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"But things changed?"

He huffed out a breath. "She changed."

"She started touching me. At first, it seemed innocent. I would lay awake at night, thinking of nothing else while my body burned for her. She'd move closer when we were together. Her robe would slip. She would let me see the curve of her breast. Sometimes she would touch my wrist, my face, like she knew exactly what she was doing." He shook his head. "And one day, she undid her robe and reached for mine. I didn't say no…I didn't push her away. I thought I was in love."

"But she wasn't."

"No. She was whatever I needed her to be." A pause. "But I did not see clearly until it was too late."

Fae exhaled slowly. "Your father."

"He found out I had been with a girl. There were fights. He thought it was another girl in the village. He wanted to send me away, told me what my duty was." His jaw clenched. "By then it was too late."

"You planned to run away with her," Fae said.

He nodded jerkily. "There wasn't anything I wouldn't have done for her. She said there was a place beyond the deep end of the forest. Somewhere no one would care what she was. Somewhere we could be together."

"And you went."

"She held my face," he said hoarsely. "Kissed me like it was a promise."

Fae waited.

"I remember a sharp pain in my neck and then freezing cold. And then the forest...seemed to bend. The air smelt like death." His eyes unfocused. "That was when the noose tightened."

Painful silence reigned.

"You couldn't have known..." Fae said.

"No." His voice broke, just slightly. "I wanted to believe her. I defied my family for her. I ruined my mother, destroyed my father. And for what?"

Fae felt her wolf stir uneasily.

***

He woke choking. He couldn't move. He was tied up. No, not tied up—suspended upside down.

His first breath scraped a raw throat, shallow and panicked, chest locked as though something vast pressed the air from his lungs. When he tried to move, resistance tightened the thread which bound him, biting into his skin, tightening with the smallest struggle.

Darkness throbbed, blurring his vision.

A shape unfolded from the shadows—too large and too wrong—it's bulk shifting with the sound of stone grinding against stone. Legs emerged first, one too many. Jointed, armoured, ending in hooked points that sank into the ground below his head with obscene precision.

His vision swam.

And then she stepped forward.

From the centre of that monstrous body rose a woman's form, pale as moon-bleached bone, draped in silks the colour of dried blood. Her skin glowed unnaturally smooth against the chitinous mass beneath her, as though she were a chimera of beauty and horror.

Her hair spilled down her back in glossy black sheets, impossibly fine, catching the dim light like spun silver.

Only later would he understand it was silk.

Her face was the same as before, and that was the most cruel part.

Eyes dark and luminous fixed on him, and when she smiled, it was with gentle curiosity, like a lover waking beside him rather than a predator studying prey.

"You're awake," she said softly.