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“There you are.” Adair breezed into the lounge, carrying a slip of paper. “I have news.”
“You act as though you’re surprised to see me here when I have nowhere else to be.” I looked up from the chair by the fireplace, my face warm from the flames.
Adair strode over, wearing a gown of green and gold, with a trailing cape. Sometimes he wore elaborate outfits like this one, and sometimes plain clothes, as though not on display. Faerie must have been a strange place.
I took the folded note and opened it. A wedding, the invitation declared. The joining of Valentine Anzio to Elisabeth Couper.
The words struck my heart, but I kept my face blank, carefully folded the note, and handed it back.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Humans are such fickle things. Their love is as fleeting as their lives. You see how this is good?”
“Good?” I faced the flames again, hoping Adair would grow bored and leave.
“This wedding is evidence that he did not love you. He has moved on. It is time you do the same.”
“Move on to what? Loving you? I’d rather rattle around this dollhouse for eternity.”
“That can be arranged, you know.”
“Bored of me, Adair? What did you think would happen? I’d come running into your arms? I’d turn to you for comfort, warm your bed, perhaps?” In the corner of my eye, I caught how his mouth twitched, threatening a snarl. Good, I hoped it hurt.
“What if I brought him to you?” Adair asked.
“What?” I looked over and found him smiling. His smiles never ended well.
“If I bring him here, will you love me then?”
I laughed. “How is it you made me, yet you do not understand me at all?”
“Then I’ll bring him, and you will thank me.”
“No,” I said firmly. “We have meddled enough in Val’s life. Let him have the life he’s chosen.”
Adair’s smile turned predatory. “It’s been many years since I attended a wedding. The last was Jacapo’s, in fact. Such joy, that day. The happy couple in love.”
I narrowed my eyes on the wicked fae who had taken me and twisted me into something monstrous. But what if his manipulation had begun before I existed? “You were a guest at Jacapo’s wedding?”
“I was,” Adair said, so proud of himself. “Then the child came along, and well, Jacapo lost interest in the gentlemen’s club, in pleasures he’d sought with me.”
A sickening sense of dread pulled on my heart. This insanity had begun long before me. Adair had been infatuated with Jacapo, and Jacapo had jilted Adair for a family.
“You grew jealous.” I shot to my feet and surged toward Adair, only stopping when the fae straightened and peered down his nose. “You killed his wife and child.”
Adair sighed. “He would have abandoned me. They’d have taken his love from me. What else was I to do? Women die in childbirth all the time. And the son? A sickly child. Mortals are so fragile.”
“He didn’t know you murdered them.”
“No, of course not.” Adair laughed. “He came to me afterward, begging for help, and that’s when he made you. Ourson.”
Rage lashed through me. “I’m not your son.”
Adair twisted everything he touched, and anything that did not fit his desires, he destroyed. He’d destroy Valentine’s love too and drag him back to me.
I clenched my hands at my sides. “Let Valentine have his life—”
