Page 129 of Harnessed in Gold

“Oh god, yeah,” she groans. “Ugh, I’m sorry. I was so stupid.”

“No, I was stupid.” I swallow and shake my head. “I was scared you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore.” An ironic taste of my own medicine.

Incredulous, she blinks. “Because you were into Leo?”

“No. Yeah. I don’t know.” I rub my aching eyes. If it weren’t for everyone’s crap on the bed, I’d flop on it and curl into a ball. “I mean, he was taking me away from you and O-Chi, and I figured you hated him?—”

“I don’t hate him at all,” she interrupts, shaking her head. “It was you I was mad at, not him.”

“Me?”

“Because you weren’t telling me anything.”

I sigh at the ceiling. “I know.”

“But trust me, Leo or no Leo, I know Zander is a thing of the past. What he did to you at the masquerade was bullshit.” She looks away and wrings her hands. “Sure, at first I kinda thought it was romantic. But now, not so much.”

I throw my arms around her. “No one should take you for granted.” Or breadcrumb her, or lie to her.

Or hold her hostage at knifepoint.

She clings to me and rocks back and forth, soothing us both. “No one should take either of us for granted.”

We match one another, sob for sob and sniff for sniff, until we’re both damp-faced and limp.

“Now look at you,” she tsks, letting me go and wiping under her eyes. “You’re a mess.”

I snort-laugh. “Because my hair’s drying weird, or because I’ve been crying?”

“Both?” she chuckles, digging through the bags and blankets. “Where’s your stuff? Oh, here it is.” She straightens and holds up my brush. “I can at leastfix your hair.”

While she works the brush gently through my tangles, I tell her, “Once the danger has passed, we’ll get you back to your regularly scheduled life. I promise. You won’t have to deal with this anymore.”

The brush pauses on the top of my head. “But what if I want to deal with it?”

I peer at her over my shoulder. “You do?” I ask, my tone way too incredulous.

A little puff of annoyance wafts off her, but she reins it in. “Okay, I’ll admit I got a little obsessed there for a while, you know, about sororities and O-Chi and all that—and don’t get me wrong, I still want to be Sweetheart—” She resumes brushing. “But I dunno, sometimes it’s all a little silly, you know? Like, ‘hello, there are bigger things going on in the world.’”

The same revelation I had a few weeks ago. And here I’ve been selling her so short.

“Besides,” she says. “Wherever you are, I want to be.”

Dashing fresh tears from my eyes, I spin around to face her. “You want to be stuck in witness protection with a bunch of faeries?”

She shrugs. “Why not? Bad faeries tried to hurt me, but good faeries saved me. The least I can do is try to help them out.”

Heart leaping, I press my palms together and clap my fingers. “You mean you want to help us find the ring?”

“Well, maybe not.” She looks down. “I don’t have any superpowers or anything.”

“Are you kidding?!” I bounce on the mattress like a kid on Christmas morning. “You know a shit-ton about nature! Consider yourself on the team.”

She thanks me with a broad smile.

“Now, you need to brushyourhair,” I command. “Because I have something for you to wear.” It takes a moment of digging, but finally I find the faerie hairpin buried deep in my tote bag. Yeah, I might’ve impulsively rescued it from my bottom desk drawer and tossed it in there when I was packing.

“Oh!” Liv’s eyes widen when I present it to her. “Oh!” They grow even bigger. “Leo gave you this, didn’t he?”