Page 32 of The Queen The Fae Forgot
He pulled my hand away from his face only so he could press his lips too softly to my knuckles. “Whatever it is you think you’ve lost, let me help you find it.”
CHAPTERELEVEN
There,beneath the weight of Shiel’s gaze, I didn’t feel so lost anymore.
Once again, he’d found me, but this time … this time, I wasn’t going to let him go.
And apparently, from the way his gaze suddenly sharpened, neither was he. Something in him shifted, transformed as he read the change in me, too. His fingers unlaced from mine only so they could find my waist instead. I’d seen him this focused before, but never on me. He looked at me with an intensity usually reserved for his work, for keeping his own court in line. Now, with his hands tightening around me, pulling me closer, his eyes locked with mine and didn’t waver.
“I’m sorry.”
His apology caught me off guard.
“I should have known you needed me when you came. I think I did, I just …” He trailed off slightly, any excuse he might have made trailing off with it. “I like to think I know you well enough by now to know when you need me.”
“It’s only been a few months.”
“It feels longer than that.” Shiel stopped and cocked his head to the side slightly. “No, not longer. Just … just different.”
For one, brief moment, his eyes did leave mine, but only so they could trace the lines of my face, slowly, as if he was carefully memorizing me.
“It’s strange to think there was a day before fate brought us together in that marketplace.”
Fate, yet again.
Icarus had once spoken of fate. No, more than once.
If it weren’t for everything that had unfolded since he first spoke words of destiny into my life, I still wouldn’t believe in fate. But now … standing here, waiting to take my throne, with the seed of a powerful glamour running through my veins and the weight of an age-old prophecy spoken over me, I’d be a foolnotto at least entertain a belief in fate.
Or, at the very least, some version of it that had been seemingly driving me ever closer and closer towards a point that felt like whatever it had in store for me was now looming just out of sight.
Not that I could have seen it if I tried, not now, not with the way Shiel’s touch had begun to make everything else start to fade away. My heart had steadied, if only so that I could feel it quicken at the slightest shift of the lord’s touch on my skin.
“You really think it was fate?”
My question came out as a whisper, almost inaudible, as if I was afraid to ask. As if I was afraid to hear an echo of the dark fae’s words again. Or, perhaps, I was afraid because I wanted to hear that echo. I wanted to believe that fate wasn’t as cruel as I’d begun to fear.
“Fate? Luck?” Shiel stopped and shook his head. “They’re one and the same. At least, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Luck?” I asked. “Have you seen where we are, what’s happening around us? You call that luck?”
The words were meant half in jest, but there was too much truth to them.
That was why I was so surprised by Shiel’s answer again. It came quick, without thought.
“I’m here with you. Any fae who wouldn’t count that as luck is a fool.”
I couldn’t help the slight smile that pulled at the outer corner of my mouth.
“What?” Shiel asked, his own brows furrowing. “You think I’m lying?”
“I think you’re reaching.”
That frown only deepened, as did the firmness of his grip on my waist. “I’m dead serious, Aurra,” he said. “I know there’s a lot going on, there’s so much in the balance—not just for you, for both of us—but there’s no place I’d rather be right now than here, by your side.”
A slight sigh whistled between his lips as, for just a moment, that hardened mask of his slipped for a moment. His face softened with something like regret, the furrowed brows turning up slightly in the center as he tried to read deeper the expression on my own face.
“I should have listened to you the moment you came to me,” he said, his voice soft and full of all the feeling he’d briefly let show on his face—already fleeting. “I’m an idiot, you know. When it comes to … to these kinds of things. I’m not used to them.”
