Page 7 of What did you do?

Just like when…

Eli was in front of me before I could blink.

“What’s wrong? What is it, Caly?” Eli scanned the small room, his amber eyes flashing with the quickness and ferocity of the fox he was capable of shifting into.

“I-I… You didn’t hear anything?” I asked, shaking myself free from whatever delusional fog had just tricked my mind into hearing voices.

Malum Mendax couldn’t talk to me through our bond. It was impossible…because I had killed him.

And killing him was theonlyreason I was granted passage into Seelie tonight.

“No, nothing.”

“I’m so fucking nervous, I’m hearing things,” I grumbled.

“Well, it’s been a chaotic few weeks since you’ve been back from that forsaken land. Suns knows you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since your return. Every night I wake up on the couch hearing you pacing about your room, mumbling. It sounds like a ghost is in the house.” He chuckled softly.

Every hair on my body rose.

I had slept like a rock since my return, always waking up in the exact spot I fell asleep in. It wasn’t me that he heard.

The dreams were the only thing that soothed me anymore.

My fae best friend moved in for a hug, and my whole body tensed.

Our eyes locked as he stepped back quickly, noting the small display of black smoke that rose from my exposed forearms.

It had been happening since I awoke in the hospital.

Every time Eli got close enough to touch, the onyx smoke seemed to whisper a dark warning. We had decided it must have something to do with my being bonded to Mendax and him dying, but neither one of us could fully explain away the oddity. Every time it happened, I didn’t miss the millisecond of sadness that filled Eli’s eyes, as if he knew something I didn’t.

“Once I’m in Seelie and Saracen mends together the other half of my heart, all of this darkness will be over. All of the thoughts ofhimwill end, and I will finally,finallyfeel at peace again. I will finally get to be with them,” I whispered, needing to believe it. Whether he deserved to die or not didn’t matter to me. I wished I hadn’t had to kill him, but if it got me to Seelie, I’d do it all over again. I’d do anything to get to Seelie.

Mendax was nothing more than the dragon that needed slain to get to my treasure.He didn’t love me; he didn’t even know me…and I didn’t love him.

I don’t.

People like us couldn’t love—or not in that way. It wasn’t love.

It just wasn’t. Lust, most likely.

Maybe if he’d have let me orgasm instead of edging me to the point of death, I wouldn’t be thinking about him so much.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t love.

This had been my mantra since leaving the hospital. I had berated and chastised myself a thousand times already, but none of it mattered.

I still missed him. Painfully so.

No one had ever seen the real me—all of me—and it was a horrible irony that when I did actually, willingly allow him to see the real me…I was pressing a dagger into his back and killing him.

What had that made me?

What kind of a monster had I become?

My jaw felt stiff and tight.

Sometimes you become the monster for the ones you love.

---