Page 36 of The Queen The Fae Forgot
Shiel sat up too suddenly, his hand reaching for the knife he’d cast aside earlier, only to come back from beneath the pillow empty. His hand searched the blankets frantically for only a second, for the few moments it took for his mind to register it was not only missing, but not needed. There was no enemy present, after all. Not a physical one, anyway.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice still raked with tired gravel as he reached for me, now, instead. His frown, already furrowed deep within his brows, deepened as he laid eyes on my hand still frozen in the now empty pane. “You’re bleeding.”
He started getting up from the bed, but I shook my head. It stilled him for a moment, but he seemed frozen, suspended between waking and sleeping where every decision weighed too heavily.
“I didn’t think the glass would be so fragile,” I said, almost absentmindedly. My eyes still scanned the dark courtyard below. The voices were gone entirely, but their memory haunted me more than any nightmare could.
“Why are you at the window?”
“I …” I trailed off, shaking my head as if I could shake that echo from my memory.
“What is it, Aurra?”
Shiel’s voice had softened, returned once again to something more like the one belonging to the fae who had taken me to this bed just a few hours ago. I caught his eye, not so bright without his golden setting sun, but still just as tender—and it softened me, too. I felt the tension in my shoulders ease, my hands unclenching from the windowpane so I could rejoin him on the edge of the bed.
“I thought I heard my sister,” I admitted, realizing how silly I sounded.
“And that’s a reason for all … this?” Shiel’s voice paused as he reached over to brush hair from my face. It was only then, as he peeled the strands from my sticky cheeks, that I realized I’d broken out in a cold sweat. I looked down at myself, at the pale skin lit by moonlight now glittering with tiny damning droplets.
My brows pulled together, my mind still knitting my thoughts together, half scattered by sleep and the other by the sound that had so shaken me.
I shook my head again, more slowly this time. “Ithought I heard her talking to Fauna. To the changeling.”
Shiel’s face darkened slightly. “You think they’re plotting something?”
That thought had occurred to me, yes. But I’d have been lying to Shiel if I told him that was what had bothered me about it so much. And right now, after everything, as I looked into his face so contorted with concern for me, I couldn’t so much as stretch the truth.
“I was jealous, I think,” I admitted. “That she could talk to someone who wears my face, when now I doubt she’ll ever want to talk to me.”
Shiel’s eyes narrowed. Sleep must have finally drifted far enough away from him that he noticed even the subtlest slip in my voice.
“Now?”
I let out the smallest of sigh, a defeated sound.
“She caught me earlier. With Icarus.”
Admitting even that—justthat—flooded my cheeks with hot embarrassment.
Shiel’s skin flooded too, but not from shame. No.
That softness leeched from him in an instant, replaced instead with a frigid coldness that froze me in place—even as he shrank back away from me, out of reach. He was still for a few moments, and when he finally spoke again, his voice had grown hard as stone.
“You were with him.”
It wasn’t a question, but it had the weight of one. It had the weight of a thousand questions. “Before you came to me, you were withhim.”
“I … I was,” I said. I wanted to look away, to turn away from the intensity of his gaze—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but answer truthfully. Now wasn’t the time to start with lies.
I’d avoiding having to discuss the dark fae since we arrived, however narrowly, but the look in Shiel’s eyes told me that time was over.
I felt my throat close up as I waited for him to demand more answers. To demand to know what happened while I was with Icarus.
“We didn’t actually do anything. Just like I told you—Ada came, she interrupted us before it was too late—”
“So you came straight to me after? And had me take you to my bed, instead?”
I gaped at him, unable to say anything in response. I waited, in the silence, for him to say something else—anything else—but all he did was stare at me, his face a mask of disbelief and anger.
