frivolity works in our favor, though, since Aerik isn’t looking for a girl so brightly colored. Your face and your figure have filled out some since you started getting regular meals, too. We can put a glamour on you to make your limp slip others’ notice, and there’ll be nothing at all to identify you as his stolen captive. You could go out into the lands around the keep with us, even meet the rest of the pack.”
That thought sends a jitter through my nerves. I haven’t done a regular “getting to know you” with anyone since I was a kid. What will the regular fae think of me? “Won’t they wonder why I’m here?” I ask. “You don’t have any other human servants.”
He studies me, probably reading my anxiety in my stance. “We don’t need to rush that part of things. You might be best off waiting until after the full moon, as everyone gets more tense in the last few days leading up to it. But after… I thought we’d simply tell them that a human girl caught August’s fancy keenly enough that he insisted on bringing her home.”
Like I’m a kitten the fae man spotted in a pet shop window. The picture that forms in my mind brings back my smile, but it’s a little shier than before. “Only August’s fancy?”
Those three words are all it takes to spark the smolder in Sylas’s eyes, hot enough to warm my skin even from a few feet away. His voice drops. “I suppose what happens in that tale next depends on who you bestow your fancy on, if anyone.”
The heat trickles into my chest with a giddy flutter that’s tempered by just one question. “Having me here—it’s not going to cause problems between you two, is it?”
“I think we’ve worked that out,” he says, and pauses. “Cadres frequently enjoy the affections of the same woman—or man, as the case may be. When their first loyalty is to their lord, they can’t fully devote themselves the way a regular mate would, and sharing a lover can be a way of… offsetting the potential deficiencies in their attentions. If that can be so, then there’s nothing to say a lord and his cadre-chosen couldn’t have the same arrangement, even if it isn’t typically done.”
“So, no more fighting?”
The smolder in his unmarked eye darkens, and the memory of his touch the other morning teases over my skin. “You’ve shown qualities I’ve found to be rare in fae and humans alike, Talia, so perhaps it’s not startling that you’ve affected both August and me as much as you have. I won’t pretend it would be easy for me to share you. Every instinct in me wants to possess you for myself alone. But you don’t belong to any of us, and if you want us both… I’m willing to suppress those instincts and see what we can make of it.”
The giddiness spreads through my whole body. “Okay. That’s fair.”
Sylas steps closer, his gaze never leaving my face. “Can you accept the life I’m offering you? All I ask for is honesty. If you still feel caged, and you’ll try to run off again—”
I shake my head vehemently, willing the relief that’s flooded me to color my voice. “I won’t. I’m sorry about yesterday—I… I didn’t really want to leave, as crazy as that might sound. I don’t have anything back in my world. It hardly feels real at this point. My family is gone; my friends will have moved on. And to live with the constant fear that Aerik or some other fae might stumble on me and realize what my blood can do… I think I can be happy here. For now, at least.”
Maybe in the future, if the fae find some other cure and I’m no longer such a commodity, I’ll want to see what kind of a life I could make back there. The keep already feels more like a home than the house that’s faded into fragments of memories, though. And that house wouldn’t still be mine anyway.
Sylas’s voice drops even lower, washing over me like a caress. “I’m glad to hear that.” He touches my face in an actual caress, his fingers brushing over my hair and down across my cheek, and all the heat in me seems to pool deep in my belly.
I do want him—I want so much more with him than we’ve already done, more than I know how to put into words. But I