Page 14 of Faeling
“But you could look.”
“No.”
“No?” She’d never refused him before. “No, you can’t? Or no,you won’t?”
Her jaw worked, and for a moment, Vallek thought she wouldn’t answer him at all.
Finally, her shoulders dropped from where they’d scrunched up to her ears, and she closed her eyes. Quiet fell between them, but it wasn’t one of the comfortable silences he’d come to enjoy, where they mulled their next move.
He couldn’t quite tell, with her eyes closed, whether she truly used her gift. Her body went a little more lax, but otherwise, she sat still in her chair.
It was a long while before she spoke, and Vallek waited impatiently. He couldn’t decide which disturbed him more—her denial or her defiance. She’d shown him neither before, and both displeased him.
Finally, she lifted her head, although when her eyes opened, she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“I don’t see anyone, my king.”
“No one at all?”
Chewing her cheek, she admitted, “None.”
Vallek frowned and stood from the table. No bride? Could that really be true?
Turning from their game, Vallek put some distance between him and his soothsayer. He’d never disliked one of her fortunes—or lack thereof—before.
So accustomed now to successes and triumphs, disappointment sat bitter at the back of his tongue. He didn’t want to swallow it.
“It’s late,” he said. “You may go.”
Still refusing to look him in the eye, the soothsayer stood. She didn’t jump from her seat and dash away as he half-expected herto, but she did flee after a polite bob of her head.
“Goodnight,” she muttered and then was gone.
Vallek stood in place for a while longer, not wanting to face the possibility of what this could mean. The idea of a life alone stretched out before him, a vast emptiness that his soul raged against.
No. No, that couldn’t be true.
Could she be wrong? Or perhaps not have had a vision yet? Perhaps her gift wasn’t as precise as she’d led him to believe.
Perhaps if there wasn’t a bride in his future…could that mean there was a mate instead? Why would she not tell him if so? She’d never requested he be precise in his semantics before.
A tendril of suspicion brushed his cheek. Did she lie? And if so, had she lied before?
His beast rumbled unhappily and unhelpfully, the questions roiling inside him worse than heartburn. He could ask her, he supposed. Whether she saw amatein his future.
But did he want to know her answer?
4
“It was just sudden is all. He’s never asked about anything like that before. I don’t know that he’s even taken a lover in years.” Ravenna hoped, the more she prattled on about the other night and the awkward way it’d ended, that she might start to believe it was less disastrous than it felt.
She was deluding herself, of course. The moment the question fell from his lips, the possessive fae inside her had viciously hissed a denial—there’s no one for you but me. It’d taken all her will to keep her magic from leaping across the table to wrap itself around him in a proprietary vice. Honestly, if he hadn’t dismissed her, she might have fled of her own volition.
Perhaps it was for the best. She could serve him and oversee her goals without nightly games wherein she found and hoarded every new little discovery about him. She would miss his company, but she didn’tneedit. Or him.
Oberon blew her hair back in a smug huff.You’re jealous.
Ravenna looked up from her lap, where she’d been stringingdaisies together into a little flower crown, to glare at the chortling stallion bastard. “I amnotjealous.”
