Chapter Text
He told her everything.
Well, not everything. That would’ve taken far too long and, besides, he… how could he tell her those things? His cousin, one of the few who loved him, trusted him, knew him. How could he tell her what he had become?
He told her everything that mattered, about Feyre. She would learn the rest soon enough.
She couldn’t have heard the whispers, none of them could, not trapped in Velaris, a prison of its own sort after so long. She would hear them. He knew she would. But how could he tell her?
Amarantha’s whore. After a year, the title had burned itself into his brain. After twenty, he had known it to be true.
And now?
Now he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t claim the title he had spent fifty years wearing.
She would learn soon enough.
“Rhys,” Mor whispered, a reminder that she was here, was real. She opened her mouth, as if to say something as unbelievable and life changing as the story he’d just unleashed upon her. “You look like shit.”
She was right. Of course, she was right, and he knew it was more than what a bath and a nap could fix. He wasn’t the same male she had known before, some part of him had broken, had died in that mountain. Right beside Feyre.
He took a breath. She was alive. She was safe. That was what mattered, even if his heart, every beating instinct inside of him, screamed… otherwise. He had no right to ruin her happiness.
Mor looked at him, still waiting for some sort of an answer.
“I feel like shit,” he said.
“Get some rest,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “The others will be glad to see you when you wake up.”
Glad, she said, as if he had merely gone away for a while. He knew she said it for the sense of normalcy it provided, but still it chafed at him.
“What I became,” he said, “Under the Mountain… Mor, you’ve seen me do most every awful thing and I’m glad you never had to see me like that.”
“I wish I had,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t been alone.”
“I was hers,” he said. “For fifty years, I was—“
His voice caught but Mor didn’t move, didn’t hesitate, just waited.
“Amarantha’s whore,” he finally said. “That’s what I was. That’s what they’ll still see me as.”
“Rhys.”
“That’s what I am.”
She set her jaw. “Not here. Never here.”
“Well, I can’t just stay and hide in Velaris forever.”
“Not forever,” she agreed, “but long enough to sleep.”
He relaxed, if just a little, taking in the familiar yet foreign kitchen of his townhouse.
“You’re here,” he said suddenly.
“I’m here.” It was a promise.
He almost smiled at that, at her. Probably would have if he was still the male he’d once been. “I meant,” he said, “here here. In this house. Not… not the House of Wind.”
“You told me to come here,” she said.
But there were plates on the table, a pair of shoes abandoned on the floor by the couch. A coat hung on a hook by the door.
“How long have you been living here?”
She blushed, which was unlike her, or at least, unlike the female Rhys had once known. “Twenty years. Cassian and I had some dumb fight and I came here and… I missed you. That house, it belongs to the High Lord, but this one? This one belongs to you.”
It was enough to let her lead him upstairs. This house was his, untouched by the violence that had ravaged him, untouched by Amarantha.
He stepped into his bedroom and unfurled his wings.
Mor moved to shut the curtains for him, and he hesitated.
He was the Lord of Night, and he was afraid of the dark.
No, not the dark. What lay in it. Nothing. No one.
The bed was too soft, especially where it pressed against his wings. The wings he hadn’t so much as seen in fifty years.
But then Mor sat on the chair in the corner. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The darkness was his, this house was his, this city was his, and he belonged to no one.
Sleep came easily like that.