“I spent twelve years in the Kingdom of Storms. Three in Noctere. Ten in Sylvanwild.” His jaw worked. “The boy from the inner district died in Gawain’s chains. Whatever crawled out wasn’t him.”
“Dorian…” I said.
“Don’t.” He pressed his eyes shut. “I can’t stand any more of your pity. I didn’t bring you here for that, Eury.”
We were alike. We were so alike.
Pity felt like its own loss. It was already a miracle he had allowed his feelings to come out in the bedroom; they must have been tidal, overwhelming.
He sucked in air, opened his eyes. “Rhiannon always admired Maeronyx. She wanted her own Gawain, but better. And so…”
He didn’t have to finish. Night-bitch. Sister-killer. “You were the prized plant.”
“But with more magic.” He scoffed. “Perhaps that was why Gawain hated me so much. And why he could never let go of me.”
I straightened with a tingling spine. The conversation, the dance, but most of all, the kinship I’d felt toward that fae in that gilded ballroom… “Gawain’s a changeling, too.”
He nodded. “With all the rage and little of the power.”
A powerless male changeling. Every time Gawain looked at Dorian, saw his potential, he must have felt burning envy. I couldn’t imagine the ways in which he’d taken it out on him. The powerless could be the most dangerous. The worst of us would take every scrap, every opportunity?—
Dorian’s chair creaked. He pushed it back and dropped to the dusty floor on his knees.
“I wanted to give you a chance, Eury. Yes, it rains acid here, but Feyreign is fucked.”
My gaze had unfocused. Now he came into clarity before me, and those dark eyes had never scared me more. This was myveyrewithout armor, without pretense, without excuse. It felt like we existed in a not-quite-real place, of spirits and truth. Only truth, because lying would be as obvious here as blood on fresh snow.
Before me knelt the boy he had been, and also the teenager, also the man. All three of them collapsed into the same battered body.
He had been thinking ofmewhen he’d made that offer. Me and no one else.
“You’re going back to that fucked place,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
His brows lowered. “I have to.”
“Why?”
“You said it yourself. I’m a killer.” He raked his fingers over his chest like he wanted to shed his own skin. “The things I’ve seen, the things I’vedone… I belong nowhere else.” His hand dropped, and he slumped back onto his heels. His face disappeared behind the lanky veil of his hair.
This man was so raw, so terribly loathing, just the sight of him felt like touching lightning.
“You hate changelings”—I shivered in place—“because you hate yourself.”
His lips folded, barely visible past his hair. “If all the gods we believed in as children were real, every one of them would damn us for what we are.”
My eyebrows rose. “You believed in the gods?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No.” The answer came at once. “Never. I wanted to—I waited for evidence of them. But there was only us. Just humans.”
For a second, I saw him only as a boy. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, sitting on the stoop of this home with his eyes cast upward. Full of untainted wonder.
He was like my mother. Believing without proof, his heart unsundered. She was the best person I had ever known.
“I believe my mother is with me.” My hand went to my chest. “I believe that.”
“Eury—”