Page 4 of Crown of Darkness
His voice warns me.
“Yes. Why?”
“Maybe it wasn’t just a dream,” he murmurs, stroking his hand across his knuckles. “Some fae can pick the thoughts from others. And while my wards are impenetrable, you’re the one person I might lower my defenses against.”
His words slowly penetrate as I turn the faucet off. “You mean, I’m picking up on your thoughts?”
“Or memories.”
“You were left on an altar in the forest?”
I remember the day he told me of how Old Mother Hibbert takes all those lost and abandoned babies and raises them in Unseelie.
Thiago crosses the room toward me, wrapping his arms around me from behind. He presses a kiss to the back of my neck. “Yes.”
“You wouldn’t remember it.” He was just a baby, and no matter how strong his magic is, there would have been nothing to hold onto.
I can’t be seeing his memories.
His dark lashes obscure his eyes as I turn in his arms. “It was the first nightmare I ever had. A recurring one. One of the other children told me that my mother had cast me to the forest for the wolves to eat, and that’s what I dreamed of for months. I would cry and wriggle, but I could never escape. I was too little. Helpless. And then the wolves come.”
I rub his knuckles, trying to chase away the shadows in his eyes. “He sounds charming.”
“We weren’t all friends.” His voice roughens. “Old Mother Hibbert takes all that she finds. Not all of them are babies. The older ones are the ones that struggle with it the most, because they can remember their fae parents leading them out to the forest and tethering them to the altars. I don’t blame him for being angry. He made my early years miserable, but I can’t even remember his name now.”
The bristles that line his jaw spike roughly against my hand as I stroke his cheek. “What was it like?”
Thiago softens into my touch and sighs. “Hectic. Loud. Cold. Old Mother Hibbert had over a hundred of us there in her hut—”
“A single hut?”
His lips kick up wryly. “It’s not the kind of hut you could imagine. The inside is bigger than the outside, and there are chambers burrowed into the walls and tunnels. It’s a labyrinth, and sometimes the walls and doors changed. Sometimes rooms moved. Sometimes the hut even moved, though it did so mostly at night, and we’d only notice when we woke and found ourselves in a new part of the forest.” He stares blankly into the mirror. “It was cold though. Always cold. And there was never quite enough food.”
I hate that he spent his childhood this way.
“Sometimes the foraging parties wouldn’t return,” he admits in a lower voice. “Old Mother Hibbert would ring the bell when that happened, and we’d all have to return to our rooms and hide under our beds. She’d lock the doors and ward the hut, and we had to be silent. So silent. If we didn’t make it back in time—” He exhales sharply. “There are many creatures who hunger for fae flesh in Unseelie. And children are the most vulnerable. Old Mother Hibbert tried to protect us as best she could, but over a dozen children vanished every year. It was… a nervous upbringing.”
I step into his body and wrap my arms around him. Thiago stiffens, but then he slowly relaxes into the embrace, his callused hand coming up to stroke the ripple of my spine through my nightgown.
He’s been there every step of the way for me.
It’s only right that I return the favor.
“I wish that I could take that away for you.” And maybe this is the reason I looked into his eyes that long-ago night of Lammastide and saw the other half of my soul.
We have both been lonely.
We have both been lost.
I always thought I was the broken one, but maybe he’s broken too? Maybe our jagged edges can meet in the middle and somehow… fill each other up.
“Pain is what shapes you,” he murmurs, cupping my face and tilting my chin up. His gaze falls to my lips. “I would never give up a single moment of suffering, a single step in my path, because it all brought me here. To you, Vi.”
This prince. I don’t deserve him.
But my tongue, as always, won’t say what I want to say. “Even if I make deals with eldritch creatures?”
Thiago’s gaze falls to my lips. “Keeps life interesting.”
