Leinth moved her finger and wrapped her arms loosely around his neck, peering at him with a serious, penetrating gaze. “Now what’s going on with them that’s gotten you all tied in a knot?”
He managed to smile. “How do you know something’s going on?”
“You didn’t sleep well,” she said quietly. “When you don’t sleep well, I don’t sleep well—but you were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you to ask. So I let you be and decided I’d ask in the morning. So what is it?”
Seamus shook his head, trying not to sigh. “Just paranoid foolishness, that’s all,” he said. “They’re on their way back, the group that took Thesan away. I’ve got no idea what they did with her.”
His lover shivered. “Do you really want to know?”
“No,” he admitted. “No, I don’t really want to know. But I’m afraid they’ll bring her back—or she’ll find her way back somehow.”
For all that Thesan was his daughter, he was terrified she’d find them again. Raised by her mother, Leinth’s sister and Seamus’s estranged wife, Thesan had been warped into a monster that sent shivers down her father’s spine. She blamed the world and more for depriving her of her father, who had been betrayed and given to the Wild Hunt before she was ever born, an innocent casualty of her mother’s cruelty and her grandfather’s plotting. If he’d encountered her under different circumstances, Seamus would have been inclined to try to help her, to repair the damage that had been done. When she’d sundered his cousin’s soul and tried to hold it for ransom, though, then refused to help them fix what she’d done, she’d lost that privilege and he’d lost hope.
There’s no saving her. Not now. Not the way she was when she left.
“Talk to me,” Leinth whispered.
“My daughter is a monster,” he whispered. “And if your sister isn’t already dead, I’m going to kill her myself.”
