A new wave of shock rolled through me. “You saw him?”
“Not the prince. The ballroom door was open and a group was leaving. There were two male faeries in front, and as soon as they saw us, they came to intercept us. They knew who we were before we could even show them our IDs. One of them said he knew they should have killed us twenty years ago when they took the boy.
I pressed a hand to my mouth as he continued. “They restrained us and told the prince’s guard to take him to his suite while they dealt with the problem. The next thing I knew, we were in the ballroom and they were calling Rogin Havas to dispose of us. They didn’t want the death of two well-known bounty hunters to draw any attention to Prince Rhys and risk reporters making a connection between him and us. They had no idea Rogin’s sister would intercept the call and save us.”
“You remember seeing her?” I’d told him that Raisa had been the one who gave them the goren to keep them alive. Until now, he had no memory of her part in it.
“Yes. I woke up in her house. She said she would do whatever she could to keep us alive. After that, all my memories are foggy. I can’t tell the real ones from the goren dreams.”
I continued pacing. I couldn’t think about the possibility that my brother was alive or about everything my parents had been through. It was too much for my brain to process all at once. Instead, I focused on the person at the root of it all, the one who had caused my family so much pain.
“What I don’t get is why? Why would Queen Anwyn steal a human baby, convert him, and raise him as her son? Her heir? One thing I know about Fae politics is that they only want the bluest blood in the royal line. I can’t believe any Seelie faerie with an ounce of royal blood would be okay with someone who isn’t even Fae-born being their king someday.”
“They would if they don’t know he isn’t Fae-born.”
“That’s it!” I whipped my head toward my father. “That’s why her guard tried to have you and Mom killed, and why they don’t want you to remember. I thought they were worried you knew about them stealing the ke’tain, but all along it was about Prince Rhys…Caleb…”
My voice trailed off, and a knife twisted in my gut at the fresh pain in Dad’s eyes. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through. His son had been ripped from him and raised as a faerie with no knowledge of his real parents. Even if Prince Rhys somehow learned the truth and wanted to know his family, we could never get back the life that had been stolen from us.
I went back to pacing. “It still doesn’t explain why she would take a human baby and pass him off as her own. What could she gain from that?”
“I don’t know.” Dad stared down at his hands. “But she went through a lot of trouble to do it and to cover it up.”
He was right. Her guards had done a lot more than steal Caleb. They’d switched him with a changeling made to look like my brother, which required a lot of magic. They also would have had to glamour the medical examiner to make sure the autopsy report confirmed the dead baby was Caleb and that he’d died of a heart defect.
After all of that, the guards couldn’t bring a human baby to Faerie. Their magic wasn’t strong enough to do a conversion, which meant Queen Anwyn had secretly come to our realm to perform it herself.
But why Caleb? Of the millions of male babies in the world, why had they chosen my brother? Had they been looking for something specific, or were we the first family they found with a baby boy? We’d probably never know the answer to that, and I feared it would haunt my parents for the rest of their lives.
Helpless anger flared inside me. The Seelie queen had done nothing but bring pain to the people I loved, and she was virtually untouchable. Not that we had evidence of her crime. The prince’s resemblance to Dad could be passed off as coincidence, and we had no proof of his real identity. Once a human became Fae, none of our human DNA remained. It was one of the things I’d been struggling with this past week.
There was the body Mom and Dad had buried, but it would take a lot more than a crazy story about changelings to get the authorities to exhume it. And something like that would not go unnoticed. My family would be dead before the ink was dry on the order.
A soft whistle drew my attention to Finch, who stood at the end of the hallway. His eyes were wide and worried as he signed, Is Dad okay?
I followed his gaze to where Dad sat with his head in his hands, and then I signed back, Yes. He’s just figuring out something.
Okay. He turned and disappeared again.
Dad moved his head from side to side. “It’s my fault. I should have kept him safe.”
“How can you say that?” I went to sit beside him. “No human is a match for the Seelie royal guard. You know that better than anyone.”
“You don’t understand. I had the apartment warded, but only against the kinds of faeries we hunted. I never thought to protect us from Court faeries. If I had, they wouldn’t have gotten in and taken Caleb.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that. No one would have thought to ward against the royal guard.” I laid my head against his shoulder, lost as to how to comfort the strongest man I’d ever known. My father was a protector, and he’d carry this guilt on his shoulders forever. It was one more reason for me to despise the Seelie queen.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment, and it was Dad who broke the silence. “We need to make a plan.”
“A plan for what?” I straightened. Surely, he wasn’t going to suggest we tell Prince Rhys who he really was. As much as I wanted my parents to be happy, I was terrified of what the queen would do to them.
“To protect our family. If Queen Anwyn learns the prince has been here and met me, she’s not going to take it well. And if her guards find out I have my memories back, they –”
“No.” Fear sent me to my feet. “We can’t tell anyone about this. The Seelie guard will come after you and Mom, and I can’t lose you again. I can’t.”
“Jesse.” Dad stood and put his hands on my trembling shoulders. “I’m not talking about going public with this. But if the prince keeps showing interest in us, the queen will take notice, and her guard will come snooping around. We need to prepare for that.”
“How?”
He pressed his lips together, and his grip on my shoulders tightened a fraction. “The first thing we have to do is tell Lukas.”
“No.” I shook my head so hard it almost gave me whiplash.
Dad stopped me when I would have pulled away from him. “Listen to me. I know you’re still angry at him, but he cares about you. He’ll protect you.”
I had no idea what I felt for Lukas anymore. At first, I’d been furious at him because he’d made me Fae without giving me a choice, even though there had been no way I could have made that decision. Then I’d hated myself for being unfair to the person who had saved my life. I’d spent the last week alternating between hoping he would come assure me everything would be okay and not wanting to see him. Not that he had tried to see me – or talk to me. The others had been taking turns calling to check on me, but I hadn’t heard a word from him since the day he brought me home.
There was one thing I did know. If we told him about Caleb and what Queen Anwyn had done, he wouldn’t let me stay here. He’d most likely send me to Unseelie to keep me safe, and it could be months or years before I saw my family again. After everything I’d gone through to get them back, I wasn’t letting anyone separate us.