Free Veil of Shadows by Jennifer Armintrout Page A

cheek. “Who told you such a thing?”

    “No one told me anything, explicitly. But I could read the truth of it in your face as you gazed on the water.” A sudden, cold shock proved it. “You looked at it as though it were your enemy. You gazed into the depths as if you hated and feared it, but could not look away from it.”

    He took another breath, ragged, as though he held back with great effort something that he would not allow to be heard out loud. It was a struggle he could not win.

    When he spoke, it was from a place as shrouded in fear as the clearing from her dream. But this time, the dread did touch her, so palpable was it in his words.

    “The night I came to you, when I…fulfilled my promise to tell you of what transpired in your mother.s Council…” He halted, swallowed audibly. “You were not the only one to have a Darkworld lover. There was a woman, a Gypsy woman. She was a girl, really, perhaps younger than you. I never asked, and she never told me. They are timeless, ageless, her people. At least, they seemed so. She had asked me to go with her, to flee the Underground and stay with her always….”

    The words struck her like a weapon she did not see coming, and the wound in her deepened, split anew by the pain in his voice. If her hands were not bound, she would have covered her ears to keep from hearing, for she knew what would come next.

    And, as if knowing that his own sorrow would cut her to her core, he sharpened his words, formed them carefully and slowly. Perhaps he said them for the first time. “All of her people were killed. By Waterhorses. And her, as well. I left you that night and found them slaughtered.”

    Her mouth was thick, as though the moisture there had fled to become the tears that filled her eyes. “If you had not come to me, would you—”

    “No!” He threw the word down like a gauntlet. “You cannot blame yourself for their deaths. You cannot involve yourself in it, and do not play at it as though you could possibly share my pain!”

    She squeezed her eyes shut, let a tear fall. Not because she believed she had any connection, no matter how superficial, to his tragedy, but because in her connection to him his hurt was too much to bear witness to.

    “Anyway,” he began, softer now, “it was too late. They had been dead for some time.”

    Striving to keep the sound of her tears from intruding, she said, “I am sorry. Not because I imagine myself a part of your pain, but because it hurts me, to see it hurt you.”

    “Empathy is a Human gift. Cherish it.” In the silence, his heartbeat was audible, and fast. “As I cherish it in you.”

    The sentiment was so intimate, it shocked her. The cold slap of recognition she.d received before repeated itself, a battering ram of truth against all she thought she knew. If they had not been bound, he would have put his arms around her. Kissed her? She thought so. If he could have, he would have touched her, and it would not have been out of obligation to his geis, or to keep up an appearance of their false betrothal.

    Her heart hammered against her ribs, and something quivered there, beat itself against her from the inside. She was too conscious of her breathing, too aware of her closeness to him. She clenched her thighs against the crude, primal ache that flooded the space between them, and prayed silently, No, do not let me feel this. Not now. I cannot bear it, and I cannot be trusted.

    “Cerridwen.” His voice was low and dark, meant to be spoken much closer to her, as the maddening inches of separation closed up between them. But it could not be that way, and it seemed futile to hear him now. “Cerridwen,” he said again, and then was silenced as the little room flooded with light.

    The door scraped open, but her eyes were still blinded when the Human entered. “On your feet. You.re going ashore.”

    Six

    F aeries lined the corridors as the Humans marched Cedric and Cerridwen out of their prison. They