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

by Victoria Mier

feverish kiss from a towering, beautifully inhuman creature in black armor. His low, rich voice—like heather on the hills or dusk over the lake—murmuring against her skin, “Outlive me. I love you too much.”

“If you do not salvage this, I will rip your little realm apart while you watch. Only once I have crushed the last of it between my teeth will I allow you to die.” More silence, then a wolfish whistle. “Ебать. I get threats all the time, but that’s the first one I’ve taken seriously in a while. Well done. Now hush and let me save our girl.”

Baba Yaga’s bathhouse with an ancient Fey king.

I swear to god…. This better not be THAT moment. No fucking way.

“I don’t want to upset you, and I’m not trained . . . I’m not trained to deal with this.”

Okay… that’s shitty. She can’t even talk to her

I don’t like whatever this is. Fix it!!

Sitting there at the desk, shuffling some papers and calm as could be, was her editor, Henry Washington.

WHAT?!

So maybe this was real?

FUCK NO

The man seemed less and less like Henry, his tone descending into something Raegan found hard not to equate with open condescension. “How much does this place cost a week?” she demanded, pleasantly surprised by the amount of venom she’d summoned. “It better be cheap if this is the extent of your psychoanalytic skills.”

head back and laughed so hard that the orderlies exchanged glances. All of this was fucking fake. All of it. She didn’t know why it was happening or what in the hell she could do about it. But she knew that everything around her was fake, and that meant the bathhouse and Baba Yaga and the quest and the King belonged to the real world. Her world.

Thank god

“Okay, so then think, you dumb bitch,” Raegan snarled at herself under her breath,

This had to work, or she would kill herself, she realized. If this world was real, she could not exist within its hollow margins, could not do its plain and simple bidding. Not after what she had touched, not after what she’d almost had. No matter whether it had been real or not. Raegan could not—would not—go back to a life without magic.

“Only born creatures in my realm from henceforth. No made monstrosities.” “It is your realm,” the King said, sweeping into an impossibly elegant bow. “I will respect your wishes as its creatrix.” Baba Yaga stared at the King for a moment longer before her gaze slid to Raegan. “I will admit he is very charming,” the witch said. “For an abomination.”

“Do the spellcraft anyway,” the Oracle said as she looked up, her features now a mask of long-simmering defiance. “Make your own fate.”

This book is an ode to feminine rage…

“Or are you not ready to risk losing her again?” she asked, her gaze heavy on the King. “Because you always will. That is the punishment. I had thought you were used to its sting.”

“He lives forever and remembers. You die continuously and forget. A punishment that would have crushed the will and resiliency of anyone else, but you two are fools.”

“you forget this part, the nature of what we are trapped in. That we exist within our very own ouroboros, doomed to keep repeating it.”

“I jeopardized everything for you. I was prepared to betray everyone for you. You woke something within me I did not understand, nor could I bear to extinguish it.”

You fought with everything you had to change the ending. And you did.”

“Instead of your sorrow,” the King continued, his gaze boring into hers, “no matter how righteous it may be, I want something else from you. I want your rage.”

“What are you going to do, Lady of the Rivers?” Raegan drew herself up, pushing off the wall to stand straight, looking up at the King of the Unseelie Fey. “I’m going to change the ending.”

“Love,” the King told her, his voice raw, like it was only the two of them in that vast marble room, “is as good an oath as any.”

She wanted to jump into his arms or maybe grab him by the hand and leave this place, make a life somewhere quiet and safe. Maybe all they needed—wanted—was each other.

They made their own destiny now,

“I have known many others in the years I have walked this earth,” he told her, his gaze a dark inferno, “and yet I have tasted nothing as sweet as the sorrow you bring me, nothing as sacred as your faithless love.”

“Outlive me,”

“Outlive me. I love you too much.” And then Raegan stepped up to the train door, just as her father had, just as her father always had, through every story and every re-telling, in every chance he had ever been given before they all turned to ash. And then, despite herself, she hesitated. It was just a small pause⁠— one, two, three.

Sobbing