He went perfectly still. She’d asked him that question once before in a mountain room when she could have had him, if not for her mouth and her honor. He’d snarled at her then. He didn’t owe her an answer now. He’d made it clear that he owed her nothing. Still, if she was spilling secrets, she would see how far she could push him.

“I hoped you had forgotten.”

She laughed acerbically. “As if I could.”

He clenched his jaw. “Dacia was my… lover,” he said, choosing the word carefully. “We had been together many years. She wanted me to properly court her. She was a noble and of marriageable age, and everyone expected it of us. But the curse…”

Of course, the curse. The curse that made him second-guess everyone he cared about. For he was destined to hurt them.

“She tried to tell me the curse was fake—I’d only lost my mother to it; what did I know?”

She winced at those words. She’d said something similar.

“Finally, I agreed. I told my father that I was going to begin courting her publicly.” He ground his teeth. “The next day, she was captured on the outskirts of Ravinia Mountain, helping a group of humans and half-Fae escape their prisons.”

Kerrigan’s jaw dropped. “What?”

“She was a revolutionary, who believed in the rights of humans and half-Fae. She wanted to see the end of their enslavement and torture. I had no idea. She never once mentioned it to me in all of our years together. But when she was caught, she was brought before my father. I stood there while they accused her of treason and beheaded her on the marble floor of the throne room.”

Kerrigan gasped. “Holy gods, Fordham.”

His eyes were empty while he looked back to that moment as it all unraveled for him. “She denied my involvement to her last breath, but it was too much for my father. He didn’t believe her testimony. It was the moment that he turned on me, sending me into exile.”

Kerrigan covered her mouth, horror on her face. She’d known that he’d been exiled from his people. That he hadn’t known if he would be welcome back. But not all of… this.

“No wonder you hated me on sight,” she whispered.

He laughed without humor. “I hated everyone on sight after that. I’d lost the woman I was to be with, my kingdom, my entire life in one fell swoop. I’d done nothing but care for her, and look at how the curse repaid me.”

“Is that why you wouldn’t answer your challenge question?”

His eyes found hers across the moonlit spring. “You believe that I loved her?”

“You wouldn’t talk about her. You just said you were to marry her.”