Page 398 of Flirting with Darkness

He stands and walks to the cave mouth, exiting before I can make my mouth form the rest of the insult.

I sit up, brush the cave dirt from my dress, and try to quell my racing heart. The quivering at my core. The utterly asinine images playing in my mind’s eye.

“Get yourself together,” I scold under my breath.

* * *

I keep the fire going until he returns some time later with two skinned animals resembling rabbits. Not quite, though.

“Well, look at you. You’ve actually made yourself useful,” he says, looking at the spit I fashioned over the fire with twigs I found in the cave. “Just when I thought you were utterly useless, you proved me wrong.”

I give him a vulgar hand gesture and skewer my not-quite-a-rabbit on one stick before placing it atop the two forked sticks I wedged into the rocks and dirt around the fire.

He sits next to me and places his meal on the spit as well. “So you weren’t lying about survival training?”

I twist to glare at him. “I don’t lie.”

He takes in my features for several moments. Long enough I grow uncomfortable under his scrutiny, but I refuse to show it. I sit, statue-still, and match his stare. When his eyes travel over my lips, so mine find his. When his eyes fall to my throat, I find the fading nail marks I left in his. And when his eyes fall to my heaving chest, I fold my arms and call him another name.

“Lech.”

“You don’t lie, do you, little bird?”

“I don’t.”

“Then you’ll tell me the truth if I ask, yes?”

I seal my lips shut.

“Did you truly believe I was some demonic creature?”

I take a cue from his repertoire and don’t answer immediately. I turn toward the fire to spin my dinner over the flames. Only after several moments, do I speak. “I believe wholeheartedly in what the scriptures, the teachings of my father, preach. The church, the Keeper’s duty, the Mother and the lesser gods. All of it.”

I pause, unable to stand the buzzing in my chest.

“Believed,” I say quietly.

It’s the first time I’ve admitted out loud and to myself that this, thathehas shaken my faith. Until now, I had no reason to doubt what Father taught me. To doubt our family’s duty.

To doubt what we kept in a chest beneath our house.

Why would I?

My chin lowers and the next group of demonic accusations don’t have quite the same fervor. “Asmodeus. Bezorn. Pazuzu.”

The king doesn't bother poking fun at me this time. He sees it for what it is. “Confronting falsehoods is a hardship few are brave enough to tackle,” he murmurs and spins his catch. “But you won’t find my name among those of your mythology’s demons, princess. I am a true fae king.”

Again, his words strike true, and as that bell rings clear, something deep and vital shatters within me.

Everything I believed breaks open, splintering into needle-fine shards, poking holes in who I thought I was.

Who I made myself become.

I stare into the fire painting shadows along the cave wall before meeting his gaze once more.

I can’t be sure if he’s being honest. I can’t know for certain that he is a fae king and not a demon.

But he doesn’t look like any demon I’ve seen in depicted.

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