Extraits

- La question n'est pas de savoir s'il vous aime, mais à quel degré. Et s'il vous aime trop. L'amour peut se muer en poison.

“You’re shivering so hard the bed is shaking,” he said.

“My hair is wet,” I said. It wasn’t a lie.

Rhys was silent, then the mattress groaned, sinking directly behind me as his warmth poured over me. “No expectations,” he said. “Just body heat”. I scowled at the laughter in his voice.

But his broad hands slid under and over me: one flattening against my stomach and tugging me against the hard warmth of him, the other sliding under my ribs and arms to band around my chest, pressing his front into me. He tangled his legs with mine, and then a heavier, warmer darkness settled over us, smelling of citrus and the sea.

I lifted a hand toward that darkness, and met with soft, silky material—his wing, cocooning and warming me.

He watched me take a long drink from mine. “I’m thinking,” he said, following the flick of my tongue over my bottom lip, “that I look at you and feel like I’m dying. Like I can’t breathe. I’m thinking that I want you so badly I can’t concentrate half the time I’m around you, and this room is too small for me to properly bed you. Especially with the wings.”

So I said, “He is lucky to have all of you.”

“No,” she said softly—more gently than I’d ever heard. “We are lucky to have him, Feyre.” I turned from the door. “I have known many High Lords,” Amren continued, studying her paper. “Cruel ones, cunning ones, weak ones, powerful ones. But never one that dreamed. Not as he does.”

I could feel Rhys still assessing me.

I shut him out. Maybe I’d send a water-dog barking after him later—let it bite him in the ass.

“You kill her?” Cassian said.

“No,” Rhys answered for me, loosely folding his wings. “But given how much the Weaver was screaming, I’m dying to know what Feyre darling did.”

Grease—I had the grease and hair of people on me—

I vomited all over the floor.

I could have sworn a smile tugged on Rhys’s lips as he went on, “One, no one—no one—but Mor and I are able to winnow directly inside this house. It is warded, shielded, and then warded some more. Only those I wish—and you wish—may enter. You are safe here; and safe anywhere in this city, for that matter. Velaris’s walls are well protected and have not been breached in five thousand years. No one with ill intent enters this city unless I allow it. So go where you wish, do what you wish, and see who you wish. Those two in the antechamber,” he added, eyes sparkling, “might not be on that list of people you should bother knowing, if they keep banging on the door like children.”

Another pound, emphasized by the first male voice saying, “You know we can hear you, prick.”

“I’ll try to be better,” he said again. “Please—give me more time. Let me… let me get through this. Please.”

Get through what? I wanted to ask. But words had abandoned me. I realized I hadn’t spoken yet.

Realized he was waiting for an answer—and that I didn’t have one.

So I put my arms around him, because body to body was the only way I could speak, too.

“You want to save the mortal realm?” he asked. “Then become someone Prythian listens to. Become vital. Become a weapon. Because there might be a day, Feyre, when only you stand between the King of Hybern and your human family. And you do not want to be unprepared.”

« Congratulations on tomorrow, » Bron said, grinning. « A fitting end, eh?”

A fitting end would have been me in a grave, burning in hell.