Page 203 of Mama Si's Paradise

“Will you let me make it up to you, baby?” Grey whispered, and I was starting toreallylove it when he called me that.

Fuck, yes,I thought. “Make it up to me, how?”

“Do you trust me?”

The word slipped from me so fast it shocked me. “Yes.” I did trust him. Call me insane, but I trusted him more than I’d trusted anybody else in my whole life.

His eyes lit up again and he smiled. “Hold on tight.”

“Wha—”

Grey pulled me out of the window and his wings stretched wide, beating the air, taking us higher.

I screamed at the top of my lungs and he laughed his heart out. My eyes squeezed shut, though he held me by the waist as steadily as I’d been with the floor beneath my feet. Still, I couldn’t fucking breathe. Rain splattered me everywhere and the wings kept on moving, and Iheardhowpowerful they were as they took us higher and higher and higher…

“Open your eyes, baby,” Grey whispered in my ear.

“No,” I choked. “Just don’t let me go.Please-please-pleasedon’t let go!”

“Never,” he said. “I’ll never let go. You can trust me. Open your eyes, Fall. Take a look at your kingdom.”

The words shocked me to my core.Mykingdom, he called it.

My eyes popped upon involuntarily, and I found him looking at me, like always.

Darkness all around, though I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his face yet.

Grey really had wings on his back.

And I was fucking flying.

Forty-Three

It tookhim a good few minutes to get me to look around.

“I promise you, you’re perfectly safe. Please, just look,” he said softly in my ear. “You see these hands?” He squeezed my ribs with his fingers. “Nobody in the world could pry them from you.Look.”

I argued for as long as I could.

Eventually, I caved.

Grey couldn’t stop smiling, a completely different person from the man he had been that morning when talking to his brothers. So open and honest andfree.

“Go ahead. Don’t be afraid,” he said, nudging my nose with his, and I looked.

I finally looked around us, and I forgot to breathe all over again.

We were even higher up than I’d realized, and the castle surrounded by the woods on all sides looked so small from here. The tower I lived in and knew to behugelooked so narrow and long—and then I saw the mountain. Valentinesaid there were three, but I could barely make out one behind the castle, far away in the distance, and between it and the miles upon miles of trees surrounding the outer wall, there were lights. Structures I could barely make out stretched everywhere there weren’t trees.

“Wow,” I breathed when I realized that the Whispering Woods was not even half as desertedas I’d believed. Even from up here, I couldn’t see the edges of it because they were covered by the deep clouds that kept the Isle in the dark. Valleys and hills behind us, so fucking beautiful dipped in darkness like that, and Grey showed me all of it as he spun me around slowly, his wings steady, pushing my hair to the sides each time they beat the air.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” he said.

“It’s breathtaking.” And for the first time since I got here, I saw the Whispering Woods as a place where people led lives and had families and worked, rather than my prison. All those tiny structures and lights—peoplelivedthere. It wasn’t just this castle and big snakes and trees. There was so much more to this place than I had ever realized.

“It’s all yours,” said Grey, raising the hair on the back of my neck. “The Whispering Woods belongs to you as much as it belongs to me now.”

I shook my head, those words too much for me to swallow. “I don’t… I don’t want to be your bride, Grey.” I didn’t want to be one of the brides. “I can’t stand to think that you…that you’re gonna go to bed with…”Cynthia and Amitaand who knew who else would come along in the next years—no.

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