Chapter Text
Dinner was, as always, a grand affair in the River House.
And Nesta was, as always, absolutely miserable.
She couldn’t figure out how they were still on the first course, her own plate empty despite Elain’s cooking abilities filling the room with a pleasant aroma. Everyone chattered around her, every so often shooting her a glance from the corner of their eye. She hadn’t missed it, the sniggers, and the murmured comments upon her arrival. She didn’t know why Feyre insisted on her presence in the first place.
“Not going to eat anything, sweetheart?” Cassian said beside her. “Should probably have something in your stomach to combat all that alcohol I can smell on you.”
Nesta blinked, dragging her gaze over to the Illyrian. His distaste was evident, brows pinched together, despite the way his eyes shone with something too close to concern, just for a moment.
If he wanted to be callous tonight she could be too.
“Not all of us are ungraceful pigs when it comes to food.”
Cassian scoffed, taking another healthy bite of the tart Elain prepared.
“With the people you surround yourself with, I’m surprised you can tell the difference between an ungraceful pig and a real male.”
Nesta narrowed her eyes. “Well how could I? I’ve never been able to tell the difference with you either.”
“Nesta,” Feyre called from the end of the table. Her eyes were begging for her to be civil, to be a person. She wished her sister would stop trying.
Nesta rolled her eyes, long used to taking the fall for Cassian’s sharp words. She wondered, briefly, where that male who’d been prepared to die with her on the battlefield went.
“Don’t waste your time on her, Cass,” Mor said. “She’s just going to go somewhere and drink herself to death after this anyway.”
Cassian’s gaze had softened for the blonde, and he heeded her, leaning away from the wretched being that Nesta was and going back to his food.
Ah, there he was. Only, he wasn’t for her, not anymore. Perhaps he’d never been.
Nesta didn’t care to offer a response, long accustomed to whatever barbed words Feyre’s illustrious Inner Circle had for her, a permanent reminder of all her failures in their previous life. And all her failures in this one.
“At least you bothered to wear proper clothes, girl,” Amren said. “You almost look halfway decent, if only you’d remembered to wash your hair. You’d think with all the money Feyre has been generous enough to give you, you’d at least keep a standard of appearance.”
And there it was, the issue everything always came to. Feyre’s generosity, Feyre’s sacrifices, Feyre’s suffering.
If only they knew.
“Are you all finished? Elain’s food will get cold,” Nesta commented dryly, already counting the minutes until she could leave.
Beside Feyre, she locked eyes with the one she hated most, with that wicked, overconfident male who was in control of everyone and everything. Rhysand stared right back, a warning in his eyes, and something inside of her stirred, a sleeping beast that wanted to answer his challenge.
“Don’t bother reasoning with her,” Morrigan said. “She doesn’t know what it means to be a good sister, let alone a grateful one. I doubt she bats an eye over the bills that come to Feyre’s door every morning.”
Cassian scoffed as they moved to the main course.
“Enough,” she heard Elain say quietly, and she flicked her eyes to her other sister, who was looking at Feyre desperately. “Enough, Feyre.”
But Feyre didn’t answer her, instead cutting into her steak intently, her brows furrowed.
“I don’t think Nesta’s ever been grateful in her life,” Cassian said, turning his gaze back to her. “You haven’t been, have you? You’ve never worked for anything; you’ve always expected it to be given to you. You can’t even be bothered to speak or to eat the food your sister made you. You may as well do us all a favor and leave.”
Fury, cold and unbridled, flooded through Nesta’s veins, and she put her hands flat on the table, pushing up out of her seat. If only he knew the things she had done for Feyre, for Elain. If only he knew the scars that she wore because of it. How it haunted her each time she found herself in a tavern, desperate for relief.
Feyre let out an exasperated sound.
“At least it wont smell of piss, beer, and sex, in here anymore,” Mor muttered, but before Nesta could come up with a harsh departing line, it was Elain who cried out, her fork slamming down on the table.
“Stop it! Just stop it. None of you know what you’re talking about.”
Nesta froze, eyebrows raised at the outburst. The rest of the family, it seemed, was in equal amounts of surprise.
“Your defense of your sister is admirable, girl,” Amren said from behind her wine glass. “But unnecessary. We’re only speaking truths.”
“But that’s just it,” Elain answered harshly. “You don’t know the full truth. None of you do.”
Nesta’s anger was suddenly replaced by fear, by horror, and she felt herself begin to tremble.
Elain wouldn’t, she thought to herself, desperately. She couldn’t.
Feyre blinked at her sister, switching her gaze between Nesta and Elain.
“What are you talking about?” She asked.
“You don’t know the truth about what happened when we were in that cabin.”
“Don’t you dare,” Nesta hissed, and suddenly, the temperature in the room plummeted, a chill running over more than one of the spines of the room’s occupants.
“Calm down,” Amren snarled back, though she paid the small female no mind.
Elain met her gaze defiantly. “I won’t let them ridicule you like this when they don’t know what you gave for our survival.”
“Elain,” Nesta warned. “Shut your mouth.”
Vaguely, she felt Cassian’s gaze on her, saw his and Azriel’s siphons flash in response to her own power.
“No,” Feyre shot back. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
Nesta offered Elain one final glare, filled with an equal amount of pleading. She couldn’t fathom the thought of Feyre knowing her secret. She couldn’t bear the thought of them knowing. Not the full extent of what had happened, what had changed her well before the Cauldron-
“Father sold Nesta when she was 16. To support us.”
Nesta closed her eyes.
A deadly silence fell over the table, so still Nesta could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the other room, just as she could hear the ghosts of those men, calling out prices for her.
“…What?” Feyre asked, in that horrible, shocked tone that was so heartbreaking, the tone that indicated she was horrified, and disappointed, and confused.
“When Nesta was 16, just after we moved to the cabin and it was clear he couldn’t support us, they went out in the middle of the night. And he sold her to whoever paid the highest price with the promise of the offer of one of the winner’s sons in marriage in exchange for…”
Nesta opened her eyes and raised them slowly to Elain. Tears were in her sister’s eyes, tears and fury. But she had no idea of the pain Nesta was feeling, the pain and the embarrassment, the mortification.
“For what?” Feyre asked, but before Elain could open her mouth, Rhys had placed a hand over his mate’s, murmuring her name softly. Feyre blinked, turning her head back to look at him, confusion written over her expression, before her eyes landed on Nesta.
How naive her sister could be. How young and naive.
“For what?”
Nesta took a breath, but Elain beat her to an explanation.
“Well, for…for first rights.”
Cassian’s gaze burned, but she was adamant to ignore it. Instead, she focused on the rage, the absolute betrayal of Elain revealing the one secret she swore never to share. The only reason Elain even knew had been an accident in the first place. It had been her one job, to protect Feyre and Elain from this reality, from this duty, and she was failing with every word that came out of her sister’s mouth.
“I don’t… I don’t believe you,” Feyre said slowly, shaking her head. “You’re lying.”
“Feyre,” Rhys said again, quietly. “It’s not unheard of for humans.”
Feyre turned her gaze back to Nesta. “Is it true?”
Nesta couldn't answer her, trembling lips pressed into a thin line.
"Nesta, is it true?!"
But she was already falling apart at the seams. Memories that she'd suppressed, that she'd pretended didn't exist after the Cauldron, came rushing to the surface.
Grasping fingers and stale breaths and pain--
'Such a gorgeous lamb. There's nothing like untouched purse.'
Just speaking it aloud sent the feeling of those horrible men’s hands on her, the bruises and scratches and bleeding they’d left behind. The tea that she was forced to choke down to prevent any unwanted accidents. The shadowed, unforgiving face of her father, who’d merely asserted that it was the duty her mother had always prepared her for, in the end. But her mother hadn’t told her it would hurt, hadn’t told her they would be cruel. And for the last two years she’d tried desperately to forget about it, to drown in the pain of the Cauldron instead.
“How dare you,” she snarled in a whisper to Elain, “how dare you!”
“I couldn’t let them do this any longer Nesta!” Elain cried. “It wasn’t fair, I had to tell them the truth.”
“It wasn’t your truth to tell!” Nesta bellowed so loudly that dishes and glasses trembled on the table. The entire room seemed to shake with the power of it.
She steeled herself as she glanced around the table, taking in Amren’s impassive face, the muted horror and sadness on Morrigan’s. Azriel’s expression remained the same as it always did, though his shadows covered him nearly entirely. When she saw Cassian, sharp pain speared through her chest at the shock in his eyes, the shock and gut-wrenching guilt, as if she’d just impaled herself at his feet. She wished desperately to wipe the look off his face, to replace it with that simmering hatred she was used to.
Now they knew everything, they knew just how used and dirty and pathetic she was, and there was no hiding it.
“I won’t apologize for it,” Elain declared simply, drawing her attention back across the table.
Nesta could barely breathe, let alone compile her thoughts, not with the pressure of all these eyes on her, dredging up the memories she’d been determined to forget. So, she said the only thing she could muster before pushing away from the table.
“And I will never forgive you,” she snapped, moving so quickly that no one had the chance to react, walking out the front door and slamming it so hard the wood cracked.
She didn’t look back as she moved down into the city, even as tears streamed down her face.
---
Rhys let out a long breath as the aftermath of Nesta’s departure settled over the table. Feyre’s mind was a chaotic mess of questions, of confusion, of horror, and it was all he could do to send his assurance down the bond, to squeeze her hand tightly.
It was something he should have thought of when he first learned of the situation. He should have considered the possibility that their father would have gone to such a length. But Feyre had loved him so deeply he didn’t dare think of it. And Nesta had been so bitter, so cruel, that he didn’t care.
“I should…” Cassian started, but stopped, half out of his seat with his eyes trained on the door Nesta had walked through, the wide crack splitting through the center. A far from suitable sacrifice for her anger, in Rhys' opinion. “Someone should-”
“Give her a moment,” Azriel said quietly before Rhys could open his mouth, reaching up to grip his wrist. You are almost certainly the last people she wants to see right now. Not after what you said.”
Cassian’s agony was clear on his face, and Rhys had a feeling the guilt would eat his brother alive for a long time after this. He knew Cassian’s game, getting Nesta so angry that she snapped, that she gave them something other than the jarring hollowness that had overtaken her since the war. But it had gone too far, they’d all gone too far. Because at the end of the day, she was barely over a child herself. She hadn’t lived, hadn’t seen, hadn’t had the time to find peace or happiness or learn who she was outside of what expectations had been placed on her since birth.
Had they all forgotten their maturity, in the fifty years of torment and bloodshed?
But more than that, the burning pit of shame that Rhys felt every day since he returned from that mountain scorched his insides, and the empathy he felt for her in that moment was so strong it nearly brought tears to his eyes. Her pain, her horrified embarrassment, was so acute it nearly made him ill. For it was a pain that he’d never wish on anyone, not even the estranged sister that got under everyone’s skin. It was a pain he knew too well.
“I think we should move this to the living room,” he rasped, intent on getting himself a strong drink.
No one argued, and soon they all sat quietly around the fireplace, each in their own process of figuring out what exactly happened at that table.
“You need to tell me everything,” Feyre insisted to Elain, gripping her hand. “What do you mean he sold her? I don't understand.”
Half of Rhys wanted to tell his mate to take the conversation somewhere else, to keep it private, but the rest of the family had already tuned in to listen, determined to learn about this sharp and off-putting female that had ended up in their Circle. Before he could make up his mind, Elain began speaking.
“I didn’t know when it happened,” she said quietly. “I didn't know until you turned 18. You went out on a hunt, like usual, and I was inside fixing some of our clothes. You never did housework and Nesta and father were outside, so I thought I might take the initiative. I guess he’d brought it up, bringing you to…to wherever they went.”
Horror and fury filled Rhys’ gut at the prospect of Feyre being auctioned off like a broodmare, and the sentiment was shared around the room by the flux in emotions that hit him from each of his family members.
Confusion. Denial. Anger. Heartbreak.
“It was the only time I’d ever seen them actually scream at each other,” Elain said, staring into a glass brandy Azriel had put into her hands. “Or the only time I ever saw father strike her. She called him a liar, a coward, that he’d promised her never to consider it, and he slapped her for it. He hit her so hard, Feyre, she fell into the snow. He said it was his decision since you were his daughter.”
She took a shuddering breath and a long sip of her drink before she continued, “You’d left the hatchet you’d use sometimes when hunting behind that day, and Nesta grabbed it, and held it to his throat. I’ve never seen her like that, even during the war. She said if he did the same thing to you or me that he did to her, she’d kill him and gladly hang for it. It took Isaac Hale and his father both to break them apart. Father struck her with his cane afterwards, over and over until I begged him to stop. When it was apparent that I’d witnessed it, Nesta told me that when she was 16, almost 17, not long after we arrived, father woke her in the middle of the night and took her to a place in a neighboring town. She didn’t say any details, but she said enough. She said she made him promise never to make you or me do the same, that she would be the only one he could use that way. He’d agreed, but then we were so desperate. I guess he changed his mind.”
“I can’t imagine,” Mor murmured, almost to herself. “Gods, she probably knew nothing about what it entailed, if what I know about the humans is true.”
“But how could you not tell me?” Feyre asked, “How could you keep this from me?”
“Because you loved father,” Elain said, with a shrug. “Nesta didn’t tell me much either, to keep that relationship. She said she knew how much he meant to you and that I had to swear never to say anything. Besides, you already considered anything to do with marriage to be beneath you, maybe she wasn't sure you'd care."
"How could you say that?!" Feyre snapped. "Of course I'd fucking care if our father was whoring out my sister!"
Rhys grimaced at the word, but his mate was too immersed in her rage to notice.
Elain sighed, taking a long sip of her drink. "She kept telling me it was her duty, her responsibility, and that I shouldn’t be upset about it. But everything has been so terrible since the war, I can’t bear it any longer. You had to know, at the very least to know she didn’t just do nothing. If anyone did nothing, it was me.”
Rhys took a breath, sparing a glance to Cassian who stood at the window, staring out into the night with a haunted look on his face. He knew exactly how he was feeling at that moment, the anguish and disgust at hurting someone so important, even if his brother had yet to acknowledge it. But Rhys had seen what had happened when Nesta was thrown in that Cauldron, and he saw their promise on that battlefield. Cassian’s heart had been hers from the moment he laid eyes on her, but all he’d given her since their return home was harsh words and a cold shoulder.
It made a kind of outrage boil in Rhys' stomach. Outrage for her.
“Well, in any case, she’ll never forgive me for telling you,” Elain muttered quietly. “I probably shouldn’t have.”
“She was right, it wasn’t your truth to tell.”
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and at once everyone’s eyes were on him. His family knew a little of what had happened with Amarantha, and they all held varying degrees of pity, of attempted understanding. Taking a chance, he added, “I would have reacted the same way, in her position.”
And it was true. If Feyre had announced what exactly had happened between him and that monster, he didn’t think he would be able to look any member of his family in the eye ever again. Even if being called Amarantha’s whore had spread throughout all Prythian, he still would never discuss it, the details. He’d never share that shame with them.
“Still,” he said. “We were unnecessarily harsh tonight. I understand it must have been difficult to watch us berate your sister. I know you were desperate.”
“It was so self-righteous of you,” Elain hissed. “To assume that you knew everything. I couldn’t stomach it any longer. None of you were held accountable for your words, but Nesta was. It wasn’t fair.”
Rhys nodded, guilt coiling in his gut. “It was…childish, of us. It won’t happen again.”
An uncomfortable silence hung over the room for several seconds, everyone stewing in their own shock and shame.
“Who…who bought her?” Feyre suddenly asked, breaking the silence, and Elain took in a shuddering breath, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“I shouldn’t say,” she replied.
“Please tell me,” Feyre pushed, and he almost intervened, almost begged her to stop asking.
Elain was quiet for a moment before she replied, “I only know who did it the first time. The Mandrays. It's why Nesta let him hang around.”
Feyre covered her mouth, and for a moment, looked like she was going to be sick. Of course, none of the rest of them knew who this family was, but Feyre had told him of the male she’d warned her sister away from, the vile disgusting creatures that he and his father were. Looking into Feyre’s eyes now confirmed for him what he needed to know.
“I should go after her,” Feyre said then. “I need to talk to her, to make sure she’s alright.”
Elain nodded, and he caught her thought fluttering through that she wanted to go with her, to make amends.
But, if it had been him, if his lifelong secret had been exposed at the dinner table to a bunch of people who’d never known or understood that kind of pain, who weren’t her friends, the last thing he’d want is their pity or their apologies.
“I think,” he said, before he had fully come to his decision, “perhaps, in this instance, I may be best suited.”
He could feel the surprise, the confusion from his family, but he knew Feyre understood. He could feel it in the bond. All he waited for was her nod, her lips pursed, before he disappeared in a winnow, unable to actually look at his family’s faces.
---
Nesta wasn’t nearly drunk enough as she stared out over the rushing flow of the Sidra. She’d only managed three glasses of hard liquor at the Wolf's Den before her dismay overwhelmed her and sent her stumbling out the door until she was leaning over the edge of a random bridge, staring at the water below, tears streaming down her face. She gasped for air, trying desperately not to devolve into harsh, unforgiving sobs.
Trying desperately not to think too much about jumping over the railing.
It appealed to her, the idea of ending it all, it always had. And now, now that everyone knew, that she could no longer preserve the last shred of her dignity and instead had to face those horrors head on, she was all the more inclined to lean over, to contemplate going too far, until she fell. No one would miss her, at least. She wondered if Feyre would ever forgive her, for ruining the image of their father. She wondered if in death she’d stop seeing the faces of those men, mixed in with the newfound horrors of war, of the Cauldron. Of Cassian’s face as he berated her.
“You know, if you jump, I will be obligated to come in after you.”
Nesta didn’t flinch, not even as the High Lord’s power settled around her, announcing his presence.
“Please,” she said dryly. “We both know you would rather push me and be done with it.”
She heard his footsteps and wondered, for a moment, if he put effort into making them audible for her sake. She didn’t turn to assess him as he leaned against the railing beside her, his forearms resting on the cool metal.
“I’d rather not horrify my mate anymore than I already have,” he commented. “Pushing her sister off a bridge isn’t exactly what you do to someone you love.”
“What if her sister is awful?”
Rhys huffed out a soft laugh. “Then it serves as more proof of my love and commitment.”
Nesta hummed, uninterested, wishing he would fuck back off to his happy little house and his family who were probably seething that she'd caused another scene. Or perhaps gloating that their perception of her as nothing but a drunken whore had always been true.
“Are you here to drag me back and apologize for ruining another dinner?’
“No, Nesta, unfortunately I’m not here to make your night worse” Rhys said, sarcasm in his voice. “I’m here because, from one whore to another, I wanted to make sure you were alright.”
Nesta blinked and turned her head, taking in the way he wasn’t meeting her gaze as he normally would, but was instead staring off into the distance, making no effort to hide the discomfort on his face.
“I don’t expect you to know this, but before Feyre, I spent 50 years serving as Amarantha’s plaything to protect my family. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It still plagues me, even happily mated.”
“Is that your way of telling me to get over my father selling me off a couple of times as a child?”
“No,” Rhys said quickly, turning to look at her. It was perhaps the first time they’d ever held each other’s gaze without ire and hatred within them. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant, if Feyre did what Elain pulled at that table, I’d probably be the one contemplating a watery death right now.”
“Her heart was in the right place,” Nesta replied, looking back out to watch the stars. “It always is.”
“That doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do.”
Nesta shrugged. “It’s not like I deserve a better treatment. I’m sure you all delighted in it, at least a little.”
“I didn’t,” Rhys disagreed. “I’m already regretting letting it happen in the first place. I was too surprised by Elain raising her voice.”
“Feyre didn’t need to know. It was better for her not to.”
“That’s not why,” he pushed, and it was so infuriating to her, that he was making this kind of effort at all. So off putting. “It’s not something easily understood, this kind of pain. I still haven’t spoken to my family about it. I can’t bear the way they’d look at me. And I can’t bear the memories it would dredge up.”
Nesta didn’t reply, so he continued,
“Elain said you made your father promise to use you instead if he wanted to try the same thing with them. You don’t have to tell me, but, how many times did you go?”
Nesta didn’t know why she felt like sharing, when just a few minutes prior she wanted nothing to do with him. Maybe it was this newfound knowledge that he knew what it meant to give up something so intimate for a greater purpose, only for it to mean little in the end. In both cases, Feyre had been the one to save the day.
“Four,” she said. “Once for me, once for Elain, once for Feyre, and once because… well, because my original bidder wanted to make sure I was still up to standard at the ripe old age of 21.”
“I imagine your father never told you what to expect, beforehand.”
“Of course not, it’s not proper to discuss such things between a father and daughter.”
“It’s not proper for a father to whisk his daughter away in the middle of the night and sell her to the highest bidder, either.”
Before she could help it, she huffed out a rueful laugh. It’s not like she could disagree.
“I’m not sure why you care. It doesn’t change anything, really. Feyre still had to save us.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Rhys said. “I know you and I are something of adversaries, but I vowed never to let anyone in my family feel this…unique kind of pain. That includes you whether you like it or not. I never should have let Cassian, Mor, and Amren go that far. I’m sorry.”
Nesta scoffed. “Don’t apologize to me, Rhysand. It sounds wrong.”
Rhys chose to ignore her words, instead letting out a long sigh. “At the very least, I thought it might be easier to talk with someone who already knows what it means to be used that way, rather than calming down your sisters.”
Well, he had a point there.
“From what I hear about your father, he was horrible with money. Did you ever see a cent of what you earned?”
“What do you think?” Nesta asked dryly. “I believe he bought Feyre some paint and Elain some flower seeds, but the rest he likely did away with in another bad investment.”
“He apologized to you, that day on the battlefield.”
Nesta took in a shuddering breath. “We don’t need to discuss it.”
Rhys respected her word, to her surprise, and didn’t push the matter further.
“I trust you’ve already told Feyre what I’ve just told you,” she said, shivering slightly as a breeze blew off the river.
“I know it may be hard to believe, but I promise this stays between us,” Rhys replied, before shifting closer in one smooth movement. If you had told Nesta this morning that she’d end her night with her brother-in-law draping his jacket over her shoulders in some bizarre act of chivalry, she would have stayed in bed. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not one to break my promises.”
"Don't be ridiculous,” Nesta commented. “You hate me, mutual understanding or not.”
“I don’t hate you,” Rhys shot back. “I may have…misunderstood you.”
She scoffed. “Yes, well, trauma does wonders for relationship building.”
They stood in rather awkward silence for several more seconds before she added, “all it did was confirm what we all already know: that in the end, I’m useless and a waste of space. None of it mattered because I wasn’t good enough to see the full deal through. Feyre still provided, we still got thrown in that Cauldron, and father is still..."
“It mattered, Nesta,” Rhys said quietly, not commenting on the way she couldn’t finish the sentence, the way she couldn’t say his fate out loud. “You gave up something irreplaceable, and a man who was supposed to protect you did the opposite. I can understand why you hate him.”
“I wanted to hate him,” Nesta blurted, before she froze. She wondered, briefly, if he’d influenced her thoughts; coerced her into saying these things.
“I felt the same way about my father,” Rhys replied, without missing a beat. “I wanted to hate him, but he was still my father.”
“It was my duty, you know, as the eldest,” Nesta said. “I was trained my entire life to be the perfect wife. Including in ways that were less than pleasant.”
“Forgive me if I question the morality of your training in general.”
“I don’t think morality cares for someone like me.”
The way Rhys looked at her then seemed to go all the way into her soul, a new kind of understanding in his eyes that made her deeply uncomfortable. How drunk was she to expose herself like this?
“Nesta, I have to ask you,” he said seriously, any of the lighter tone he’d been using to coax her into conversation gone. “And I can only hope that you be honest with me. Are you letting the males here do what they want to you because you want to feel as used and dirty as you did back then? Because you think it’s what you deserve?”
Nesta took a full step away from the High Lord, rattled at his observation. She barely acknowledged that truth to herself, let alone to anyone else. She told herself it was to numb the pain, to find something to fill the crippling silence. But deep down, she knew the truth.
“I’m asking you because I wanted the same thing, afterwards. I wanted the same thing, but my family didn’t let it happen, even if they didn’t know the full truth. No one has done that for you.”
Rhys’ expression was perfectly neutral, save for the way his brows were furrowed. He was waiting for her to say, before he assumed, but she didn’t know if she could voice the words. She didn’t know how to convey what she felt vocally, how to describe it. Subtly, almost unnoticeably, she felt his presence in her mind, brushing gently, a silent request. She didn’t know why, but she yielded, just a fraction, to let him feel a taste of it. Maybe she was just too exhausted to do anything else.
He nodded once, and that was all that needed to be shared.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could tell you it won’t feel this way forever, but some days I still think I’m drowning myself.”
Nesta swallowed, suddenly aware of the tear tracks on her cheeks, the way she’d been compelled to lean so far over the edge of the railing, towards the water below.
“When is the last time you’ve eaten?” he asked then, so simply it was as if he’d asked her for the time. Perhaps it was to stop the chaos that threatened to pull her under.
Nesta blinked. “I don’t remember,” she admitted, a bit awkwardly.
“There’s a tonic,” he commented. “It helps with nausea. Even if food tastes like nothing, it’ll at least keep nutrients in your system.”
“Maybe I don’t want nutrients in my system.”
“Perhaps you’d allow me to try and convince you otherwise. Velaris is known for its pastries, you know. And its chocolate. Not exactly the healthiest meal, but I’d say you can eat whatever you want so long as you eat something.”
Nesta raised an eyebrow but was so tired already that she didn’t ask why he was offering that information. The more the night dragged on, the more she just wanted to go to bed, to forget this day as quickly as possible. For a moment, Rhys’ eyes went distant, and she watched in no small mount of fascination as he communicated with whoever was calling out to him. Perhaps he’d been gone too long, and his family was worried they’d had some kind of altercation. Sensing her curiosity, he said,
“Cassian is asking if I found you.”
Nesta scoffed, exhaustion temporarily replaced by bitter hurt. “Cassian has made it clear that I’m not worth his time. Now that he knows the full truth of it, I doubt that will change.”
“My brother is often too hot headed for his own good. You make him nervous; it ruffles his feathers. But if you think anyone in that house is going to think less of you because of what you’ve done, what you’ve had happen to you, you’re wrong, Nesta. The only thing anyone is thinking right now is how to fix the mess we’ve found ourselves in, and whether you’re going to be alright. We all have our own scars, in one way or another.”
She raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him, but he didn’t say anything further, not meeting her silent challenge, as he might have yesterday.
“You’re tired, I know,” he said instead, sliding his hands into his pockets. “Shall I walk you home?”
“Don’t trust me not to do something stupid the moment you go back to your fancy house?”
Rhys cocked his head, the expression on his face conveying the silent message.
I see you now, Nesta, you can’t fool me with haughty words any longer.
“Fine,” she said. “Though I’m not sure it’s very seemly for the High Lord to stroll in that part of town this late at night.”
“I’m not a very good High Lord if I don’t feel as though every citizen in this city deserves my attention. Besides, I need to connect with these people again. I used to be so much better, knowing their needs and ensuring their care. I’ve been regretfully absent these past few months.”
They moved silently through the streets, and Nesta wondered briefly why he didn’t just winnow them. The walk was quiet, and still a bit awkward, but filled with a newfound understanding. A not so small part of her still wanted to sleep and never wake up, to fade away forever, but the spiral she’d been falling down when she stumbled out of that tavern subsided, just enough to take a breath.
When they reached her building, Rhys paused, assessing the exterior for a few moments.
“Will you be safe here, alone tonight?”
“I’m too tired to do anything else, Rhysand.”
Starlit eyes assessed her carefully as she slid out of his jacket, handing it unceremoniously back to him.
“Will you think about what I said?” he asked, waving a hand, and conjuring a piece of paper. “If you write on this parchment, I’ll receive it instantly. You are welcome in our home, though I know it will be some time before you feel comfortable there. But I’d like to help you, to try, anyway. Cauldron knows I’m being as hypocritical as I am idealistic, seeing as our struggles may be more similar than once thought.”
Nesta looked at the parchment in his hand, trying desperately to find that hatred she had for him, that bitter resentment. But as she looked at the High Lord, she saw her own exhaustion reflected in his eyes, just for a moment. The same pain, the same scars. And while the circumstances were different, she felt understood by him in a way that no one else could. At least, no one else in that house. And though she knew she should resist the urge to give herself anything, she was too tired to fight any longer.
“I suppose we whores should stick together,” she said quietly, lifting a hand to accept his small offering.
And though Rhysand’s eyes were sorrow-filled, centuries of pain and regret within them, he smiled.