Page 33 of Bride of the Fae Duke

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly, because that was all that seemed left to be said.

He cocked his head, one pointed ear breaking through the blue silk of his hair. His gaze met hers for the first time in minutes, and to her surprise, the emotion in those cat eyes was not grief or anger or even exhaustion, but rather …

Relief?

No,amusement?

‘Thank you,’ he said, the most miniscule tremble of his lips confirming that bewildering hunch. ‘I understand you won’t even tell me to stop wallowing?’

‘I— Look, noteverythingyou do is wallowing!’ An unexpected laugh wormed free. ‘All you do is care about your people and your responsibilities, and even if you do so a little too much at times … should I chide you for it?’

‘No,’ he admitted, looking away again, his smile dwindling. As if he couldn’t bear to see her face – to see how she might react to the next words he’d speak. ‘No, not for that. But then there’s my unforgivable sentimentality over my mother’s memory, even after she killed six innocent women, andthat…’

Nellie huffed. ‘She’s still your mother. That’s the bloody trouble with parents, isn’t it? They don’t stop being your parents even when they leave.’

A small silence fell.

Perhaps that last sentence had come out with a little too much force.

‘I mean …’ she started, a helpless attempt to correct the mistake. ‘Of course, not everyone—’

‘I know what you mean,’ he interrupted, and if his voice was curt, it didn’t sound unkind. ‘So who left, if I may be so impertinent as to ask?’

Drat.

‘My father,’ she whispered.

He sighed. ‘Ah.’

‘And my mother just … stopped living.’ The words spilled out whether she wanted them to or not, lured into the open by his own vulnerability. ‘Kept telling me how much he’d loved us, how much he’d loved her, how he would surely come back soon. And then he didn’t. So after months she finally gave up – stopped getting out of bed, stopped eating.’

He closed his eyes. ‘How old were you?’

‘Twelve summers,’ she breathed.

His jaw tightened. But all he said was, again, ‘Ah.’

As if she’d answered questions he’d been mulling over for weeks. As if he’d wondered but never dared to ask. She’d been naked in his arms so many times, and yet she’d never felt so bare before him as in this moment – as he sat there and watched her with those strange eyes, grey depths brimming with years upon years of shattered affections.

‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered, shrinking in her chair. ‘I shouldn’t—’

‘You should.’ A brisk bite to the words – too brisk, as if he was hiding the opposite beneath that snappish tone. ‘And you … Divines help me, you know that I’ll never let any such thing happen to you again, don’t you, Eleanor? You know I won’t allow it?’

Her jaw fell shut again.

Allowit?

She should scoff, a little voice reminded her, sounding uncomfortably like her own. She should laugh and shrug off his vows. Pretty promises, all of them. Like magic. Like fairytales. The sort of promise Father had made, and Father hadn’t minded dooming her to a life of scrubbing floors …

But Othrys Locke wasn’t Father.

Othrys Locke was the bloodyoppositeof Father – a man who would collapse beneath his duty before he’d run from it, who understood the weight of heartache better than perhaps anyoneelse in this city. Sitting there with that gleam of honest concern in his inhuman eyes, ready to protect, ready to do what must be done and save her …

Looking like a fairytale.

Like every fantasy she’d laughed at come true.

‘Eleanor?’ she heard him say again, his voice distant.

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