They never acknowledged her until one night when she watched the Alpha, Sionnach, dance in the wide-open desert under a full moon. It wasn’t the first or even the fifth time she’d watched him, but this time, he looked at her and grinned. Late that night, he came to her cave and was the first to talk to her. For years, he was the only one who visited her, who teased her. He didn’t force her to join the faeries here, but he was her friend—her only friend.

Until Jayce . . .

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Trusting Keenan had been the mistake that informed Rika’s entire life, a mistake that had cost her both her humanity and her happiness. She’d given everything—her mortality, her family, her health—but it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough.

So when she’d escaped to the desert and hidden herself away from both humanity and faeries, she’d kept to herself. It was a quiet life, but she was happy—until she met Jayce. Admittedly, met might not be the right way to describe her encounters with the mortal boy, but it was as close of a word as she knew, and as close as she’d come to a relationship in a very long time. She spent countless hours at his side talking to him or simply enjoying their shared silence. Jayce, of course, hadn’t known how much time they’d spent together because Rika remained invisible during all of it. She might not have been born a faery, but she followed the rules: faeries weren’t to carelessly reveal themselves to mortals.

Today, as she had so many other times since she’d first discovered Jayce staring into the sky with a bemused smile on his face, Rika was enjoying one of their art dates. She cherished her days with Jayce. Unlike the faery king she’d thought lovely when she was a mortal, the human boy she’d fallen for was the kind of beautiful that faeries couldn’t be. Jayce had thick dreadlocks that were such a dark brown that they were only a shade shy of black—except for the few that were dyed purple. Today, the dreads were pulled back in a ponytail, but a few had escaped and fallen over his shoulder as he sketched.

Oblivious to her as always, he perched on a rock, sketchbook on his knee, bottle of water at his feet. Pencils, charcoal, and other art paraphernalia jutted out of his satchel and spilled onto the ground next to him, but he was lost in the moment. His attention drifted between the desert and his paper.

Rika shaded her portrait of him while he captured the desert landscape with his colored pencils. “Another perfect date,” she said.