<span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff9999">Rory had always been attracted to his darkness, his recklessness. It complemented her very nature. Unlike the proud sidhe, her brethren were wilder, darker, more deviant. More prone to causing trouble, to finding trouble, and sticking to trouble. Dante had been a bad boy with impulses when she had met him, and no doubt he still was. Like a moth to a flame, she had latched onto the shifter and hadn’t let go. Perhaps their relationship had turned codependent on at some point.	However, it was also her own chaotic nature, and that of her family’s, that had landed her in the situation that she was in now.<br/>
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She stiffened on the chair when he got up, crossed the room. Her eyes looked greener as they widened to luminous saucers, the faint freckles on her face standing out now that her skin was splotched with tears. The auburn and fire of her hair was mussed, framing her red-rimmed stare as she watched him while wearing his shirt over her body. At first, she froze where she was when his fingers crept across her cheek. Then she released the shuddering breath she had held and slumped forward. Moving on instinct, she pushed herself up and wound her arms around his neck, her splotched face burrowing into the hollow of his throat as a fresh sob closed her own.<br/>
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“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she murmured, voice quaking, as her face twisted to the side, even though she deposited the crown of her head firmly under his chin. “I thought I was going to be stuck there forever, that I wouldn’t be able to get out… that they were just going to kill me and I have to make sure that.. That they can’t.. Follow me,” she babbled out loud, regardless of if he cared or not. “They killed granna already, for living out in the world like this.. It’s forbidden, so they’re rounding up all of us.. And trying to keep us there.. And that’s not the kind of life-- Eoin-- she needs to stay here, out here, not there where everything is ugly even if it looks pretty…” <br/>
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No doubt he had no idea what she was talking to. But Rory had taken advantage of his surge of kindness. Even when he drew away to look at the fresh swarm of tears that filled her eyes. She blinked rapidly, trying to clear them away, but instead causing them to spill over onto her cheeks. Sucking in a hard breath, she wiped them away herself while she scrubbed her hands over her face. Her pulse beat rapidly in her chest and she shook her head as she tried to compose herself. The truth fell hard… and that was that Rory had been alone, scared, pregnant, and unsure of her or her daughter’s own fate. The reality was -- she still didn’t know.<br/>
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So with her deep breaths taken, she tilted her face back up to his. “Did you… want to come with me?” There was a certain amount of nerves in the question, of uncertainty. “I… have to go back to her now, to Eoin, if you wanted to meet her.” <br/>
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She got to her feet with the words, her eyes searching his smoldering pair, and smoothed down the shirt over her eyes as two spots of color formed in her cheeks. Tentatively, she pushed herself up on the balls of her feet and pressed her lips against his cheek. “I’m so sorry about all of this,” she whispered breathily close to his ear when she pulled her mouth away from his skin.	</span>