Every Longing Heart (Bonds of Blood #2)

Prologue

When the blood bond severed, she felt it. Pain washed over her, but she bore it, bracing herself against the sensation of the cut as one did for the pain of amputation in order to separate a diseased limb that would kill if left on.

Then the pain lifted. Genevieve gasped, her first free breath in twenty years.

“Genevieve? What is it?” Elspeth asked from the other side of their small, dark bolt hole. Her quick needle hovered over the frayed hem of Genevieve’s cloak.

“It’s—gone,” Genevieve stammered. “Gone—” Her hand scrabbled convulsively at her chest, as if to hunt for the end of the broken, intangible tether.

Elspeth’s face blanked—and then set. “Then you must go. Go now,” she urged. She tied off the last stitch and snipped the thread, thrusting the cloak towards Genevieve.

“I—but what about you?”

“Genevieve,” Elspeth said, her colorless eyes flashing red in the dark, “Go.”

Genevieve Dryden wrapped herself in the voluminous cloak and fled the dark depths of London.

She recalled little of her flight, stowing away in baggage cars, sleeping when she had to, clutching her hood tight about her, ignoring the cold winds that blew.

Need drove her on. Need—and desperation.

Her journey ended on a bleak street in Oxford as she stared up at the lit windows of a small house. But as she gazed through the cloudy glass, she did not recognize the man who pored over a book in the study. Small footfalls and children’s laughter rang out from the upper floor.

Her heart, which she had thought long dead, seized in her chest.

The neighbors in the surrounding houses were all different. And she could not call on any other familiar acquaintances. Not after twenty years.

She searched the college as a last resort, but no familiar figure lay asleep in the library over a translation or sat beneath the trees to watch the constellations.

Genevieve finally drifted through the streets to the churchyard. And in the moonlight, as snow began to softly fall, she fell to her knees in front of the tall hewn stone and sobbed bitterly, her threadbare gloves clawing at the words inscribed there under an open book:

In Memory of Ezra Dryden, who died Nov. 23rd, 1879, Aged 78 Years. Beloved Husband to Constance. Faithful Father to Genevieve.

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1:21

She was too late.