Page 74 of Fated or Knot

MARIUS

Iwas the first to react when Lark started to faint. When she asked Mother, “What did you say?” in her little flute of a voice, she wavered on her feet. A lost, unfocused look entered her eyes.

Mother drew herself up as I launched into motion. “You don’t remember me? I was your godmother. I took you to my nest like my own child. I need every answer you have, Metalark!”

Cursing inwardly, I lunged the last few feet between us as Lark dropped like a stone. Her slight weight fell into my arms, and as I took in her slack face, my beast lost his starsdamned mind.

My brothers all reacted, shouting in surprise. I growled viciously at them, crouched over my mate’s body with my fangs bared. Mother stepped back on instinct.

“What did… Why did she… I didn’t mean…” Now that the one person benefiting from us speaking Theli wasn’t listening, she switched back to Serian and made a sound of distress. She backed into my father, Elion, who had abandoned his chair by the fire to draw her behind him. He protected his female with his size while I snarled at anyone trying to get too close to Lark.

Kauz stepped forward and crouched as close as anyone dared come. “Marius?” he asked. The ever-present cloak of calm he carried with him tried to settle over me.

No. Defend mate.

I chuffed at him in warning.

“Niall, then,” he said.

It’d been his idea to name my beast, to speak with it more personably when my feral side took over.“You’re like another person when he’s active, so he deserves a distinct name,”he’d reasoned.

It wasn’t that I was two people in one body, even though it seemed that way from the outside. I was simply always in conflict: Marius the prince versus Niall the feral beast, and it was closer to a fifty-fifty outcome per fight than I led others to believe.

“She’s going to be okay, Niall,” he murmured. “She’s experiencing some mental backlash from Mother triggering something she was forced to forget.”

I snorted, unimpressed with the explanation. Too many words. “Stay back,” I rasped.

“I need you to give her to me. The only way she’s going to get better is if I get that silencing band off her,” he coaxed, holding out his hands.

I stood with Lark still in my arms. Her limp body slumped in a way that made my beast even more upset. I glanced around, scenting the air.Home.I could take her to my rooms, let her recover there.

Yes. Then claim.

Yes, then I’d have her claim me…wait. I shook my head, and my wild side receded. “We have a plan, remember?” Kauz was saying.

“I remember,” I gritted out. He was going to take her to his father as soon as possible to remove the silencing band. Wecouldn’t talk to her about it, or anything else he’d dug up in Cymora’s mind, for fear of exactly what’d just happened to her. Mother had called her by her full name and implied that she was part nixie, and that’d been enough to pinch her consciousness.

I had to be strong for her. I had to give her to Kauz. But I didn’t want to.

P’nixie, my instincts whispered. They were quieter now that I’d acknowledged that Niall was right. But that side of me hadn’t been subtle when we met in a pawn shop. The smell of her perfume had shredded the bindings of my self-control until only a single thread remained.

Niall had screamed that it washer. She was inestrus,and I needed tobreedher. Lark absolutely hadn’t needed me to bend her over a display case like my instincts had so desperately wanted to. I, in my eternal war with myself, had screamed back that wasimpossibleand ensured that her heat didn’t fully develop. It was the only right thing to do for the poor, weak waif I’d first assumed Lark to be.

The p’nixie was dead. My true mate had died a long time ago.

Yet here she was, in my arms, her secret identity confirmed by Mother.“A seamless mix of pixie and nixie.”We’d met as kids, and my beast had known instantly that she was the one, just as he never let me forget that she was still alive. After all, we had never seen the body.

Word of her death had led to my scar and the damage in my right eye, and that had become what shaped the rest of my childhood. The adults in my life had mourned her and moved on, but a part of me never could. I saw the evidence of the one and only pixie-nixie’s death on my face every time I looked in the mirror.

How would I even begin to tell her this? I couldn’t even start if she would pass out within a few sentences.

“Marius,” Kauz prompted. Everyone else was staring at me with shades of the particular pity sprinkled my way when I didn’t mask the moments I lost control.

I breathed a gruff and low, “Thanks.” He always knew what to do when Niall took over. Well, he was going to get the silencing band off her, and then…we could talk, the p’nixie and I.

I passed her limp body into his arms, helping arrange her limbs to make it easier for him. He didn’t have alpha strength, but he wasn’t a slouch either. I’d helped him develop his muscles to rein in those wings, after all.

“I’ll get her back to you as soon as possible,” he whispered.

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