Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 132138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 661(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 661(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
“I don’t understand any of this.” My father looked almost as guilty as the Seelies.
An ember of hope flares. They might finally believe us. “We’ve thought about this a lot. We’ve talked about it, asked some Fae who know about bonding, some vampires who understand consorts. They think Bronwyn is an incredibly strong broadcaster. I know that any bondmate could balance us, but there’s a difference between the bond and a perfect mate. Her mind reached out, even as a child, and she found us. We held to the bond. If Bron is a broadcaster, then Shim is a receptor.”
Beck’s face is a careful blank. “Let’s accept the fact that Bron is alive somehow.”
“She’s alive,” Shim insists.
“How did you save her?” Dante asks.
Shim shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s all muddled. I remember feeling her die and grabbing on to Lach.”
I don’t like to think about that night. It’s a nightmare in my head, a collection of fear and pain. “It was the first time our powers manifested.”
“The night of the fire,” his father whispers, looking at the scars on my face.
“Yes. We all almost died that night.” I stare at my father. “We lost her for a long time. That was when we started to fade. We couldn’t be sure she was alive. And yet the bond was there. It was like bonding over that distance broke the connection for a while.”
Shim sighs. “And then one day, I was sleeping and I felt her at the edge of my consciousness. Every night the connection got stronger, and now I can feel her during the day when I concentrate.”
“That’s why you seem to be fading. That’s why you lie around. You’re seeing her.” Father sits back and seems to have aged twenty years. “Do you think she knows what happened to my Gilly?”
This is a piece of information we withheld. We thought about it, but with our father not believing us, it seemed cruel to tell him.
“Gillian’s alive.”
The room erupts in chaos. The news that the Unseelie princess is alive and potentially in danger somewhere on the Seelie plane lights a fire under the nobles’ asses. My father sits, taking it all in. There’s already talk of a raid, a quiet retrieval mission, even of hiring a hag to contact her. This is another reason we kept quiet. Until we’re ready to rescue our bondmate, we can’t risk detection, and we worry our father will be reckless, thus costing both women their lives. Amidst all the discussion, the Finn twins walk away, quietly speaking among themselves.
I look at Shim who nods, understanding what we need to do.
We stand up, moving toward the Seelies. It’s time to talk to our brothers-in-law.
Even before we make it to the Finns, Cian Finn turns, walking our way with an angry look on his face.
“Why the hell haven’t you said something before now?” Cian gets right in my space.
I have no intentions of letting the Green Man intimidate me. “Should I have walked around informing everyone that Bronwyn Finn is alive? Do you think that wouldn’t have gotten back to Torin?”
Beck seems calmer, but there’s a cold look in his eyes. “You could have told us. We both have relatives on the Vampire plane. We’ve probably been in the same city at the same time, and yet you kept this a secret.”
“We told our father,” Shim argues. “Not her name because we understood the danger to her, but we explained the situation, and he refused to believe. If you hadn’t seen what Lach could do tonight, you wouldn’t have believed it, either.”
“You bloody well could have tried,” Cian spits.
“Tell me something, Prince Lachlan,” Beck begins with lazy menace. “Does my sister know she’s a princess of the Unseelie Fae?”
There it is, that churning in the pit of my belly. “The connection is difficult to explain.”
“Yes, you seem to have that trouble a lot,” Cian accuses.
Shim’s getting angry, his hands twitching. When Shim gets angry, fireballs tend to descend from out of nowhere.
“Shim, calm down. Torching our brothers-in-law won’t make the situation better.”
My ever-more-reasonable brother smiles grimly. “It will make me feel better.”
“I’d love to see you try it,” Cian grinds back.
Beck manages a laugh. “He’s my calm half.”
A kinship opens between us. “Shim is my happy half. I’m a righteous bastard.”
“Well, I’m all sunshine and daisies,” Beck replies, his expression relaxing. “Cian, stop overreacting. I understand how you feel, but you know damn well that I wouldn’t have taken a meeting with the Unseelie until very recently.”
“It wasn’t like I didn’t try,” my father says, joining them. “I would have tried harder if I’d listened to my sons.”
My stubborn anger at my father begins to fracture. It’s coming from Shim, but I welcome it. Being angry with our father got us nowhere.
“I still would have resisted,” Beck Finn admits. “Until we found our Meggie, we were the ones who were fading. I couldn’t consider any sort of an alliance. It wouldn’t have worked, and then I was only concerned with bonding with Meggie and keeping her safe.”