Page 54 of A Dance With Fire
“Oh?” He could hear the amusement in Valerio’s voice. He didn’t turn to look at the prince, but he knew he’d find his lips pressed into a thin line and his eyebrows up to his hairline.
“I could have easily mistaken their footsteps for someone else’s. The next time they wander the forest, they might not be so lucky.”
“Hmm, I’ll have Clay or Uric speak with them.”
Ryker grunted once again. His eyes darted through the darkness, but he felt distracted, his mind restless… his body aching.
“The Fire Dancer—”
Ryker snorted, interrupting his prince.
“You despise her so. Why?”
Ryker shifted slightly as if by moving he could expel the discomfort the question brought from his body. “I have my reasons,” he muttered. Reasons he didn’t want to talk about. But Valerio knew them anyway.
“Ryker, is this about Mairin? It was a hundred years ago.”
And yet the pain felt like it had been yesterday.
Ryker didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. Valerio, though was his prince, knew better than to pry into Ryker’s mind, his past, or his feelings.
Fucking feelings.
All he’d ever felt for years had been rage, grief, sorrow. He’d become familiar with such things like all Fae had. Yet when he felt, he felt profoundly, wholly. It consumed him like a blight that spread through his soul and blackened his heart.
He couldn’t remember what love tasted like. Whatlusttasted like.
Until today.
The fact enraged him. It haunted him enough to push him from slumber. It had led him here, to keeping watch at ungodly hours so he didn’t have to face the truth of his own dreams.
“Ryker…”
“Hmm?” He couldn’t turn to meet his prince’s eyes. He’d never been frightened before, but he was afraid the truth would be read from his own eyes. That Valerio would look at him and know what had happened. The way he’d held the Fire Dancer to his chest and watched Orna and Des with a pounding heart and an aching cock.
There had been something taboo about what they’d done, watching a scene that hadn’t been meant for their eyes.
He should have tugged her away the moment he saw Orna step from between the trees. The only reason he’d even pulled her behind that bush was because he hadn’t recognized the footsteps. That just went to show how much the fire Fae distracted him.
Something he’d never admit to anyone. Something he didn’t even want to admit to himself.
“I think it’s time you moved on from the pain.”
He didn’t say anything, even as Valerio waited. When Ryker didn’t open his mouth, Valerio clapped him on the shoulder.
“Get some rest,” he said, and then he was walking away.
But all Ryker could do was stare off into the distance and grit his teeth. There were words on the tip of his tongue that he could never say.
It was the pain that helped him move on.
The pain, the grief, the sorrow. He held onto those and let them blacken his soul.
A part of him barely remembered what everything else felt like.
But maybe there was no difference between death, lust, and love at all.
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