Page 42 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
I thought back to a simpler time, when Shiel had first rescued me, and the greatest thing I was struggling with was whether or not I’d even turn out to be fae, or if they’d mistakenly taken a sorry human girl from the only home she’d ever known—however bad that home might have been.
Shiel lay close enough to me that I could feel the heat radiating off of him, but not so close that we were touching. Finch had wandered off to find his horse so he could lay some sort of protective faerie circle around us, while Zev had started gathering together some of the drier scrub branches to start a fire. My stomach grumbled in appreciation. My fae body craved these creatures’ food even more than my human one had.
As impossible as that might seem.
Shiel and I lay alone for the first time since that one night we spent together in his tent, each of us bloodstained and shivering. Now, we were drenched in nothing but our own sweat, and though we shivered, it was from the night air and not the wracking shoulders of a newly shared trauma.
“It’s been so long since the last time,” I whispered, wondering if his thoughts had wandered to the same place mine had.
Shiel lay in silence for a moment before his voice finally carried over to me from the growing dark. “You’re not the girl you were that night. You’re not the girl I rescued.”
“You’ve got that right,” I said, a heady rush bubbling out of me with a half-snorted laugh. I held out my hands in front of me, admiring the pale, foreign hands that now waved in front of my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Shiel staring, and turned over on my side to catch his gaze before he could look away. “What do I look like?”
The question caught Shiel off guard. Things didn’t often catch that fae lord off guard, so it wasn’t without a significant sense of satisfaction that I watched his brow crease in concentration.
“You didn’t see yourself? In the mirrors?”
I shook my head. “Not long enough to remember what I saw,” I said, though it wasn’t entirely true. I’d seen the eyes now embedded in my skull like turquoise gemstones. But the rest ofme, even the parts of me that I need simply look down to see or explore by my own touch, I was blind to them.
Something stopped me each time from touching the shape of my own new body. Something stopped me from looking down, from peeling back the travelling clothes that fit me strangely to see the body I’d been born with, yet never seen.
Shiel was watching me more closely now. That furrow in his brow had deepened, the look in his eyes so piercing that it took me a moment to understand why.
“Aurra…” he started, his voice deep, the uncertainty lingering there in the moments before I cut him off.
“You can look at me, Shiel,” I said, my own voice coming out far breathier than I expected.
Across the cave, a dull light began to flicker. The light was quickly fading outside the cave, and with it, so was the heat of the day. We’d not yet travelled so far north that we feared catching a chill in the night, but I’d grown accustomed to the thick blanket of heat the Southern Court provided the last few weeks. Just thinking about spending the night without it sent an involuntary shiver down my spine.
Though, it might have been the weight of Shiel’s eyes on me that truly did it.
SEX SCENE
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I woke before Shiel,in the hour where dawn had just begun to settle.
I found Zev outside the mouth of the cave, his hunched shoulders half covered by a thin blanket. Finch had chosen to sleep inside the cave at some point in the night, and I swore his body edged closer to Shiel and I each time I’d turned over in my sleep and caught a glimpse of his fetal form lit only by the glow of the coals.
Zev, meanwhile, looked like he hadn’t slept a wink.
“Zev…”
My voice felt small beneath the great reddening expanse of sky. “Did you keep watch all night?”
Zev didn’t turn to look at me. He kept his gaze fixed on something on the distant horizon, the dark of his pupils moving up and down as he traced the line of the closest mountain.
“Someone had to do it.”
He finally turned to look at me as I came to crouch beside him, my own arms reaching to wrap around my shoulders as if to mimic him. Only one of us was shivering, however, and it wasn’t me.
We sat in silence for a little bit watching the sky begin to brighten before he speaks again.
“It waseasy to spot you, too,” he says, turning to look at me. “You were different from everyone else around you. Everything about you. How you looked, how you moved, how you observed the world around you. When I saw you, I knew that you were fae…but it was more than that. I feel like if you had been in a marketplace full of fae, I still would have picked you out.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes…You are special Aurra. And I never doubted that you were the actual princess.”
