These Twisted Bonds (These Hollow Vows, #2)(33)

“Don’t you understand?” I whisper. “You didn’t just take the crown. You took my life. You killed me.”

Sebastian squeezes his eyes shut. “I love you.”

I shake my head. Because I know it’s true. I know he believes it. “Love means nothing without trust.”

He swallows. “I know you’re hurt right now, but do have any idea how much it broke me when you left? And you went to him? After everything?”

I frown. “Who? Misha?”

“Finn,” Sebastian growls. “You want me to understand why you can’t forgive me, but you forgave him for the same thing.”

“Finn has nothing to do with this. I haven’t seen him since that night in the catacombs.”

“But . . . you’re in the Wild Fae Lands.” Confusion flashes through the bond before he muffles it.

“You’re staying with Pretha’s brother . . .”

“Misha offered me refuge when I needed it. A place where I could get away from you and Finn.” I shake my head. “Don’t turn this around and pretend I’ve betrayed you. You don’t get to do that.”

His brow wrinkles. “Tell me what to do to earn your trust. You know I love you, so tell me how you can trust me again.”

There it is. My opening. The reason I’m here. “You want to earn my trust? Help me dismantle your mother’s camps. Free the Unseelie who are trapped in the Seelie Court and send them home.”

Sebastian blinks twice, then shakes his head. “It’s already done. She released the Unseelie to return home once Mordeus was gone.”

Does he really believe that? “Not the children. She still has the children. I saw it for myself. She’s drugging them to suppress their magic and keeping them alive so she can send them into the mines at the border. She’s using them to collect fire gems.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and curses. “She promised,” he whispers, shaking his head.

I close my eyes against the devastation on his face, but it doesn’t help when I can feel it tearing through my chest. “Promised what?”

He looks out the window, a dozen emotions flitting across his features. “Shortly after you came to the palace, I visited one of her camps and met two children who’d been taken to the mines. They were . . .” He swallows and shakes his head. “I confronted her, and she promised they were the only two she’d sent, that she’d had to send them to get the fire gems the healer needed to keep her alive.”

“She told you it was just the once? And you believed her?”

“I knew she was dying and I knew she was desperate, but I hoped . . .”

“She’s not dying anymore, and still she holds the children—thousands of them. Still she uses them to gather fire gems to make herself more powerful. You can’t trust her promises. And if you do, I’ll never be able to trust you.”

He turns his gaze to mine and searches my face. In this moment I know he’d give me anything I asked for. I know it as surely as I know my own thoughts. “I’ll dismantle the camps,” he says.

“Consider it done. I’ll assemble a team first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll be ready.”

He shakes his head and swallows. “I can’t let you go with them. I won’t risk you like that.”

“You can’t control me. I am not human anymore. I have this power, and I’ll use it.”

“But if she finds out you have it . . .”

“What? She’ll kill me so the power transfers to you? Isn’t that what you want?” I stare at him unblinking, daring him to lie to me.

His eyes blaze, and he loosens that hold on his emotions, lets them flood over me in a powerful wave of hurt and disbelief. “You don’t believe that.” It’s not a question. He knows I can’t bring myself to believe it, even if I want to. His gaze skims over my face again and again, as if he’s trying to read more from me than this bond will give him. “I don’t know what she’ll do, Brie, but I won’t risk it. Not for anything.”

“It’s not your risk to take. This is my life, and this is the only way I can . . .” This is the only way I can live with myself.

No. I won’t say those words. I won’t show that weakness. Not to him.

It’s all been too much. Oberon gave his life to save me, and in doing so, he sacrificed the future of his entire kingdom. Then, because I took the Potion of Life, the power of the crown was tied to me, and every member of the shadow court is in danger yet again.

All for me, for my life. I may hate the fae, may loathe being trapped in this new fae body, but I will never believe that my life is more important than the lives of so many.

If I don’t fight for these children—these innocents—how am I supposed to live with myself?

I don’t have Sebastian’s skills, though, and I have no shield to keep him from unearthing this secret truth from whatever he’s receiving through our bond. His eyes go wide, and I wonder what he’s processing. The self-loathing? The grief for everyone who sacrificed for my miserable life? The futility of this immortality I don’t even deserve?

“Brie,” he says softly.

“I know what it’s like, Sebastian. I’ve lived to serve the whims of a greedy debtor. I’ve been trapped and worked until I collapsed and still found myself further from freedom each day.”