Page 4 of Fae Crown

“It’s not your decision to make. If you have to submit yourself to that nastiness, then I’ll be right there at your side, doing whatever I can to make it more bearable.”

“You can’t. You heard what she said. Watching your mate … be with someone else … it’s a pain worse than death. I’ve heard that before too, from others.”

“Then we’ll fucking suffer together. I don’t know what else to tell ya. I’m not letting you endure that alone. Andfuck hera thousand times over. Just, you know, not in the way she wants.”

Rush’s fingers trailed down my thigh. The vines tattooed along his skin glowed as bright as a full moon. The rosebuds I’d noticed once were absent. Sharp, biting thorns bloomed from the twining lines in their stead.

I traced the path of light up the back of his hand, then his forearm.

“You’ve never told me about these. They get brighter when you’re really upset or sometimes happy, right?”

I could feel his stare following the path of my touch across his skin. Again his cock twitched against me.

“Yes. When my emotions run high either way.” For several moments, he watched me caress him. “It’s an unfortunate tell I haven’t been able to master.”

In the arena I’d watched him closely. Whenfighting, he’d erased all hints that would reveal his upcoming moves. That was true adeptness.

“It gives me away too much,” he grunted.

I nodded knowingly. I didn’t think I was quite as good as him in otherwise disguising my thoughts.

“Where’d they come from?” I asked.

His chest rose and fell intently against my back. “Would you believe that I don’t really know? Many decades ago now, when I was a boy first coming into my power, they simply started appearing one day. At first, it was just one little vine.”

“Where?”

“Here, across my heart. About where … I stabbed you.”

His affirming aloud how he’d hurt me, something he’d already done many times since I first appeared yesterday in the throne room without explanation, was his way of penance, I suspected. A way for him to never forget.

Stabbing me in the heart hadn’t been the betrayal I’d first assumed it was.

Undeniably, it had been awful. Only since seeing him again could I be certain it had been as torturous for him as it had been for me.

I nodded to encourage him to move beyond our painful past.

Finally, he said, “It happened over many years. They kept spreading, showing up everywhere. Now there isn’t a single part of my body where they can’t manifest. Now they’re even more reactive to myemotions than before. Just when I need to control myself the most.” The admission was bitter.

“Did you try to find out about them?”

“Of course. But we fae are as unique and varied as our powers. I found nothing that could inform me about my specific situation. My parents didn’t know anything.”

I started. I’d never considered his parents.

“Are they still alive?”

“They are. Though they’ve retired from the positions of drake and drakess and their attendant duties. They leave all of that to me now.”

As well as the responsibility of protecting his sisters, that I knew. He viewed Ramana’s death as one of the most significant and condemning failures of his life.

Seconds slunk past without either of us speaking before urgency took hold of me again, forcing me from my ease. We were on borrowed time already.

“You really think it’s a map?” I didn’t have to elaborate. He wasn’t likely to soon forget his mate glowing with her own set of tattoos.

For now, mine had vanished without a trace. But Rush had sketched their trajectory while they still blazed their mysterious trail across my skin, hiding the drawing within a bound journal he’d fetched from the antechamber where the queen had once ordered him to sleep—back when she still pretended to care about my safety.

What a fucking bad joke that had been—entirely on me.

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