Page 4 of What did you do?

“Do. Not. Hide her from me,” I warned the man.

Not yet!I pleaded with myself while feebly attempting to loosen my grip around his throat. The pads of my fingers rebelled, pressing tighter into the coarse stubble on his neck.

“I-I told you, I kn-know nothing. I wouldneverkeep her from you, My Lord,” the wiry man stammered.

“Dirac! Take him now!” I shouted as I lost all composure. I threw the trembling man to the only other fae in the dim and smoggy forest.

My friend, if that’s what he was, gathered the weathered TreeTamer and slammed him against the tree directly behind us.

I was losing it, and I couldn’t afford to lose it—not now. Not when he might have answers. Different answers. Answers that Ineededto hear.

Dirac spared me a concerned look before turning back on the man with a smirk.

“You feel it, don’t you, mate?” the large fae whispered. Dirac grinned wide at the bleeding man and pushed the smooth, gray blade harder against the weathered skin of his throat. “You thought him unhinged before, eh? Look at our prince now.” He nodded in my direction with a smirk. “We have word you were seeing to the whispering oaks a few miles from the Elf and Hanabi portals the same day the human assassin left.”

Of their own accord, my feet began to pace in an all-too-familiar rhythm. The skin covering my knuckles tightened until I was certain I would crush my own bones.

She belonged to me.

I wanted to kill him for putting the goddess—mygoddess—in the man’s mind.

She wasfucking mine.

She didn’t belong in anyone else’s head but mine. Stars knew she had taken up every empty space of it in her absence. She was all I could think about.

I snarled in frustration while my fists started to pull tufts of wild, black hair from my head. The scar on my back where she had stabbed me stretched with tight, new flesh, further reminding me of how much I ached to get ahold of her.

Both men shifted uncomfortably. My wings of smoke pulsed, but like usual these days, they remained pinned to my back. Black smog billowed around me, inching its way closer to where Dirac held the villager.

“I swear!” The man grew frantic at the sight of my smoke.

A Smoke Slayer was only as dangerous as his smoke, and I was practically fuming wisps of acid.

His heart beat like drums in my ears—drums that pounded out a symphonic crescendo, begging me to include his cries of pain.

“I swear, I saw no one! There was no one in the woods that entire day. You—you know who was behind this.We all know it!Just like all the other traitorous humans! Everyone knows she’s with the Seelie prince?—”

His head snapped in my hands with a resounding crack the instant I grabbed him. It sent enough relief down my spine, I may as well have cracked my own neck.

My eyes burned a hole in him as I dropped him to the ground and coiled my smoke around each of his arms and legs while replaying his final sentence in my mind over and over.

I watched the man’s limbs pull free from his body with a soothing sound. He had been dead since I snapped his neck, but Idesperatelyneeded to release some of my fury.

If I couldn’t get a handle on myself, all of Unseelie would soon be dead, and I would have a throne but no one to rule.

Even that—a thought that would have normally shaken my soul—didn’t matter anymore. If she and I were the only two left in all the realms, I wouldn’t care.

I would rule her.

I would worship her.

I would punish her.

My chest vibrated with a growl, thinking of that worm calling Callie—or whatever my pet’s real name was—a traitor. I pulled his lower jaw off with an easy tug and threw it into the misty forest. A bit of tension ebbed as the sharp tang of black blood teased my nose.

“You know he’s right,” Dirac said.

Nearly tripping, I spun to throttle him. Friend or not, he wouldn’t speak about her.

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