Settling his hands on his stomach, he turned his head on the pillow to look at her again.
Rose.
Panic gripped him.
How could he hurt her now?
He visualized plunging An Breitheamh into her heart and made a low sound of agony.
Rose stirred in her sleep, her lashes fluttering, but she didn’t wake.
Fionn shifted onto his side to watch her.
If he didn’t take An Breitheamh to her, he’d have to find the last fae-borne. He couldn’t kill Niamh if she was his descendant. If he couldn’t kill Niamh, and he couldn’t kill Rose … Yet, that was taking a massive risk. What if he was too late to find the other fae-borne?
What good were these feelings, anyway? Fionn planned to take his revenge and die at the end of it. There was no future for him and Rose. Even if he didn’t have a plan to die, he’d never learn to trust her fully.
And what of Rose’s future? To constantly be on the run from fanatics who either wanted to kill her or use her to open a fucking gate?
Surely giving her a worthy death now was a blessing in disguise.
The mere thought nauseated Fionn.
“Rose,” he whispered, reaching out to touch a silken strand of her hair, “what have you done?”
21
The streets had blurred together as Rose sped through them faster than light. She flew over rooftops, jumped from balcony to balcony on seventeenth-century buildings that changed as she soared midair onto La Sagrada Familia. One minute she’d been in Orléan, now Barcelona.
She gripped the side of one of the spires, feet secured in the gaps in the stonework. Laughing, exhilarated, Rose held on tight as she glanced over her shoulder and found Fionn floating midair with invisible wings. His brooding expression was firmly in place.
“Let go, Rose,” he demanded.
Instead, she climbed.
“We mustn’t touch what isn’t ours,” he called out.
She stopped, pulled her knees up toward her chest, her feet flat to the stone, and pushed, arching her back, lifting her chin as she did a backward flip off the spire. It felt like flying.
Landing on the ground was like landing on a cloud.
Her surroundings were vague now, like an incomplete sketch. However, when Fionn appeared before her, he was anything but. He was full-color 4K HD.
“Show-off,” he said.
Rose felt excitement blossom low in her gut accompanying the flutter near her heart. “You like it. Admit it. You like me.”
Just as his lips pushed toward a smile, a tornado—or something like it—pulled him up into its grasp, taking the vague world with it in a smear of colors.
Her heart raced, all joy gone, only confusion and fear left as she stood in an eternity of darkness.
“Hello!” she yelled, the word echoing and echoing and echoing.
Then she was on the move, like the blackness beneath her was a walkway in motion; one that rippled and wobbled and then propelled her out of the dark.
Rose landed in a large room. Struggling to even out her breathing, she spun in the spot, staring at the circular room with its conical roof. A whitish, cracked, claylike material created a circular wall that came to just above Rose’s head. From there the ceiling, made of a wooden frame and hay, vaulted to a point in the center. In the middle of the room was a circle of stones, within which a fire was dying, the smoke filtering up to a small gap in the roof.
Edging the room was a table with pieces of pottery, a rough-hewn jug and cups … There were wicker baskets and benches with furs thrown over them near an entrance.
Behind her, simple framework and fabric draped like curtains created a crude separation of living and sleeping quarters. Rose jerked in surprise at the sight of a beautiful gray wolf sprawled in front of it, his head resting between his paws as he dozed.
A groan drew Rose’s attention from the wolf to the curtains as a large hand pushed the fabric aside, revealing more furs.
The wolf instantly woke up and stood, a large, majestic animal with piercing blue eyes. He began to pace impatiently until Fionn was there. There was a glow about him, and even though he sported a thick, long beard, Rose would recognize him anywhere. He stepped out of the furs, naked and magnificent.
Her breath caught.
He reached into the bed of furs, giving her an amazing view of that muscular ass of his, and pulled on rough trousers. With a yawn, Fionn crossed the room