Page 89 of A Dark and Lovely Devastation

The command was enough for Keelin to determine that my sisters had not taken over. He opened the door, and I entered.

Dagda sat at the table. His head shot out of his hands, where he had been cradling it moments before. A war of emotions ran across his face. The ability to sense what he felt was muffled, and I had to pause to search it out. There it was… pain, sorrow, a bit of annoyance. And a gentle hope.

“You knew,” I breathed out the words. “You knew Niamh was the leader of the Fomori.”

His eyes grew round even while his expression tightened. “How did you—”

“Yes or no,” I snapped.

His jaw clenched. “I never believed she was the organization’s leader. However, I did suspect, for a time, that she might be involved with them.”

I paced to contain the emotions roiling within me. “How much did you suspect?”

He watched me pace. When he answered, his voice was quiet. “Enough to be fairly certain.”

“And yet you did nothing?”

Guilt and pleading flashed through the bond. “She was all I had left. My only family—”

I spun on him. “She almost killed me!”

Dagda rocked back.

“And you… you could have stopped it.” Breath after heavy breath expelled from my lungs. I thought of Thaya, impaled on the horn of the black unicorn and my unending self-loathing that accompanied it. “Thaya’s death, the battle, my need to use that damn scepter that awoke my sisters within me. You could have stopped all of it if you had onlydone something.”

“She was my daughter. We had years and years, lifetimes in human terms, so many memories. How could I throw that aside? How could I destroy the only relationship I had left?”

“You’re weak,” I snarled, and Dagda flinched. “Your unconditional love nearly caused the downfall of this world and untold violence in the human realm.” The whole damn point of the Fomori was the destruction of the Otherworld, which could only be achieved with my death. But when Niamh was seconds away from ending me, I’d seen the satisfied hatred in her eyes. Killing me was personal.

My fingers clasped the heartstone, and I yanked it up over my head, over my disheveled hair. I held it out. “I want to be free of this bond.”

Dagda rose to his feet, slowly, deliberately. His vast gaze had narrowed on me, a vein jumping in his neck.

When he didn’t respond, I demanded. “It can be done, can’t it?”

He pressed his knuckles into the table, and he spoke through clenched teeth. “The oncemate bond can be broken, but once it is, it can never again be reforged.”

“Good. What do we do?”

His face tightened, his eyes turning molten. “We will not break this bond.”

“I said I want out—”

“I will not break this bond for one blip of a life of you hating me!” he snarled.

His words rang through me, and my fingers closed over the heartstone, my nails digging into my palm.

“Youwillrelease me from this bond.” I hurled it onto the marble floor. A flash, and the feel of lightning striking through my chest, caused me to stagger. Dagda fell back against his chair, and it slammed into the ground.

He raced around the table, collapsing next to the heartstone. It looked almost broken in two, a sliver of stone at the back the only thing holding it together. He gathered it carefully into his hands.

“What have you done?” He glanced up at me, horror on his face.

I gazed down on him, a darkness stealing across me. Wrapping my heart up tight. “I understand now why Morrigan left you.”

I walked out of the room, passing a pale and open-mouthed Keelin in the doorway.

Chapter 30

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