Freed (Imprisoned by the Fae 3)

“So long as you’re the rightful ruler of the Winter Court, you don’t get that luxury, cousin. Oberon killed your kin. Don’t you want revenge?”

“Why? When, if I could, I would’ve taken Melisandre’s head myself?”

“She was my sister—” Nyx begins.

Morgan’s laugh is soft. Dangerous. “And? Don’t you remember what she did to my sister?”

“Perhaps Branwen should’ve pledged her loyalty to Melisandre instead of the missing queen.”

I revise my opinion. Nyx is a fucking idiot.

“Oh?”

The fae, at heart, are a capricious race. They have their whims, going from amused to irritated even quicker than a toddler. Add that to their belief that they’re better than anyone else and a crazy amount of power and… well… I guess you get someone like Morgan.

Who, if she’s your friend, is kind. Sweet. Accommodating.

But make her your enemy?

Her eyes flare that same freaky white color. Her skin turns pale blue. Wind whips around her, causing her beautiful black curls to bounce around a face that’s as stunning as it is terrifying.

From where I’m hiding with Rys, I can feel the cold pouring off of her in waves. But when she channels her power—channels her rage—and shoves the air in front of her at Nyx, all of that snow and ice and chill is targeted at her Unseelie cousin.

When the snow settles and the wind dies, I see what Morgan has done to him.

He’s… he’s frozen. One big Unseelie popsicle.

Morgan closes her bare fist.

Nyx explodes.

I scream. At least, I think it was me. Might’ve been Riley.

Hey. It’s better than puking.

As the ice shards hit the frozen ground with a soft, tinkling sound, I’m suddenly reminded of what the redcap said about Morgan. About how she caused the troll carrying her toward the Faerie Market to shatter.

I don’t know if he’s the sort of faerie folk that has to tell the truth, but he definitely wasn’t lying about that, huh?

Whoa.

15

You’d think that, now that the leader of the rebellion was dead, our job was done. Nope. That’s human logic.

Fae logic says that we promised Oberon a meeting with the Winter Queen and, until Morgan agrees to sit down with Oberon and figure out their next step as rulers of Faerie is—because, regardless of what Morgan said, now that she executed Nyx, she has to ascend to her throne sooner or later—we haven’t quite finished what we set out to do.

I feel awful for her. She’s spent more than two hundred years hiding, her cousin is dead, her sister is a raven, and all she wanted was to be left alone in her cottage before something even worse happened to her.

And then I showed up.

Not only did I have her on the run from Siúcra guards before leading her into a trap where we were caught by trolls, but after she made it back, I brought even more trouble to her doorstep.

But I also brought Jim. And from the way those two are buddy-buddy all of a sudden, I think she forgives me for everything else.

I’m not jealous. I’m not. I have Rys, and I’m really psyched for Jim that he can have a do-over when it comes to his own happily-ever-after. I guess… I don’t know. It just sucks that he had to forget everything that ever happened between us first.

Because that was Grimly’s trick. It wasn’t just one memory that he took from Jim. By taking the day that Jim first noticed me, he took the day that he fell in love with me. Jim always said it was love at first sight. Turns out, it really was.