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Seething, she stomped over to the counter, snatched the bread, and started making a sandwich. Gods, she was hungry. And exhausted. And so, so angry at that stubborn demon husband of hers, who was currently rearranging the dishes in the cabinets in some OCD-compliant order, no doubt working off his frustration. The bread suffered from some frustration of her own, what with the way she almost butchered it.
Going through the fridge, she pulled out a bunch of stuff to put on the sandwich, all the while furiously thinking, brooding, fuming with what in her opinion was clearly justified anger.
He couldn’t honestly expect her to give up on her sister, not after all she’d been through. Only a few months had passed since Merle rescued Maeve, and Maeve still suffered from the trauma of her abduction and torture at the hands of a demon. Merle’s stomach turned when she thought back to how she had to ask Arawn for help in finding Maeve’s captor, and how Arawn’s price for his assistance was an open favor…which he claimed later, after Maeve’s rescue, by demanding Merle surrender magical custody over Maeve to him and let him take her baby sister.
Bruised and hurting from the race to save Maeve, and from seeing the open wounds in Maeve’s psyche, Merle had desperately bargained with the Demon Lord once more to keep Arawn from claiming her right away. So she ended up locked in a deal with Arawn—she granted him free use of her magic as long as he didn’t come to take away Maeve.
And she had to keep it up, because the thought of the Demon Lord dragging Maeve off to the heart of his dark dominion soured her blood. Why couldn’t Rhun see that she had to hold on to this last chance of keeping Maeve safe, that it was simply not an option to surrender her baby sister to a being like Arawn if there was still a way around it?
Grinding her teeth, Merle barely kept herself from squeezing the honey bottle to death—and then she froze. She stared at the sandwich in front of her, a dizzying suspicion crawling up her spine. Mentally doing some math, she then put the honey down on the counter with shaking hands, heart pounding a thousand times a minute.
“Rhun,” she whispered.
Pausing with a mug in his hands, he met her eyes, then followed her glance to the sandwich—which consisted of bread with peanut butter, cheese, bacon and pickles, topped with honey. He frowned, looked at her face again, before his attention dropped to her hand, which was resting on her abdomen.
His eyes widened. The mug slipped from his grasp, fell to the floor, shattered. Suddenly Rhun was in front of her, his hands cupping her face, his lips on hers, searing, possessive, kissing the hell out of her while the mating bond between them pulsed with a tangle of white-hot emotions. Excitement, fear, protectiveness, and, above and beyond all, a love that went so deep, it fucking broke her heart.
Swallowing a sob of bittersweet happiness, she wound her arms around his neck, kissing him back with all the passion she felt for him. She jumped up and wrapped her legs around his hips, and he caught her, set her down on the counter with utmost care, stroking her face. Resting his forehead against hers, he closed his eyes, his hand warm as it curved over her belly. There was a hush of awe about him, and it was so damn beautiful she wanted to cry.
For the longest time they remained like this, Rhun’s one hand tangled in her hair, his other resting on her belly, her arms around his neck, fingers digging into the silk of his hair. He smiled as he met her gaze.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” they both said at the same time, and she giggled, giddy and high on an overload of happy hormones.
“Are you really…?” he whispered.
“Yes.” She gave a shaky nod. “I can feel it. A tiny spark.”
Rhun’s smile brightened until it was blinding. “We’re going to have a little witch volcano.”
Chapter 8
Your mother.
The unspoken words whispered through Isa’s mind, and brought back memories of what had indeed been the hardest case Isa ever worked.
“Please, please, I beg you. Search your heart, find some mercy.” Tears streamed down the fae’s face, her eyes huge and round and imploring as she looked up at Isa. “Please let me go.”
The magical leash in Isa’s hand burned into her skin, even though the power was calibrated not to affect Isa herself. And yet she burned. Her hand trembled. If Isa had even a shred of compassion in her heart, she would release the faery, would grant her the freedom she so desperately craved. But alas, the heart the fae had spoken of was made of stone.
“Come with me,” Isa said, her voice as cold as the marble that sang to her.
Basil’s voice drew her back into the present. With a start, she looked over at him.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I was just asking about the hardest case you ever had.” His brows drew together over those gorgeous brown eyes. “But hey, if it’s too personal a question, forget I asked.”
Isa swallowed hard, pushed back the feeling of an irrevocable, heavy mistake. “Well, I guess it’s a tie between the one fae I had to chase up Mount Hood—all the way up—and the other fae, who fled into the sewers of Portland. And yes, I had to chase him through pipes full of human waste.”
Basil choked out a laugh. “I don’t even want to imagine how long it took to wash off.”
Isa grinned, glad he accepted her diversion at face value, bought into her implication that hard had been a matter of physically taxing versus emotionally devastating. Because even with a heart of stone, dragging Basil’s mother back into Faerie almost broke Isa.
It was wrong, she knew that. All these years of suffering, all the pain, the looming specter of her own death, it was only fair, wasn’t it? Didn’t she deserve it? Had the curse not been the just reward for declining to do what had been so obviously right? Yes, maybe she deserved to suffer.
Isa took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and shook herself. Shook off the maudlin feelings of self-recrimination, and reminded herself of what had been her reality ever since she was a little girl. How could she have made the right decision, or even known what was right? How could she have known how to care for anyone else, how could she have put the welfare of anyone else before her own needs, when no one had ever done the same for her?
She had to claw and fight for every scrap of food and shelter while she was growing up. She struggled through a childhood intent on seeing her die rather than succeed, and she made her way out by herself. No one helped her. No one cared. She never had the luxury of caring for someone else more than she cared about staying alive, so declining to listen to the pleas of one desperate fae had just been par for the course.
