Page 48 of Kingdom of Faewood

A dutiful lorafin—his prized trinket.

It was all I would ever be.

I lay down and stared up at the tent’s ceiling. Soon thepounding thumps of my guardian’s agony drifted away on the wind. I no longer heard them as the numbness spread.

Shivers continued hitting me intermittently as I stared at the billowing canvas above. Outside, darkness grew as twilight bled into night, and I thought of what else Jax had said today.

“I know that your guardian claims that she left you.”

A thought suddenly struck me, and I bolted upright, the first rush of warmth cascading through my limbs that I’d felt since Jax’s questioning had begun.

“Jax?” I called.

In a blink, he was there, at the tent’s opening. “Yes?”

“Can you ask him what he knows about my mother?”

He gave a curt nod, and I lay back down, biting my lip as the feel of Jax’s magic again speared the air. “What do you know of Elowen’s birth mother? You may speak only to answer my questions.”

I waited on bated breath, and a surge of hope began to rise up in me. Maybe he knew who she was. Maybe he knew where I could find her. Maybe he’d known all along and had been lying about that too, and there was still hope that I would one day locate her.

A hiss came, then my guardian said slowly, as though the words were pried from his lips. “She’s...dead.”

A clash of pain exploded inside my chest.She’s dead.Vicious vibrations zapped along my throat, coiling all the way around my heart.My mother’s dead.

“How did she die?” Jax asked in a deadly tone.

“I killed her.”

My heart stopped.

It just . . . stopped.

“How did you kill her?”

“I saw her bathing in a stream in the Wood with Elowen lying on a blanket near the stream’s edge. I saw Elowen’s shadow mark and realized what she was, so I drowned her mother and then took Elowen.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to hear more. I couldn’t. Pain barreled through me. Intense, vicious, all-consuming pain.

I couldn’t bear it. I fell back on the furs, my heart reeling.

A disgusted sound came from Jax. “I knew it. You’re the worst kind of fucking scum that walks in this realm.”

Rustling sounds came from the other males. They spoke quietly, their voices blending together in concealed rough whispers. I didn’t try to discern any of it.

Because my heart was ripping in two. I was being killed from the inside out.

Not only had my guardian made me a permanent slave, but he’d murdered my mother and then claimed my entire life that she abandoned me.

I knew I could ask Jax to reveal the details. He could force my guardian to tell me all of the gruesome facts of what had transpired the day my guardian had taken me. The day he murdered my mother.

But I didn’t want to know. Because the thought of hearing anything further about her last moments of life...

I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter.

The tent’s flap lifted a moment later, and I opened my eyes in time to see Jax hesitantly step inside.

His mask still covered him, his bandana was still in place, yet the raw emotion pounding in his aura was anything but hidden.

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