“You’re—”
“Changing,” Katherine finished. “Something happened when I meet Urian. That’s his name. Maybe it was coincidence, but I feel increasingly more . . . like dad since we met.”
“Urian,” her mother repeated. “What do you know of him?”
Katherine laughed awkwardly before saying, “Hesayshe’s an exiled prince, and he has human friends—or subjects maybe? I don’t even know.”
“Which court?”
Of all the replies that her mother could’ve made, Katherine wasn’t expecting that one. She sort of blinked at her. Her very mortal mother claimed not to know much of the workings of the world of the fey.
But mortals could lie, couldn’t they?
Mutely, Katherine simply stared at her mother, who was scowling at the shutters.
“Summer? Winter? Dark? Shadow? High?” Her mother frowned. “I don’t recall your father mentioning any exiled princes. Therewasa bound king . . . but his name was Keenan.”
“So . . . you know a bit more than you’ve shared, then?” Katherine was shaken by the wave of betrayal. “Even now, you didn’t think I was old enough to learn all this?”
“Kitty Kat . . .”
Ignoring her, Katherine grabbed a bag. Jeans and a shirt were perfectly fine. She wasn’t dressing up for a date. What difference did it make what she wore? She wasn’t trying to impress the faux prince. She was simply hunting for answers—some of which her mother, apparently, had hidden.
“Katherine!”
But for one of the few times in her twenty-odd years, Katherine wasn’t interested in stopping. She’d known her mother was protective, known she was training Katherine for all sorts of disasters, but for reasons that really had made logical sense, Katherine assumed that part of that training was sharing everything she knew.
Apparently not.
She wasn’t going to trust everything Urian said, but today Katherine was going to give in to instincts that weren’t entire human. Tonight, she was going to embrace being her father’s daughter.
ChapterTwelve
Urian
Urian watched her walk toward him. He was put off that it had taken almost sixteen days for her to come out of her tower, and he desperately wanted her to feel as needy as he did—or maybe he wanted tonotfeel this needy. He wasn’t sure. All he could say for certain was that he felt a compulsion, an unpleasant pull toward her.
“Stalker much?” she said, as if there was something wrong with his attention.
Instead of answering Katherine, he pulled out an old pocket watch that had long since stopped working and looked at it. Time was fleeting, even for one of the fey. He knew it with a surety that had carried him along for over a century.
She looked as exasperated as he felt. “You sit there staring at me for two weeks and—”
“You live here?” He looked around, as if surprised, and teased, “Who knew?”
She flipped her middle finger up and walked away. She had a good walk, hips swaying in time to ancient rhythms and posture fit for a battlefield. It gave him pause.
“Whose get are you? What faery? What court? Or are you sired by a solitary faery?”
She stopped mid-step and looked over her shoulder. “Get?Sired? I’m not an animal, Urian. I’m a person. Like you.”
His pulse quickened rebelliously at the sound of his name on her lips. Pushing that traitorous longing aside, he stood. “Howmuch like me, Katherine of Miller?”
“Just Katherine.” She sounded terse, but she’d stopped walking away.
Slowly, intentionally putting all the lust of agancanaghinto his every step, he prowled toward her. And as she watched him with a look that seemed more predator-in-waiting than he was expecting, he added, “Do you think I would lay siege to arandomtower, Just Katherine?”
She swallowed, and he saw the same traitorous interest in her lightning-flecked eyes. “Katherine. Or Kat.”