Page 182 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Without even meaning to, we’d fallen into a gentle sway, my arms looped around his neck and his hands gripping my hips. Both of us were still covered in layers of all kinds of filth, but I never wanted to miss an opportunity to dance with him again. Not after I’d seen his dead body on the ground. Not after what had happened to our friend.
“Garvis?” I finally whispered after a few beats of pulsing silence.
Coen exhaled roughly.
“I laid him to rest on a lonely isle to the north of here. It was peaceful and quiet and shrouded in mist, and just seemed like the place he would have chosen for himself, i-if he could have.”
His voice snagged on those last few words. I leaned my chest against him, pulling him closer and listening to the strong rhythm of his heart.
Alive. Coen Steeler was alive. And even though I’d spent the last six months loathing him and telling myself I wanted him dead, we were even more officially enemies now.
I was set to join the Good Council. He was the Good Council’s greatest threat—an oath-bound monster with a jade-encrusted sword who could breach the dome at any time. The queen of Sorronia’s deadliest weapon. The Fated General and head of the entire faerie fleet.
Yet I’d never felt so safe against the chest of someone so deadly.
“Garvis said we had a spark.” I tried to swallow the tears climbing back up my throat. “Do you… do you still feel that spark, too?”
Coen stopped swaying us to peer down at me.
“I neverstoppedfeeling it, Rayna. Every time you looked at me, even when you wanted my head on a spike, I felt it. Sometimes, it was the only thing that kept me going when everything felt so dark.”
My tears climbed higher, but so did my courage. I braved the words that had been brimming inside me for the last day.
“Then I’d like to choose you. And to keep choosing you… if that’s what you want, too.”
After a moment of surprised silence, during which he traced every contour of my face with his eyes, Coen gave me a smile that ignited in their smoky quartz like an ember among ash.
“You are my devastation, Rayna. My catastrophic event. And you are the one who put me back together into who I am today. I can’t think of anything or anyone I’d like to choose more than you.”
When he lowered his lips to mine once more and I got to taste that promise on his tongue, the world beyond the darkness around us—I could have sworn itshivered.
Because official enemies or no, whether she thought Coen was dead or not, Dyonisia Reeve didn’t know what was coming for her. She and the queen of Sorronia were playing a deadly game with each other, each of them using one ofusas a weapon.
But what neither of my aunts realized was that together, Coen Steeler and I were two sides of the same blade—a double-edged sword that could slice back.
And we didn’t have to be their pawns.
We could be players, too.
EPILOGUE
COEN
“Her Majesty would like a word with you… General Steeler.”
I was back on the ship with Terrin, Dazmine, and the twins, the ocean air stinging against my eyes.
It had only been six hours since I’d last seen Rayna, and I already missed her: her warmth, her beautiful, wild mind, the softness of her skin, and that glimmering, jade-green light in her eyes.
But she was at the Institute, currently taking her rescheduled second quarterly test. I didn’t want to disrupt her focus, and the captain of our ship was mashing her lips at me with an impatient crossing of her arms.
The captain hated me for accepting the oath, I knew, but there was nothing she could do about it—except, perhaps, gloat in my face when the queen of Sorronia wanted to speak with me.
Nobody in their right mind enjoyed the presence of the queen of Sorronia… even when she was hundreds of miles away, speaking to us through glass.
My newfound tie to Her Majesty was punishment enough.
Spitting out a few curses and catching the pity-filled glances of the others, I stomped after the captain. She led me into a room where crimson drapes lined the windows, casting an eerie red glow around the ornate mirror looming over me.
