I had wanted, and if Asher was right, she may no longer even care about us. She’d been down there too long. What the hell had I done? Who the hell was she now?
“Let’s hope your wife is the thing that crawled out of that hole. Judging by the love letter she left you, I’m going to say it’s her, but not her.”
“It’s her fucking heart,” I rasped. “That’s Synthia’s heart, and her message is written in her own blood.”
“It doesn’t mean that’s who crawled out. It just means they consumed her thoughts and had access to one of her corpses. They may have left it so you didn’t go looking deeper for her. The things down there aren’t like us, Ryder. Some consume souls, taking the best parts of their prey and removing their memories while transforming them into what they want them to become.
“Other things, well, they make you into something else altogether. I wasn’t this sexed-up when I went down there, but I sure as fuck was when I came out of that pit. You never come back the same. That place changes you into a monster, and what went down doesn’t come back up. Sorry that isn’t what you want to hear, but fuck, she ripped out her own heart and used her blood to write you a creepy-ass love letter. Doesn’t sound like the Goddess of the Fae came out of there, Ryder,” he said sadly.
“My Synthia isn’t in that cave, that’s all I fucking care about. I can bring her back; she’s my wife. I just have to find her.” I stared at the drawing of the wings; it gave me hope.
The beating heart that still pounded on the pedestal, though, gave me pause. A long fucking pause, if I was being honest. What had she gone through to get out of there? Would she forgive me for leaving her here? Knowing Synthia, I was going to be in for the fight of my life to get her back.
“This is fucking crazy shit,” Adam muttered, pushing his fingers through his hair in frustration.
I was willing to go to war to bring her back to me, but first I had to figure out where the hell she was, and I couldn’t feel her. It felt like she was right here, but the only thing she’d left me was her bleeding heart. “We need to discover where she was or where she would go.”
“No, you need to figure out who and what crawled out of that hole. Then, and only then, can you figure out where Synthia went.” Asher shook his head, frowning. Everyone went silent, listening as the heart beat louder and louder as if Synthia was experiencing an adrenaline rush, or worse, fighting someone.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ryder
I stood on the battlements, watching the field where power seemed to continually be collecting for the last several days. All of Faery was holding its breath as something intensified within it, and I had a suspicion it was my wife gathering her strength to come for me. I wanted her back here, safe within the walls of the stronghold, and yet the more we looked for her, the more helpless I felt that she wasn’t coming home.
If Asher was right, and the prick seemed to be right about the pit, it wasn’t Synthia that had crawled out of that cave. So who was driving my pretty wife around, and how the fuck did I fix this mess?
It was killing me to consider the truth. To think of Synthia being hurt by creatures within the pit, but it was supposed to have been empty. I’d assumed so, since Asher and an entire army were now outside of it, roaming free. He’d never mentioned anything else being down there when I’d cornered and interrogated him on the passes. I’d put him through hell, allowing Zahruk to search through his intentions without looking too hard at his time in that hellish pit. I’d been in a hurry to head off the mages.
The Seelie prison was one of the few things inside this entire world that I’d never bothered to explore, but