Page 121 of Stealing Tink

My entire body stills, and slowly, I crane my neck to look down.

Golden hair spills out across the dais. My hair.

If my hair has grown out long enough to be past my waist, perhaps I could have been asleep long enough for my abdomen to heal after all.

“Zora.” I hear a voice, strangely familiar, too close.

I turn to find a man—no, a fae—in a wooden chair next to the dais. I’m not sure what appears more out of place—the dark-haired, pale-skinned male who looks like a shadow compared to the light in this room, or the simplicity of the rickety wooden chair compared to this grand hall.

“Who?” The voice that echoes through the hall is scratchy and melodious and deep and feminine.

And very much mine.

I gasp, and even the shrill sound is beautiful as I grasp my throat with my hands.

The male, thinking I’m panicking and mistaking the tears streaming down my face, jumps from his chair so quickly it topples over. He’s in front of me faster than I can blink. “It’s all right,” he says, the words punctuated by the choking sound in his throat. “You’re all right.”

He says it as if he too is taking a moment to actually believe it.

He’s crying too, his tears like the water dripping from a marble fountain, or rain on a marble statue. He’s beautiful, and I feel no attraction to him, but there’s a deep longing for his presence all the same.

“Where am I?” I ask, though it doesn’t seem like the right question. Who am I seems more accurate, but it’s a question I’m too terrified to ask.

Disappointment flashes across the man’s face, but he composes himself quickly enough. “You’re in Queen Abra’s palace. You’ve been asleep for… well, for quite some time.”

I frown, feeling my brow crease. The motion feels choppy, unfamiliar, as if my forehead hasn’t done it in quite some time.

“Queen Abra? Of what kingdom?” I ask. I rake my mind, but I’ve never heard of such a ruler, although I suppose if I’ve been asleep for quite some time, she could have come to power in the interim.

“Mystral,” he says, but frowns when he observes the blankness in my expression. “You don’t remember, do you?”

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be remembering, and now I’m wondering if this is just another one of my nightmares, and the Nomad will come waltzing through the door any moment now to kill me.

Still, there’s something about the fae before me that tells me I can trust him. Not that that instinct has served me well in the past, but it’s not as if killing him and escaping into a kingdom I’ve never heard of is going to get me very far.

“The last thing I remember, the Nomad had a blade to my throat, so I stabbed him first.”

The male before me blinks. “The Nomad?”

It’s the kind of question that’s asking who is that, and not the kind that makes it sound like the other person doesn’t possibly believe I could have encountered the Nomad. If this male doesn’t know who the Nomad is, then I certainly am a long way from home.

“I’d been stabbed in the stomach,” I say, my hand finding my waist, and there’s something about that sentence, being able to express it, that has my voice choking up. “I don’t know who healed me,” I say, all of a sudden, not speaking about the wound to my abdomen, “but I would like to thank them.”

Understanding dawns on the man’s face. “This Nomad—he didn’t happen to look like this, did he?”

The man pulls over a tapestry, one that’s hanging off the side of a chair, and lays it next to me across the dais, so that part of it spills over the side. The part that’s smoothed out over the dais displays a fae with sandy-blond hair and ice-cold eyes.

My heart thuds, and I can’t untangle the fear from the pain. “Yes, that’s him.”

“Zora, can you remember what he was doing when you killed him?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know a Zora.”

“Of course. Sorry,” says the man. “Even so, can you remember?”

“I already told you, he was holding a dagger to my throat.”

“After you’d already been stabbed by someone else?”