Page 136 of A Dance With Fire
“She didn’t tell him what she was. She hid it with glamor, and he never suspected, never went around her with iron or ashwood. I don’t know who the bigger fool was. Her for lying, him for not realizing it, or me for not stopping her from seeing him.”
“If he was her mate, I don’t think there’s much you could have done…”
“I warned her. I told her not to hide it from him, but I didn’t stop her. I should have fucking stopped her. She was soashamedof our kind that she flounced around pretending to be human so he would love her. Then the day came when he found out. You’d think he would have been lenient because she was his mate, but he was a soldier, betrayed, and he despised the Fae.”
“Ryker—”
“They tortured her. Raped her. Took turns.” Hatred burned in his words, his posture, within every single inch of him. “They left her hanging from an oak tree for me to find, her face carved up, and I tried. I tried to save her, but all I got were these scars.” He gestured at his face, the raised flesh pulling taut at the rest of his skin. “I got her pain, the pain of what those beasts did to her, and not just the cuts, but everything else, too.”
She took a wavering step towards him. “Ryker…”
“All because she thought she should hide who she was. If she’d had the slightest bit of Fae pride, instead of betraying who she was to fit into what the humans want us to be. She betrayed herself for a human who didn’t deserve her. She didn’t have to say it, but I knew she was ashamed of what she was. Hatred does that. It makes us change. When it looks us in the eye long enough, we start looking back at it like we’re looking into a mirror until we hate ourselves. Mairin hated herself.” His eyes burned on Shula. “And I see that in you too. Cowardice. Fear.Hatred.”
Shula rocked back on her heels. “That’s not fair,” she choked out. Tears stung the backs of her eyes. “I told you why I had to hide—”
“But youkeephiding, Shula!” he screamed, and she flinched at the sound as if he’d struck her. He growled and lowered his voice. “You keep hiding from what you are and what you’re meant to be.”
“I’m not meant to be anything! I didn’t choose this!”
“Mana gave it to you, regardless of what you want or wish you had. You’re an Elemental Fae, and you have the power to change the world, but you’re too fucking cowardly to accept it.”
“It’s not my fight,” she argued.
Ryker scoffed. “Pathetic.” Then he stepped off to the side and gestured to the direction she’d been walking towards. “Leave, then. It’s better if you walk away now.”
Shula swallowed the emotion rising in her throat. At this goodbye, the anger and evident hatred. Everything they’d built together, the hatred, the training, the understanding, thekiss, it all came back to this again.
She’d told him time and time again what she felt, what she thought, and he couldn’t look past what had happened to his sister to see that maybe Shula was different. That maybe it wasn’t shame driving her away at all, but the bad luck. The hurt. The fear of seeing everyone around her die. The helplessness. Being used and discarded.
She felt it all.
A sense that she’d never really belong anywhere because in the end she always brought more harm than good.
So Shula did what she had to do.
She walked away from him, but his voice trailed after her.
“I don’t need a coward for a mate.”
And it was those words that had her halting. That had the heaviness in her chest dropping. A sense of magic purred inside and clicked into place. Like those were the words she’d been waiting to hear her whole life. They settled. Right. Perfect. Pieces falling together.
She whirled. “What did you just say?”
His lips were pressed into a thin line, his eyes hard. “You’re my mate, Shula.”
She felt like he’d struck at her with a blade. The words tore through her body, slowly, painfully, and they settled. Familiar enough with the agony to embrace it as inevitable, as the truth.
Everything came to her, a flash of lightning through her mind. The laughter two nights before, Ryker’s behavior at dinner, and everything in between. Talk of mates, Weylyn’s questioning by the river.
Everyone had known.
Everyone except for her.
She gritted her teeth, hands tightening into fists. “How long have you known?”
He blinked. “I suspected when you ran into me outside the temple of the Brotherhood. I knew for certain when we arrived at Castle Aileach.”
Months.
