Wren purred in my ear, pointing towards the gap in the fence, “therearesuch things asnicefaeries. We call them sprites.”

“I thought sprites were supposed to be wicked and cruel,” I mumbled, trudging in the direction he urged me to walk. When I ducked my head beneath the upper beam and slipped through to the other side, I was not at all surprised to find Wren waiting there as if he’d simply walked through the wood.

“Well, they can be, I suppose,” he mused. “But I think they’d be quite taken with your sister. They’re nice to the people they like.”

I huffed a humourless laugh. “And you?”

“I’m nice to everyone.”

“Right.”

Through the waist-high grass on the slope by the river, we slipped deeper into the night, skirting around the fringe of the housing estate away from the town bridge. Crickets and frogs clicked and croaked along the water’s edge, falling silent as we passed them and then picking up their songs as we continued to walk. The moon was low in the sky, a crescent in shades of grey, white, and yellow. Stars shone brighter the further away from Belgrave’s township we went, and with Wren walking a few steps ahead of me, there was no trace of that golden light.

---