Chapter 3: What I Heard Them Say About Me

The cabin was two miles past the treeline, and no one on this earth knew it existed except the three of us. They kept it dark. Silver sconces, low fire, and thornvine — Draven's power, black briars that grew where he told them to grow. That night they hung me from them. The barbs went into my wrists, my ankles, my ribs, holding me a foot off the floor while the fire spat. Kael stood below me, shirtless, watching with his arms crossed like a man appraising livestock. Draven opened his hand and let violet light coil into a whip. He walked forward, looped it around my throat, and pulled it tight. "From now on," he said, "this is ours. Our place." He leaned in until his mouth brushed my ear. "When we call, you come. Immediately. Do you understand?" I couldn't breathe. Spots swam. "Answer me with your mouth." "Yes," I rasped. "I understand." He snapped his fingers. The thorns vanished and I dropped six feet onto stone. Kael crouched in front of me and took my jaw. I looked up at him through my hair — bloody, shaking, still stupid enough to hope — and I tilted my face up to be kissed. He clamped his hand over my mouth and shoved me away. The tears came before I could stop them, running over his fingers. "Why?" I whispered. "Why won't you ever kiss me? What did I do wrong?" Kael said nothing. He reached into his coat and took out a folded page. He opened it in front of my face. A portrait. Short dark hair. A gold circlet. That bright, beautiful, poisonous smile. Selene. He lowered his head, slowly, reverently, and kissed her painted mouth through the paper. Then he dropped it on the floor beside me like it was nothing, and it landed face-up, and I lay there staring at her while my heart came apart in pieces small enough to swallow. Draven's hand covered my mouth from behind. "Don't talk," he murmured. "You're so beautiful in red." The fire threw two shadows over one small body, and I closed my eyes and let it happen. Later, I lay half-conscious on the fur bench with a blanket over the lash marks, and they sat by the fire drinking, and they forgot I existed. "Which of us do you think she'll pick?" Draven said, swirling his glass. Kael didn't even look up. "Doesn't matter. She only has to breed. One heir, and the North is ours." He set the glass down. "Once we're crowned, no one can ever take Selene from us. She stays in that house forever, legally, and nobody can say a word." "True." Draven laughed under his breath. "She's a slave, at the end of it. She was never going to be a wife." "Carrying our pups is more honor than she's earned." Then Kael glanced toward the bench, and his voice went almost warm. "At least she looks a little like Selene." Something in me went very, very still. Ten years of love died in that room, and it didn't even scream. It just stopped. I opened my eyes in the dark and I wasn't crying anymore. I sat up. I wiped my face. And I lifted my right hand. Silver-blue light exploded out of my palm — light I'd never once summoned in my life, light that made the fire cower — and it hardened into a staff of pale blue steel, humming with thunder. I stood up in my ruined slip and I brought it down on the floor. BOOM. The stone split from wall to wall. The roof beams screamed. Slabs of granite came down like the sky was falling, and Kael and Draven dove sideways through smoke, shouting my name. I didn't run. I walked out through the front door, dragging that torn white silk behind me like a train, and I stopped in the moonlight to watch it fold in on itself. "I'm finished with that place," I said. I tilted my head as the last wall went down. "Besides. It doesn't need to exist anymore." Dust rolled over the pines. And at the edge of the treeline, where nothing should have been standing, two eyes opened in the dark — gold, ancient, and fixed on me. They didn't blink. They smiled.