Revulsion crossed her face, making her look hard and cold where only moments ago she’d been soft and loving. “Ní mise do ghrá!”
As the hooded figures reached Fionn, Rose wanted to yell in warning, the words almost spilling out when she reminded her panicked emotions that this was just a dream. Her reminder came just in time because as the hooded figures fell upon Fionn, the black of their cloaks whipped out at Rose, covering the world in the fabric, rippling and whooshing like banners in the wind.
Then there was light.
Greenery all around.
Rolling hills of grass.
A gentle brook bubbling somewhere in the distance.
Birds singing.
“Rose?”
Thinking he’d discovered her in his dreamscape, Rose whirled to face Fionn and instead saw herself with him.
A dream version of herself.
Light sparkled off her, her eyes impossibly blue.
She was … beautiful.
Was this how Fionn saw her?
Rose ached at the thought.
She turned her attention to him. He was as he was now, dressed in one of his fine suits, his overcoat fluttering behind him in the soft breeze. Those startling green eyes gleamed in the daylight as he approached her with a tortured expression.
“Fionn, what is it?” her dream self asked.
He halted close to her, reaching to cup her face in his large palm. Rose touched her own cheek as if she might feel the tingle of his touch. Then he bowed his head toward hers and whispered across her lips, “I’m so sorry, mo chroí.”
So distracted by the fact that Fionn was dreaming of her like this, Rose noticed An Breitheamh too late. The dagger was fixed in his other hand, a dagger that he plunged into her dream self’s heart.
Confused, horrified, Rose stumbled to her knees along with her dream self, watching miraculous tears roll down Fionn’s cheeks as he held her dying in his arms.
“What have I done?” he rocked her, murmuring the question over and over.
What the fuck? Rose choked on silent screams as the air behind the dying Dream Rose shimmered and peeled open, like water receding from shore, revealing another world beneath.
Faerie.
The gate to Faerie.
Fionn laid Dream Rose on the ground and gently removed An Breitheamh from her heart. As soon as it was out, covered in her blood, he threw his head back and roared the most terrifying, anguished sound she’d ever heard.
Then he slumped over Dream Rose’s dead body, the very image of defeat.
“Fionn.”
His head jerked up to the right. The redhead was back.
“Aoibhinn?” he gaped, confused, his cheeks still wet with tears. He did not look like the Fionn Rose knew at all.
Aoibhinn gestured to Dream Rose’s body. “This is worse than what I did to you. You shared the bond. How could you?”
“I can’t take it back, can I?” he asked hoarsely.
She shook her head. “Do you want to? After all, it was the only way to open the gate.”
Understanding and terror flooded Rose. She had to wake up, she had to wake up. She had to get away from him!
That bastard!
That lying, vicious, psychotic bastard!
Fionn’s head snapped toward her, and he looked right at her.
Horror darkened his face. “Rose. No.”
22
Her eyes flew open, blood whooshing in her ears from her pounding heart, and without even thinking about it, her body traveled.
One second Rose was lying in bed next to Fionn, the treacherous bastard, and the next on her feet by the bed, facing him.
He was awake. Already up on his feet by the opposite side.
His rugged features hard, his eyes glinted with determination and … accusation?
“You can dream-walk,” he growled. Accusatory.
Oh no. Rose was going to kill the motherfucker.
She flew at him, a blur across the bed, but he was fast, too fast, traveling from one side of the room to the other before she could thrust a fist through his chest. It wasn’t something she’d ever done before but Rose reckoned he was the best son of a bitch to practice on!
“Don’t.” Fionn held up a hand against her, his expression implacable. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
The last few hours came flooding back, weakening her at the knees.
The fight.
His battling the vampires to protect her. Him being weird, her refusing to back down until he shared what was going on with him.
Him kissing her. Taking her to the bed, his hands on her body. The rightness of it. The desperate need for him.
And then … she’d no longer been conscious, which was how she found herself in his dreamworld.
“What did you do to me? We were …” she whispered, gesturing to the bed.
Fionn shrugged. “You fell asleep.”
Oh, yeah, sure, she’d fallen asleep when the guy she wanted most in the world finally broke his damn control and put his mouth and hands on her.
“You put me to sleep.”
The dream poked and prodded her, painfully reminding her of the truth. “You put me to sleep because …” Misery unlike anything she’d ever felt clawed at her. The agony of his betrayal. Tears threatened, but she refused to give them to him. “You’ve been planning to kill me all along. That’s why you’d look at me like you wanted me but then push me away. You’re a sick bastard but not sick enough to fuck the woman you’re planning to betray. To murder.”
Her instincts were screaming for her to get out. To flee. Yet the naive woman who had begun to fall in love with a stranger needed answers. “Do you deny it?”
“It was just a dream,” Fionn replied gruffly.
“Don’t lie to me!” she shrieked.
Fionn looked away, running a hand through his hair. A slight tremble in the movement gave him away. If it hadn’t, the wave of emotion hitting Rose—foreign, panicked, remorseful, and desperate—did. He’d forgotten to mask himself from her in all the confusion; she was feeling everything he felt.
Those were not the feelings of a man planning to kill her.
It would explain perhaps why she’d never felt danger from him.
And so she stupidly waited when every fiber of her being told her to escape.
Finally, he settled his flinty regard upon her. “The children who were born to open the gate need not die,” he confessed. “Not for anyone but me.”
“You?” she gritted out.
“I had a wife and children.”
Rose remembered the shock she felt watching him interact with his wife. The jealousy, even. The disbelief at seeing his children. “I saw them.”
“I had people and land that I vowed to protect when I became their king. When I agreed to go to Faerie to save them, I was agreeing to become Aine’s whore, not just her slave.”
Despite the betrayal of the dream still turning her stomach, it was not in Rose’s power to halt the flash of anger and sympathy she felt at his confession.
“I tricked her as I said I did, and my people betrayed me upon my return. But what I left out was that I had a family. And my wife, Aoibhinn, had remarried. She was bound to the new king and together, they sentenced me to an eternal sleep. I was surrounded by druids as she stared in revulsion at me, at what I’d become, while the man who’d taken my place, a stranger, held back my son from coming to my aid. My daughter wailed her despair from the arms of one of my men.”
“Your wife betrayed you?”
Fionn nodded, expression carefully blank. “The Faerie Queen took everything from me. Everything. Trapp
ed me with powers I have no right to. Abandoned me to an eternity of emptiness. She may have closed the gates to protect both our people, but I will never forgive her for what I lost.”
“Aoibhinn.”
He curled his upper lip into a snarl. “Fuck that treacherous bitch. I’m talking about my mortality. My right to see my children grow, Rose. My Caoimhe and Diarmuid. Lost to me because of Aine and what she turned me into.”
Rose glowered at him. She didn’t want to be sucked into his sad tale of woe. “And how do I fit in to your story? Don’t lie. I’ll know.”
“There’s no point lying now, is there.” Fionn studied her, his countenance dispassionate, completely at odds with how he’d behaved in his dream. At complete odds with the emotions she’d felt from him only moments ago before he got a handle on them.
“You need not die to open the gate. Just a drop of blood. In fact, someone can only go to Faerie as your companion. That’s what the Blackwoods want from you. To convince you to take them to Faerie. But Aine made it so I can’t enter Faerie with ill intentions without sacrificing one of the fae-borne using An Breitheamh. She assumed it would be a difficult decision for me since I’d been an honorable man.”
Flashes of the dream pounded in Rose’s head.
Fionn crying.
Roaring as if devastated by her death.
What was true?
What was the lie?
“You want to kill me to open the gate so you can take your revenge on the Faerie Queen?”
“She made me the thing I hated, and when I returned home, my wife and her new husband decreed I was a monster. My son, now a man, disagreed. Our people didn’t disagree as such, but they were conflicted. This had been done against my will, to their king—their king who had offered his life to save them all.
“So Aoibhinn compromised. She asked the druids to put me to sleep, that if I was meant to ascend beyond my curse, the Fates would awaken me. Young women of the village sacrificed themselves in honor of the king I’d once been. Their blood is not on my hands but Aoibhinn’s. She betrayed me and forced my children to watch. All because of that cruel bitch of a fae.”