Dawning of Light (25 page)

To a point, anyway.

When Samuel stepped forward, Cecilia stepped back, into the foyer. He paused. “There are wards around the king’s home.” His gaze swept over the beach house as he lifted his hand and smoothed it across the invisible barrier.

“Olivia and I were attacked recently. The king is taking precautions to ensure his daughter is not injured.”

Samuel looked truly shocked at her announcement that she and Olivia were attacked. “Cecilia, please,” he begged, reaching out but unable to touch her, due to the wards. “Please, you must come with me. You have no idea how much danger you are in.”

“What do
you
know of it?” she asked suspiciously. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.

“I can protect you. I can save you. But you must come with me.”

“The last time I did anything with you I was drugged and ended up waking up in your bed.”

“Would that really be so bad?”

Cecilia blinked in astonishment. Surely he was not implying…“What are you suggesting?”

Samuel reached out again and flattened his palm against the invisible ward. He gave her an earnest look as he said, “Mate with me, Cecilia. Make me the happiest man in the world.”

“How can you even ask me that, Samuel? How many times must we have this same conversation? I assure you, the outcome is not going to change.”

“I can protect you,” he insisted again. “But you must mate with me. You must turn your back on the shifters. I cannot protect you if you do not—”

“Are you implying that I can’t protect her?”

The voice was deep and deadly low, so low as to almost be without inflection. But the meaning was clear, as was the threat.

The door was suddenly jerked wide, and Finn stood there, a furious look on his face. Cecilia could tell he was barely managing to keep himself in check. He wanted to lash out, and if Samuel wasn’t careful, he would find himself on the receiving end of Finn’s fist. Or worse.

“It’s you she needs protecting from,” Samuel said. Whether brave or stupid, he pressed on. “Your presence here. If not for you, she wouldn’t be in danger at all.”

Finn was out the door in an instant. Samuel turned as if he intended to bolt, but Finn caught him easily, grabbed the front of his coat and flung him around, slamming him into the side of the beach house. Samuel grabbed Finn’s arm with both hands, but his strength was no match against an angry shifter.

“She doesn’t need your protection,” Finn growled. His eyes had begun to glow.

“Yes, she does.” Samuel gasped as he struggled against Finn’s grasp. “You’re the one putting her into danger.”

Finn snorted. “Why? Because I’m the one warming her bed, instead of you?”

Samuel’s eyes widened as his gaze darted from Finn to Cecilia and back again. He lifted one arm and magic shimmered in the air, but before he could conjure a sword, Finn shifted his hold, moving his hand to Samuel’s neck. He squeezed, his hand momentarily shimmering between human and animal form, until Samuel dropped his arm and released the magic.

“Let me go,” he croaked. After a moment, Finn released him, and Samuel sagged against the wall as he lifted his hand and cupped his throat. When he pulled his hand away, there was blood on it, his own blood, from five short scratches resulting from when Finn’s hand turned into an animal’s paw for a moment.

“Lights above,” he cried out. “Am I—am I going to turn into one of you now?”

Finn wrapped his arm around Cecilia’s waist and hauled her close to his side, as he rolled his eyes. “Stupid human fairy tale,” he muttered. “Getting scratched by a shifter does not turn you into one, dumbass. You wouldn’t be so lucky. Now get the hell out of here.”

Samuel obviously learned his lesson. He stumbled away, tripping down the steps, and then ran through the snow, heading toward the stone steps that would take him down to the village below.

Finn turned and strode inside, dragging Cecilia along with him. He slammed the door closed and transferred his furious look to Cecilia. “What the hell was he doing here?”

She slipped out from under his arm, needing that small bit of distance between them. Otherwise, she was more likely to try to attack him than to talk reasonably with him. By the lights, she had it bad for the shifter. If he so much as suggested it, she suspected she would mate with him in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, she was fairly certain he did not feel the same way.

“He came to speak to me.”

“He drugged you, Cecilia. Or have you forgotten already?”

“I didn’t forget,” she said, shaking her head. “But he apologized. And he was sincere. He said he needed to tell me something about my parents…” It occurred to her that he’d never gotten to that point of the conversation.

“He proposed to you.” Finn was so angry, she could feel his rage, like it was a living thing. Was Samuel’s visit really something to be so upset over?

“What is your problem?” she demanded. “You’re acting like—like I did something wrong.”

“For all we know, he’s the enemy,” Finn growled.

“Samuel? No way. Besides…” Besides, he’d just asked her to be his mate, not attempted to kill her. Finn was wrong.

“Besides what?”

“He only has my best interests at heart.”

“Is that what you call it?” Finn sneered. “Best interests? He wants to fuck you, Cecilia,” he said ruthlessly. “Just like I do. He wants you for himself. Is that what you want? Would you rather be in his bed than in mine?”

Cecilia gave him a bewildered look, even as her heart clenched so tightly she was almost certain it would burst. There it was. He’d said it. He didn’t want her for anything more than to warm his bed. It wasn’t even making love to him. It was just fucking.

She blinked rapidly, as tears suddenly threatened, and she took several steps away from him, until her heel bumped into the wall. She paused for the space of two heartbeats, and then she turned and fled from the room. Finn watched her go, but he did not follow.

* * * *

Her emotions were all over the place, high and low, ebbing and flowing, fluctuating and shifting. The only thing she didn’t feel was happy. Finn knew this because he could
feel
her emotions, and it was making him nuts.

Was it because he’d interrupted Samuel’s proposal? Had she really intended to accept? Didn’t she care for Finn in the least? Everything they had, everything they’d done together, everything she meant to him, and she would so easily walk away from it all?

It wasn’t even about the fact that he’d saved her life so many times over the course of the last few months that he’d almost lost count. It was about how he felt. What she was to him. What he wanted her to be—forever.

You knew
, he reminded himself. He knew she didn’t feel the same. How many times had she said she did not want a mate? How many times had she talked about one-night stands? How many times had she insisted she wasn’t at that point in her life? How many times? And he’d foolishly, stupidly ignored all the signs, ignored her words, and plunged forward anyway, all but handing her his heart on one of the queen’s ornately carved silver platters.

What a fool. What an idiot. What a fucking dumbass he’d been. Shaking his head in self-disgust, Finn wrenched the door open and strode out into the chilly sunlight. He needed to get away from her. He needed to put distance between himself and Cecilia. He needed to figure out how to mend his broken heart.

Breakfast was done. Lunch had been served. The early afternoon snack was done, the remains cleaned up and put away. Carley’s shift in the kitchen had come to an end. She felt both oddly relieved and admittedly fearful.

While she’d been cleaning up after lunch, Tanner and Finn had appeared in the kitchen. She’d refused to stop doing her chores as they questioned her, asking endless questions, most of which she did not know how to answer.

“I don’t know,” she said more often than not.

But she suspected a great deal more than she would admit to them. She knew she couldn’t tell them. She was too frightened. They might be able to protect Olivia and the king and queen and possibly even Cecilia, but they couldn’t protect her. She was in too deep.

In truth, she was more frightened of her mate than she was of anyone else, and there were plenty of scary lightbearers and potentially frightening shifters in her life at the moment.

She vividly recalled the first night she’d lain with her new mate. She’d been absolutely petrified, having no previous experience with the act of coupling with another. Miguel had ruthlessly taken her innocence, utterly lacking in gentleness, and it hurt so badly she’d cried for an hour afterward. As soon as the tears dried, he’d wanted to do it again.

That pretty much summed up their entire relationship.

Miguel was one of that small faction of lightbearers who strongly believed lightbearers should only mate with their own kind. Since Olivia mated with a shifter, Miguel and the rest had banded together even more tightly, and were so organized now that they were actually having regular meetings.

Carley did not attend the meetings, because Miguel did not want her to know too much, on the off chance that the shifters at the beach house got wind and started questioning her—like today.

This was just fine with Carley, since she didn’t hold to their beliefs anyway. The one time she’d made the mistake of saying as much to Miguel, he’d tossed her down onto the bed on her stomach, and then he was on top of her, pushing into her, ruthlessly taking her, despite her protests, just as he always did. Except that time he kept saying, “How does it feel, Carley? You like it like this? You like the idea of being fucked like an animal?”

In truth, she didn’t like being
fucked
at all, because every time was with Miguel, and there was literally nothing about it that felt good to her. It was just another aspect of her life that she tolerated because what else could she do? Run away? Leave the coterie and put herself at the mercy of the shifters? She’d not once in her entire life stepped outside the protective wards surrounding the village. She had no earthly idea what she would do if she did.

More than once she’d considered going to Cecilia for help, or at the very least, advice. She had no one to talk to, no girlfriends with whom to share her secrets, her fears, even her happiness, on the rare occasion she felt such an emotion. She and Cecilia were related, distantly, through some cousin or another. Despite that connection, she did not know Cecilia well, and they were not of the same class at all, and while Carley envied the clearly happier lightbearer, she was far too intimidated to broach a subject so private as her desire to run away from the life she hated more and more with each passing day.

And now she had a far bigger problem on her hands, one that complicated her situation all the more. She pressed her palm to her flat belly and sucked in the cold wintery air. She’d had Alexa confirm it only that morning, but she’d known already, known for days, over a week. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that even if the act was not done in love, it could still produce life. The idea that she was carrying Miguel’s babe in her womb made her even more nauseous than the fact that she was pregnant did.

As the shifters questioned her with far more gentleness than her mate had ever shown her, Carley felt a terrible compulsion to just admit everything. Tell them what she knew, put her fate into their hands. Her fate, and that of her unborn babe.

The secret meetings. The leader who called himself the Chosen One. Her suspicion that they were planning something, some way to destroy the shifters who now lived in the coterie. Those
accidents
that kept happening to Cecilia—Carley was fairly certain the Chosen One was behind them. She’d only met the mysterious hooded lightbearer a handful of times and did not even know his identity, but Miguel talked reverently about him all the time. From what Miguel said, Carley was certain the man was capable of attempted murder against the innocent lightbearer.

But she wasn’t so innocent, was she? Carley knew it for certain, since she’d walked in on Cecilia and the shifter named Finn—the one Carley had warmed to the most, because he’d been so darn nice to her—while they’d been engaged in a sexual act that looked far more interesting than anything she’d ever done with Miguel. And Cecilia had been enjoying herself—immensely. Whereas Carley simply endured the act until it was over—or worse, cried when it hurt so much because she was raw and dry and Miguel forced himself upon her anyway—Cecilia had been an active participant and the noises she made had most definitely not been cries of pain or distress.

Each day that she returned home from her shift at the beach house, Miguel had taken to questioning her about what she’d seen or overheard there. He fancied that she was an inside spy, even though she always insisted she’d not heard or seen anything out of the ordinary. She knew he wanted to be able to take some bit of news to his precious Chosen One, and Carley wanted no part in helping their cause.

“That’s a lie,” he’d sneered one evening. “I know the king’s daughter is fucking that shifter. I heard she’s carrying his babe in her belly.”

“Well, it isn’t like they do it in the kitchen,” Carley had replied, even though she’d heard that was exactly what they’d done, just the previous day.

She didn’t tell him about Cecilia and Finn. Despite the fact that they were not close, Carley still felt a sense of loyalty to the woman who was her distant cousin. And Finn had never been anything but nice to her. He loved her cooking, and had, in fact, come to her defense when Miguel had been berating her in her own kitchen, in front of her own staff. Whereas her mate made her feel like something dirty on the bottom of his boot, Finn made her feel…special.

How could she possibly say anything that might harm him or Cecilia?

Miguel’s questioning was what she feared the most at the moment. After what Tanner and Finn put her through, she wasn’t sure she had enough strength left to stave off her insistent mate. It was a sickening thought, but as she trudged home through the snow, she actually considered luring him into bed upon her arrival, just so she could avoid the inquisition.