Page 92 of What Sleeps Within the Cove

“Make it stop,” Estrella mumbled, her voice broken. She whimpered as she squeezed her head tighter, and it was all I could do to turn to her mother helplessly.

Medusa paused, turning back to us. “Some distance will help her,” she said, but the sad expression on her face told me it wouldn’t be enough. That it wouldn’t drown out the sound of that wailing in her head. It was enough to drive anyone to the point of madness, to make them wish for the end. I picked up my pace, desperate to do what I could to diminish the strength of it at least.

“What happened?” I asked, glaring at the Morrigan where they moved in silence at our side. The three of them exchanged a look between them, debating what they should tell me.

“She failed,” Badb said finally, her gaze locked on Estrella’s pained face. “It is a token to her strength that the river allowed her to leave at all, but every failure will take something from her. She will grow weaker, until she isn’t strong enough to fight the pull of the river. If she does not find a way to win this trial, the Cocytus will be her final resting place.”

I looked down at my mate as we entered the village, Medusa conversing with one of the fishermen. He pointed us toward an empty cabin, leaving us all to share a single roof for the night. I moved into the doorway quickly, laying Estrella on the bed and checking on her through our bond. The wailing was less potent, to the point that she could hear us around her and try to focus on the words we spoke. But that wailing was ever present in the back of her mind, a reminder of what waited for her. “And what if she doesn’t go back? What if she abandons the trials altogether?” I asked, unable to fathom the thought that she might have come all this way just to lose at the very end. That the last trial might be the one to defeat her.

“Then she will never enter the Cradle of Creation, and she will slowly lose herself to the screams of the grieving. Once a trial hasbeen lost, I’m afraid there is no turning back to the land of the living. She can no longer simply leave. She will either try again, or she will remain here forever,” Macha explained, her voice solemn.

“Leave us,” Medusa snapped, ordering the Morrigan out of the cabin. They disappeared into the dim light outside, but she didn’t dare to try to command me away from my mate’s side. “Tell me what happened. Tell me so that I can help you win when you go back.”

Estrella cleared her throat, forcing herself to sit. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse as if she’d spent an eternity screaming. Her stare on me was hesitant, and I considered offering to leave so that she and Medusa could talk it through more comfortably, but the first word she spoke guaranteed that I could not leave.

“Loris,” she said, the name sinking inside of me. Even if we hadn’t discussed her once lover, just the name of a male would have been enough to raise my hackles. “He was the only other man I ever…” She trailed off, looking at me from the side of her face.

My fists clenched, gripping the bedding fiercely as I fought to keep my anger off my face. “You hurt him,” Medusa said, earning a wince from Estrella.

“Not exactly,” Estrella said, explaining the circumstances of his death to her mother. It hadn’t been her fault, and she knew that logically. There would have been nothing she could have done to prevent theviniculumfrom protecting her life, from keeping her safe for me. It wasmymagic that had killed Loris, that had eliminated the threat to my mate. I felt no remorse for it given what he’d been willing to do for the Mist Guard he served, and knowing that while it had never been love, Estrella had once held him in a form of affection guaranteed he would never have my sympathy.

He should have been honored to die to protect her, not been willing to make the killing blow.

“The Cocytus takes a person’s every sorrow and magnifies it,” Medusa explained, sitting on the edge of the bed. “He is no longer the man you remember. He no longer remembers things accurately. In his mind, you killed him to free yourself of your entanglement because you had a mate waiting for you. In his mind, he sees his every insecurity. He will never measure up to a God; he will never be good enough to deserve you. It no longer matters that he never even wanted your heart in life, because the river has made you into his obsession in death. Give him what he wants. That is what he needs to move on with his afterlife. That is what he needs in order for him to give you his assistance.”

Estrella imagined the three apples in her head, the way that they were just out of reach. She needed his help, and he hadn’t offered it.

“I can’t,” she said, her voice cracking. She wouldn’t meet my eye, her window slamming shut in her mind to try to shove me out of her head. There was something in her memory of that trial that she didn’t want me to see, something she thought to protect me from. “I cannot give him what he needs.”

Suspicion made my hackles rise, my magic tickling along my skin in warning. Myviniculumpulsed, the tendrils writhing on my skin as if our very bond felt the affront that had been committed. Carefulness forgotten, I shoved at the other side of Estrella’s window and thrust it open, shoving my way into her head once again. She gasped as I slid inside, the memory of the trial slithering between us like something insidious. I hadn’t dared to peer into this part of her past, hadn’t wanted to see the man who’d touched what was mine, just as I suspected she hadn’t tried to look into the women that had come before her.

There were some memories better left forgotten, some people not meant to be shared. He stood before her in the trial, entirely nude and trembling. His pain was tangible even as someone who did not know him, the emotion surrounding him enough to smother the air with darkness. His jealousy drove his words, motivated them as he made his demand of Estrella.

He wanted to touch her. He wanted her to touch him.

Out of spite for me, out of sheer, absolute hatred for what I represented, he wanted to use Estrella to strike at me. He blamed me for everything that had gone wrong in his life and led to his death, and wanted to take the one thing that mattered to me more than anything.

My mate.

Our bond would never recover from an affair, no mate bond could tolerate such an injustice. There were those who agreed to practice nonmonogamy within their relationship, but it was a mutual decision that they came to based on their own sexuality and needs as a unit. Those pairs tended to be well-matched. They tended to share those needs so that they could find absolute completion within one another. It would have been tragic for a monogamous Fae to be paired with someone who wanted nonmonogamy, ending in nothing but heartbreak all around.

Estrella and I would never be nonmonogamous. We would never tolerate the touch of another. She was all I wanted and my desires did not require other relationships to keep me content, and I knewshe felt the same. The disgust that slithered through her at Loris’s proposition only confirmed that.

What he suggested would be nothing short of rape, a manipulation to get her to give him her body under threat of death. That the Fates had allowedthisto be her Trial only worsened my already shit opinion of them, making me want to tear her father’s head from his shoulders.

“He wants her to fuck him,” I snapped, turning to Medusa. “Is this what your husband wants for your own child?”

“Just because that is what he claims to want does not mean it is the actuality. When you return to the river and see him again, he will have no recollection of your previous encounter. He won’t remember giving you an ultimatum. It is up to you to maneuver him to the place where you need him, Estrella. You have to guide him to wanting to make peace with you,” Medusa said, her voice soft as she watched Estrella curl into me. The fight had gone out of my mate at some point in that river, her guilt becoming a storm inside her.

“He blames me for his death. How could he ever want to make peace with me when by your account, he is never going to remember it accurately,” Estrella said, shaking her head. I hated the defeat in her tone, hated the way that it felt like she’d given up entirely and accepted that this was her end.

“So he is never going to see the events that led to his death the way you do. Does that matter? Is his opinion of you more important than giving him whatheneeds so that you can walk away with what you need more than anything?” Medusa asked. “I did not come with you so that I could watch you tuck your tail between your legs at the first sign of failure. Why aren’t you fighting?!” The anger in Medusa’s bellow shook the cabin walls, forcing me to stand from the bed so that I could attempt to intervene in the coming fight. If Estrella wasn’t up to standing up for herself, then I would be the one to do it for her.

I was the one she could lean on. I was the one who carried her when she was too weak to stand.

“Because I’ve never won! I have never been able to fight back in any way that fucking mattered!” Estrella snapped, her face pinching with the anguish that I felt echoed in her head, that incessant wailing bringing her own sorrow to the surface. “What am I supposed to do? Keep fighting when we all know I’m going to fail? When we know that this is just going to keep getting harder and fucking harder until I can’t take it anymore?”

“And what makes you so certain that you’ll fail, Estrella?” Medusa asked, her voice too calm in the face of Estrella’s anger.

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