Chapter 3: The Gift With Teeth

They sent me two maids at dawn. "I'm Lara," said the first. "The young Lady Blackthorn sent me to look after you." The second didn't bother lowering her eyes. "I'm Susie. I'm here to teach you manners. You're a wild little thing, and you will not embarrass this family in public." I moved two fingers. A thread of green light slid off my knuckles, quiet as a whisper, and sank into her stomach. Susie folded in half with a strangled noise. "Get out," I said. She stared at me, gasping. "I said. Get out." She ran. Lara stayed. Braver, or better paid. "You shouldn't have refused the name, miss," she said quietly. "Without it, they'll never see you as one of them." I ran my thumb over the black moonstone at my throat and watched the light come through the window. "Being a Blackthorn means nothing to me," I said. "Be kind to me and you'll have my respect." I looked at her. "Don't, and I won't forget it either." Vivienne arrived at noon in red. "Already holding a grudge against Grandmother?" She set a velvet box on my table. "Grandmother gave me this for my sixteenth birthday. It's my favorite thing in the world." She opened it. A moonstone pendant the size of a robin's egg, set in white gold. Pack-heirloom old. "I want you to have it," she said. "Maybe then you'll stop being jealous of how much everyone loves me." Cheap theater. "Take it back." Her smile locked up. "If you refuse, it means you still hate me for taking your place." Her voice sharpened. "You have to accept it." She dropped the box on the table and swept out. I called Lara over. "Take it to my grandmother. Ask her to return it to Vivienne for me." Lara's eyes went round. "Miss — that necklace is worth more than this house. None of the young masters have one. Only Vivienne. She gave it to you. Why not keep it?" "Do as I said." She came back twenty minutes later, pale. "Miss. Lady Rosalind says you're to keep it." So the old woman had been in on it. Testing me. Or squeezing me. "Then put it somewhere everyone can see," I said. "Vivienne isn't generous enough to give me anything. And now that Grandmother has seen it — I'd very much like to know what she's playing at." I found out at four o'clock, when my youngest brother Theo kicked my door open. "Where's the pendant?" he snarled. Vivienne stood behind him with wet lashes and trembling hands. "Theo, please, don't—" "You stole it." His eyes burned gold at the edges. "Vivienne's had that since she was sixteen and you've been in this house four days. Give it back." "She put it in my hands herself." "Liar!" "Enough." My grandmother's cane cracked against the floorboards, and the whole room flinched. Rosalind looked at Vivienne for a long, long moment. "Yesterday," she said, "Sienna brought that pendant to me herself and asked me to return it to you. I'm the one who told her to keep it." Silence. Vivienne's mouth opened. Nothing came out. "So," Rosalind said. "You gave a gift, and now you want it back? In front of your brother? While crying?" "G-Grandmother, I didn't—" "Apologize to Sienna." The cane came down again. "Now." Vivienne bit her lip until it went white. "Sienna. I'm sorry. It was my mistake." I reached up, unhooked the chain, and let the pendant drop into her open hands. "Apology accepted. Take it back." I held her gaze. "A gift from you? I wouldn't dare." Theo went red. Vivienne's fingers closed around it like a claw. My father summoned me an hour later. He didn't look up from his desk. "There's a betrothal contract with the Draven bloodline. Signed the year you were born." He finally lifted his eyes. "You're going to the Draven estate tomorrow. Behave." Draven. My stomach dropped through the floor. The Draven estate sat above the sea like a fortress deciding whether to let you live. Camille swept in ahead of me, arm around Vivienne, laughing at all the right jokes. The Draven matriarch, Mira, looked past me like I was furniture. I stood in the doorway, ignored, in a borrowed dress, feet bare. Then a door opened at the top of the staircase. He came down slowly. Charcoal suit. Shoulders like a war banner. The man who had knelt in my mother's dirt yard four days ago, begging the Ghost Healer to save his father. Three steps from the bottom, Kian Draven stopped dead. His head turned. His nostrils flared. And he looked straight at me.