“And what you are? And Vivienne? And Morgan?”
“And Embry and Lyr,” she adds. “All of us.”
I think about this. There’s only one other person who knows the truth, and he’s currently recovering from a stab wound in the safest place I could find for him.
Is it possible that she could have remembered? All on her own?
The idea is almost exciting. It’s a lonely life to be the keeper of so many secrets and an impossibly heavy burden to bear. I gaze at her while she paces, willing myself to perceive if she’s come into her own sight, but it is veiled from me, as are so many other things.
I sigh.
“It was a sense,” she says suddenly, stopping and looking at me. “It was this faint sense that there was more. It started years ago, when we first met, and it got stronger and stronger, unt
il one day I just knew that it was something beyond the ordinary. And the more I watched, the more I saw your hand in our lives. Sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel, but always with purpose. With foresight.” She gives a little laugh. “It was right in front of me all along. Merlin.” She says my name as she shakes her head, as if she can’t believe how long it took her to put it all together.
“I’m surprised you let yourself believe it,” I say, but I’m not really. Nimue has always been at the threshold of magic—suspended just on the other side of her own veil—and had she been born in a less rational age, she would have found her sight years earlier. Indeed, she was barely a woman when she kidnapped me the first time and held hostage my power and my life. She got both, in the end.
“I want what you have,” she says simply.
“You could have just asked.”
She looks at me. “I’ve asked you only once for something for myself. It hurt enough the first time.”
Stay. Don’t hurt me like this.
I love you.
I am very, very still as the echoes of her pleas ripple through me.
“Anyway, aside from not being a masochist, I was also certain you’d say no. You’ve kept this a secret from everyone, haven’t you? I’ve dropped hints around Vivienne and Morgan and even Embry…and nothing. No one knows.”
“Ash knows,” I admit. “He needed to before—”
“—he died,” Nimue finishes for me, and real pain crosses her face. Pain for her nephew Embry and her adopted son Lyr, who think Ash is dead.
I don’t correct her. Not yet.
“And what about Lyr? You left him alone while you decided to dabble in felony?”
“He’s with Vivienne and Morgan now. He’s well cared for.” Her eyes narrow in on me. “Stop trying to change the subject.”
Fine. “So you know the truth and you want, what? Lessons?”
She walks up to me and presses her finger under my chin. The supercilious way she demands my attention sends a bolt of hot lust right to my cock.
This is new.
This did not happen last time.
“I want everything,” she says. “And you’re going to give it to me. You owe me that at least.”
“Owe you for what?”
“I think you know,” she says.
That is an unpleasant thing to hear, given our history, because if one stacked pain on top of pain on a scale, mine would far outweigh hers.
“You mean our parting at the lake. But your heart didn’t stay broken for long, did it?” I ask. “Or were you not fucking Jack Pelleas the very next day after I left?”
