The Faire (Harrow Faire #5) - Kathryn Ann Kingsley Page 0,36

over his shoulder, the other wrapped around his chest.

She relaxed her hand. The darkness dissipated like smoke. One second it was there, the next, it was a fleeting after-image in his vision. Gone.

He was shivering. “Cora…what did you do?” His voice wavered, even as he clung to the source of the power that had manifested in front of him.

“I did what had to be done.” She paused. “Are you afraid of me?”

He opened his mouth to speak, paused, shut his mouth, repeated the pattern again dumbly, and then finally turned his gaze from the stairwell—waiting for the slithering void to reappear—and looked up at her.

Her eyes were not silver. They weren’t the wonderful shades of the clouds that he adored. They, like they had been in his boxcar when he had foolishly provoked her link to Harrow Faire, were gone. Empty darkness greeted him. She blinked, and just like that, her eyes returned to normal.

And they were heartbroken.

They gazed at him in pain. She grieved for the loss of his shadow. She grieved for what she had become, perhaps. And now they looked at him in wariness. Clearly pondering, as if she had said it aloud, if he was disgusted or too frightened by her.

“It’s changed me.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. She placed her hand over her heart. “It gave me a choice. I could…I could take more of it into me and save us, or I could stay here in the tower until we died…while you dangled there, suffering. What choice did I really have? I don’t know what it’s done to my head. I feel it there, humming in the background.” She cringed. “Like bees. Or like I’m sitting next to a generator. He says I’ll get used to it, that it won’t bother me as much as time goes on. But he’s there now, in my head. I don’t know what parts of me he took and changed—how I’m different—” Tears welled in her eyes again, and she didn’t bother to stop them from falling. “You might not…” She stopped and started again. “I’m not the same person. I can’t be. Bits of me are Harrow Faire. Bits of me are that creature. What if—what—” Her voice broke.

He turned to kneel on the stairs between her feet, facing her. He reached out and cupped her cheek. “What if what, Cora dear?”

“I know you can’t love me. I know you don’t want to. That’s fine. But I…it doesn’t change how I feel about you. When I climbed out of that hole, I wondered if I had lost that part of me. I guess I almost hoped it would go away. It would have made you happier in the end. But it’s still there. I still love you. I’m sorry.”

Oh, Cora…

“But now, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am. How much of me can be taken away before I’m not me anymore? Before I’m someone else? Or before I’m empty like Ludwig? Before…you don’t want me.”

He pulled her into a kiss. He wrapped his arm around her lower back and tugged her flush against his body. He poured his passion into his embrace. She clung to his rumpled suitcoat. He felt a huge tear in her clothes at the back. She had been skewered on a metal statue for who-knows-how-long. The blood beneath his fingers was crunchy and dry.

But it didn’t deter him.

When he finally broke, he could feel her breathing against his chest. Short and shallow. She looked up at him, eyes smoky and dark. She watched him, breathless and rapt. Caught in his embrace and his gaze all the same.

He wondered if his eyes were still inverted colors. He hoped so. He rather liked terrorizing people with them, even if the sunglasses were irritating at times. Nothing in life was more fun than a dramatic reveal.

“The jury has returned, and the verdict is in.” He smirked. He tilted her head back slightly and ghosted his lips over hers. “Yes. I am terrified of you, my darling Contortionist. Of what you’ve become. You are something altogether new. Something these fools in the Family have never seen before. But it seems that every time I think I could not want you more, you seek to prove me wrong.” He grinned. “If I were not concussed, I think I might have to take you here and now.”

She laughed quietly. It was a sad, exhausted sound. She kissed him. She broke away