Beyond the Aching Door (The Fatebound Duology, #1)

by Victoria Mier

He was even taller up close, all spring-loaded muscle beneath porcelain skin. His black hair fell in elegant waves. And his eyes. Eyes that Raegan somehow knew, had known from even before the subway platform—ocean eyes, gray and fathomless. Something emanated from him, pulsing out from his being, and it made her head swim. Power, she realized. It was power. Pure, raw, unadulterated power.

It seemed too improbable: that she had always been looking for him and now, finally, here he was.

“Is this not beauty?” the King asked, his tone genuine, at least as far as she could tell. “Old roots were cut to the bone here, and yet they reemerge, defiant. Is there anything more beautiful than defiance, than survival? It is the most ancient song and perhaps the sweetest.”

“You and I were both flowers plucked by greedy hands,” Blodeuwedd said, her words fervent, eyes holding Raegan’s. “They thought they might contain us in pretty vases or breed us for more blooms. But the plucking turned us into something else, didn’t it? Something with wings and talons. Do not forget that.”

“That is not what I said. In your marrow, before all the rest, you are like me. You are a witch. And we are the darkest parts of the forest and the woodsmoke on the wind when October comes roaring in. We belong to no one. We don’t even belong to ourselves, not all of the time, and certainly not the way everyone thinks we do. We belong to the older curves, the deeper shadows, the quiet things that no man dares to know. But the King?”

“You are my deepest wound,” Oberon murmured, his eyes searching hers. “And yet I cannot live without the taste of blood in my mouth.”