Trapped within the filmy haze of sleep, it was so easy to forget. To ignore what he’d done and what I’d done since. It was too easy to tuck my nose into his crisp winter-scented neck and to drape my arm over his shoulders.

Rorn, still holding me, lowered to the bed.

I forced my heavy eyelids open wider. “You’re back.”

His rush of breath gave away the vibrating tension, the anxiety roiling like a storm within him. “I should be saying that about you.” His throat bobbed. “Bloom, where have you—”

“The Graveyard,” I said, not wanting to talk of betrayals—of the wolf’s scent that still stained like a curse I’d never rid upon my skin. “Theenon told me you returned to the city. Why? You know that is what they want, to catch you without enough strength behind you. You must cease journeying so far.”

“It was only a small wave.” Armed murderers who hoped to reduce the Jade line to ashes would never be considered something small, and he knew it, yet he still insisted on downplaying. “The threat has eased.”

The threat would never ease.

So long as we lived, the kingdom of Wistensia, and much of the Isle of Emerald, would continue to be butchered by those who loathed and feared our kind.

Silence trickled into the chamber. Not even the warm notes of late spring upon the evening breeze washing in through the cracked, arched windows were enough to eradicate the chill blanketing us both. My blood thickened to sludge, my eyes gritty as I pulled away and rose to dig my palms into them.

I couldn’t do this.

I couldn’t do this, yet there was nothing else to be done. No other way.

I was a queen. A monarch with responsibilities. A torn soul with a shattered heart. A dreamer who’d been given everything I’d ever dared to want.

I was a typical treacherous faerie fool who’d sought revenge without knowing what it would cost.

And now, it was time to pay the suffocating price.

“Astrantia.” Rorn’s smooth timbre, the question within his warning as I stood and walked to the window, should’ve concerned me. “You’re tired. Come back to bed.”

“You should bathe,” I said, numb and blinking down at the glass river. My eyes traced its curves around the base of the hills—a jeweled serpent in the grass through the patches of forest on either side. “You reek of death.”

You reek of misery.

I closed my eyes, tight and wincing. Forced the memory of dim lighting and the first glimpse of that arrogant, wolfish grin to melt from my mind.

But it took too long, leaving behind a venomous taste that burned each shallow breath. So long, that I hadn’t sensed my king arrive behind me.