The argument with Rowan echoed in Kael’s mind, a discordant shriek against the low thrum of the city.
He stood on the gravelled rooftop of a four-story walk-up across the street, the garden a square of impossible life laid out below him.
From this distance, he couldn’t see the individual leaves or the precise curve of a petal, only the deep, breathing darkness of it, a living shadow under the jaundiced glow of the streetlights.
A single string of solar-powered fairy lights Rowan had insisted on glowed near the tool shed, a constellation of her own making.
He had almost done it.
He had stood before the Heartseed, felt its pulse resonate with the fading magic in his own bones, and reached for it.
But the instant his fingers had neared its core, he had felt her. Rowan.
Her stubborn will, her fierce joy, her unwavering love—it was all woven into the Seed’s very essence.
Taking it wouldn’t just be theft; it would be vivisection. He had recoiled as if burned, a moment of weakness that had nearly cost him everything when she’d stormed back in, her eyes flashing with hurt and suspicion.
Secrets and trust, she had accused, and the words had struck him with the force of an iron blade.
Every moment he spent with her was a new layer of deceit, a fresh betrayal he layered over the last. He was a prince of a dying kingdom, and his lies were the only currency he had left.
A faint scrape of leather on gravel behind him made him stiffen. He didn’t turn.
His Fae senses, already on high alert, had registered the presence a moment before the sound. The glamour was thick, expertly woven—a suit of expensive, tailored wool, the scent of a sharp, gender-neutral cologne, the click of heels designed for boardrooms and hostile takeovers.
“Brooding on a rooftop, Mr. Kael,” a cool, familiar voice said. “How very dramatic. I trust you’re admiring our future asset.”
Morwen.
He turned slowly. She stood near the rooftop access door, a silhouette against the city’s perpetual twilight.
She looked exactly as she had at the community board meeting—impeccably styled, her dark hair in a severe chignon, her face a mask of polite, predatory interest.
But even through the glamour, he could feel the wrongness of her, a sliver of ice in the humid summer air.
“It’s not your asset yet,” Kael said, his voice flat. He kept his own glamour clamped down tight, the persona of the quiet, brooding landscaper his only shield.
“A temporary setback,” Morwen replied, taking a step closer. The gravel crunched under her heel. “One you were instrumental in, I might add. A clever trick with the board member. Subtle. I was almost impressed.”
A cold dread coiled in his gut.
She shouldn’t have been able to sense his compulsion. It was Seelie magic, quiet and persuasive, a whisper of sunlight on the mind. For a human to notice it was impossible.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Morwen smiled, a bloodless slash in the dim light. “Oh, I think you do. Let’s stop this tedious little play, shall we? The roles are so tiresome, and the stage is beneath us both.”
She lifted a hand, and the world seemed to warp around her.
The crisp lines of her suit blurred, the sharp scent of her perfume soured into the smell of damp earth and rot. The glamour dissolved not like water, but like flaking stone, revealing what lay beneath.
Her form remained humanoid, but all humanity was gone.
Her skin held the pale, lightless sheen of polished obsidian.
Her eyes were not black, but voids that drank the light and gave nothing back. The severe chignon had unspooled into hair that shifted like smoke, and when she spoke again, her voice was a layered thing, the smooth corporate cadence underscored by the grinding of stone and the whisper of dead leaves.
“Kaelen of the Silverwood Court,” she said, and his true name on her tongue was a violation. “Did you really think you could slip into this world unnoticed? A prince, scrabbling in the dirt like a common thief.”
Kael’s blood ran cold.
The carefully constructed walls of his mission crumbled to dust, leaving him utterly exposed. His hand instinctively went to his side, where a blade of shimmering light would have been in his own realm.
Here, there was only the rough denim of his jeans.
“Who are you?” he managed, his voice tight.
“I am Morwen of the Onyx Throne,” she said, a flicker of ancient pride in her void-like eyes. “And unlike your crumbling ruin of a court, mine understands the value of adaptation. We don’t hide from the new world; we buy it.”
Unseelie.
The realization hit him with physical force.
Vex Development was not just a corporation; it was a foothold.
His enemy wasn’t a CEO, but a rival Fae monarch with ambitions that stretched across realms. He had been a fool, a child playing at espionage while a war was being waged around him.
“Your people are dying, Kaelen,” Morwen continued, her tone conversational, as if they were discussing quarterly earnings. “The light of the Seelie Court fades. Your glades grow brittle, your rivers run sluggish and grey. Your father sends his precious heir on a desperate, pathetic quest to steal a spark of life before you all wither into memory.”
Each word was a perfectly aimed dart, striking at the heart of his shame and fear.
He could see it in his mind’s eye—the great silverwood trees of his home, their leaves tarnished and falling out of season, the eternal twilight of his court growing dimmer with every cycle.
“You know nothing of my home,” he snarled, a pointless act of defiance.
“I know everything,” she corrected him smoothly. “I know that the Heartseed you’re meant to retrieve could sustain your realm for another century. I also know you can’t bring yourself to take it.” She gestured with a long, elegant finger toward the garden below.
“Because of her. The little mortal botanist. You hesitated. I felt it. A tremor of Seelie sentimentality. It was… disappointing.”
He was trapped. A rat in a maze designed by a far more clever predator. He had thought this was a simple mission of retrieval.
Now he understood. He was caught in a war, and he hadn’t even known the players.
“What do you want?” Kael asked, the question tasting like ash.
Morwen’s smile widened, a truly unsettling sight on her Unseelie face. “What I’ve always wanted. Power. The Heartseed is more than just a battery for dying traditionalists like your father. It’s a nexus. A focal point on the ley lines of this world. Corrupted properly, it won’t just sustain a realm; it can reshape one. It can funnel the raw, chaotic magic of this human world into a… more refined vessel. Me.”
She took another step, the air around her growing colder, prickling his skin. “You and I have a common problem, Prince. You need the Seed’s power, and I want the Seed itself. Your mission is to rip it out, severing it from this place. My goal is to claim it whole and corrupt it to my will.”
He stared at her, the pieces clicking into place with horrifying clarity. “You’ve been using me,” he said. “The blights, the attacks on the garden—you were testing its defenses. You were testing me.”
“And you failed the test,” she said with a dismissive wave. “You chose to protect the garden instead of seizing your prize. But failure can be instructive. It has led us to this new opportunity. A devil’s bargain, as the humans would say.”
Her obsidian eyes locked onto his. “Help me. Help me break the girl’s connection to the Heartseed and distract her while I perform the ritual to claim it. In return for your assistance, I will give you a sliver of its power. Not the whole, of course, but a potent shard. Enough to placate your father. Enough to grant the Silverwood Court a reprieve. A stay of execution.”
The offer hung in the air between them, vile and tempting.
A sliver of its power. It was more than he had now. It was a chance, however small, to save his people from their slow, inexorable decay.
It was a betrayal of everything he stood for, but it was a chance.
He thought of Rowan, of the fierce light in her eyes when she talked about her garden, the feel of her hand in his, the impossible, explosive kiss under the moonlight.
He thought of her face when she’d accused him of keeping secrets, the pain and confusion warring with the undeniable pull between them.
Helping Morwen would mean destroying the one pure, vibrant thing he had found in this world. It would mean destroying her.
“No,” he said, the word raw and immediate.
Morwen’s expression didn’t change, but the cold radiating from her intensified. “I expected that might be your first answer. Sentiment is a rot that afflicts your kind. So let me be perfectly clear about your second answer.”
She glided closer until she was only a few feet away. “If you refuse my offer, I will send word to the Silverwood Court. I will tell your father not only that you have failed, but that you actively defended the very thing you were sent to acquire, all for the sake of a mortal woman. Your mission will be over. You will be a disgrace.”
Her voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “And then, with you removed from the equation, I will take the garden. And I will not be gentle. I will rip the Heartseed from the earth and from Rowan Finch’s soul. I will personally see to it that she is broken in the process. I will drain her of every ounce of that lovely, defiant life, and I will leave her a hollow shell in the ruins of everything she has ever loved. Her destruction will be your failure made manifest.”
The threat was not an idle one.
He could feel the chilling certainty of it, the absolute lack of mercy in her. She would do it. She would enjoy it.
He was caught.
Utterly and completely caught. Every path led to ruin.
Uphold his duty to his court and help Morwen, and he would sacrifice Rowan. Protect Rowan, and he would condemn his people to oblivion and sign her death warrant anyway. There was no victory here.
There was no escape.
Morwen held his gaze for a long moment, letting the poison of her ultimatum sink in. She had laid the board, defined the rules, and checkmated him before he even knew they were playing.
“You have until the next celestial alignment to decide, Prince,” she said, her glamour beginning to re-form, the sharp suit and human face snapping back into place like a mask. “Consider your options. But know this: one way or another, this garden will fall. The only choice you have left is who falls with it.”
She turned and walked back to the rooftop door, her heels clicking with renewed corporate authority.
She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to.
Kael stood alone on the rooftop, the distant wail of a siren a fitting lament for his predicament. He looked down at the garden, at that small, defiant patch of green glowing in the heart of the concrete jungle. It had been his target.
Then it had become a sanctuary. Now, it was a battlefield.
And Rowan, the woman he was undeniably, impossibly falling for, was standing at its heart, with a target painted on her back that he had led his enemies right to.