Page 24 of Crowned By the Fae King

A door shut forcefully, not quite a slam.

Danica slid in through the doorway and leaned against the frame, crossing her arms over her chest with a rueful expression. "It is, actually," she said. Her mouth tugged to the side. "You probably weren't around a lot of fae, right?"

I shrugged, a little awkwardly, given that I was topless and wearing her underwear, with only a sheet for modesty. "Not really. The overseers were fae, but probably ninety percent of the people at the mine were humans. Maybe more."

"Well," she said, flipping open the shield on one of the eternally-glowing lamps, a glass shape filled with a liquid the fae called lambence. "There's a couple pretty key cultural differences."

"You don't even know what culture I'm from," I pointed out. I crossed my arms over my chest. "Human cultures are pretty diverse."

She flashed me a smile. "What culture are you from?"

Well, bluff called, I supposed. "Vietnamese-American. I'm from Long Beach. Los Angeles area."

"What a coincidence," Danica said, in a way that suggested it wasn't coincidental at all. "I got picked up from L.A., too. Used to live in Koreatown." She blew a breath out through her nose. "Faery doesn't correspond exactly to the mortal world, but there's regions that are more associated than others. This part of Faery, you see a lot of mortals from the western coasts of North America, Europe, and Africa, for some reason. It doesn't really matter, though."

"Oh?" I asked, not moving from my position on the bed.

She didn't seem to mind the combativeness. She just smiled again, and said, "Not a lot of mortal cultures where a guy caught groping an unwilling girl gets his hands cut off for it."

I stared at her.

"Yeah." Danica came over and took a seat in one of the two chairs at what was probably a breakfast table. "As you might imagine, people who can literally feel the balance of debt are pretty weird about it. Their biggest crimes are theft, and the closer that theft is to your core being, the worse the crime. Theft of life, theft of autonomy… Basically, you're not gonna end up on the receiving end of someone's orgasms unless you explicitly consented. So. You know. Cass is pretty torn up about it."

With a grunt, I rubbed at my temples. "He didn't know."

"Yeah, no shit. Hence why he's not submitting himself to a goddamn tribunal." She shook her head, dark strands of hair drifting behind the motion. "It'll be easier for him if you give him a way to make retributions."

"He didn't do anything wrong—" I started, frustration showing in my voice.

Danica held up her hand, palm out. "Hey, don't bite the messenger. I'm just trying to say that you're probably not going to be able to convince him that everything is hunky-dory, so if you want him to chill, give him something to do about it." When I didn't answer, she shrugged. "The other two points of interest for tonight are that fae don't care about nudity—"

"You mentioned that earlier," I said drily.

"—and they see public spaces as an extension of private spaces," she continued, as if I hadn't said anything. "You're probably going to see people having sex, dueling, making bargains, whatever. Don't stare. Don't look at all, if you can help it. It's rude."

I filed that away. It made a couple of my encounters with the fae overseers make a bit more sense. Not that they still hadn't been assholes, but at least I could scratch "exhibitionist" off the list of crimes.

"Anything else?" I asked.

She pursed her lips. "Uhhhmm… no? Oh! Yes. There will be bugs."

"…Bugs."

"Yeah, fae aren't weird about that. Or are, depending on your point of view," Danica said, shrugging one shoulder. "In addition to regular food, they eat bugs, so. There will be bugs at the feast. Probably you won't have to eat them," she added, her lips twitching. "But, you know. Just in case. There's bugs."

I groaned and flopped back onto the bed. "Okay, fine. Public sex and bug snacks. When's the damn thing?"

"You've gotta be ready in about an hour." She got back up and brushed imaginary dirt off her pants. "Me, too, since in addition to being one of Cass' Archangels, I'm the Mirage Duchess. There's already three potential body-servants who've assigned themselves to you," Danica added with an overly-dramatic expression of woe. "All female, two fae and a mortal. A fae man was in the running, too, but he took one look at the expression on Cass' face and changed his mind."

"Whatever," I said, rolling my eyes. Cass hadn't even been aware I existed before this morning; he had exactly zero right to be possessive about me, especially if the rules of the game included hands chopped off for unwanted sexual touching.

"Soulmate possessiveness," she said with a shrug. "It can be pretty bad when you're unbalanced. Sometimes it goes away afterwards, or changes shape."

"Whatever," I said again, still not getting up. "You can send them in, I guess."

In the periphery of my vision, I caught sight of her frowning. I told myself I didn't care. What right did Danica have to judge me? She obviously knew how to exist in this world. She was a duchess and some sort of special attendant to the King, all full of helpful advice for the bumbling newcomer.

Maybe it was just the contrast of our meeting: the glorious Archangel with her bad-boy soulmate doting attendance on her, decked in white and gold… and the filthy, exhausted, half-crazed Queen-by-fiat in her stolen bandit's clothes, whose soulmate didn't even know she existed. Even knowing she was only trying to be helpful didn't make me resent her any less. Someone else could be helpful, not this gorgeous, self-possessed woman who knew my soulmate so much better than I did.

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