Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Our memories are our reality.
Istared at the shadows shifting across the ceiling.
The evening Louisiana air drifted in through the open French doors of my bedroom as I tried to make sense of the horror I’d seen.
The memories were within reach, the veil easily broken by my aunts who cast it.
I needed to be ready and strong. I would also need time and therapy.
I shifted my bare legs and pulled the loose sheet down to the bottom of the bed.
A creak on the railing was my only warning.
The moonlight disappeared, and his scent washed over me as he leaped into the room.
He was barefoot and bare chested, just a pair of jeans hung on his hips. He’d been in his beast form.
“Front door not good enough for you?” I grumbled. This was the first night he’d pushed to even be in the same room as me.
“Didn’t want to risk you warding against me coming home,” Hudson said while prowling around the edge of the bed.
His gaze slid up my legs, gold rolling across his eyes as he cataloged every curve.
I would never tire of the hungry way he looked at me, like I was both precious and someone he wanted to devour.
It would be so easy to let go of all the hurt and the worry, to fall into him.
But that road would lead to the ruin of our relationship.
As much as he was an alpha, he didn’t need or want a woman who fell to her knees because he growled.
“I’m moving toward forgiveness, but unlike the memories you stole, I can’t just snap my fingers and remove the hurt.”
He froze at the end of the bed. “Meaning?”
“I need my space.” Indigo bucked against that idea.
“Something has changed.”
My brows lowered, and I sighed. “I watched the video.”
Silence stretched, and my chest tightened.
“Fuck this,” he growled before climbing onto the bed and gathering me into his arms, surrounding me in his scent and safety.
For a moment, I let myself be weak, to take the calm from him.
I buried my head in his neck and breathed him in.
Home. He didn’t offer excuses or point out the truth of their actions.
It had been necessary for my safety and theirs.
I understood that now. But the lies still wedged a barrier between us—the deals we’d made and the situations we’d become entangled in.
“Are we going to discuss the deal you made with a god?” he whispered into my hair as his hand slid under my T-shirt and stroked my spine.
“Tit for tat.”
He tensed.
That’s what I thought. “So many secrets,” I muttered.
“And just as many nightmares. We were all marked that day, Cora.”
I squeezed my eyes closed and dragged in a breath before rolling away from him. “I apologize for my pain and torture affecting you.”
“Don’t deflect with barbed words. They don’t suit you.”
They didn’t. I was being a childish asshole. “I need sleep,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes with my hands so hard I saw a kaleidoscope of stars.
“Then sleep.”
“Alone.”
“No.”
“Not a request, Principal.”
“The house is at full capacity.”
“Then sleep at Dayna’s or at your own. You have options, but I am not one of them.”
“No.”
“Hudson,” I snapped.
“I’m not leaving you after witnessing your nightmare come to life. I don’t have to be in the same bed, but I won’t sleep somewhere I’m not close enough to catch you should those demons try to drag you to Hell.”
“I’ve been to Hell, and it’s not half as bad as you think.”
He snorted, rolled off the bed, and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser to snatch spare blankets into his arms. He pointed at the wall separating the bedroom from the living area. “I’ll be right through there.”
My heart melted a little. No matter how hard I pushed him away, he refused to leave.
“And tomorrow we can talk about what wedding decisions you need to be cited on. The rest we can delegate.”
He left the door ajar and retreated, leaving me once again in silence, but this time I was not alone.
Sleep didn’t come. It stalked. When it finally pounced, it sank its teeth deep. Stone. Cold. The kind that remembered screams.
The room wasn’t a room so much as a glass box made of rules. Chalk lines on the floor, iron pins hammered into the corners, sigils that tasted like rust on my tongue. A drip somewhere I couldn’t see, steady as a metronome ticking out the moments I was not allowed to own.
“Again,” my grandmother drawled. Eloise’s voice was a ribbon tied in a knot, pretty, choking. She didn’t raise it. She never had to. Power hummed through the wards like bees in a jar.
The Hound circled me with the lazy patience of a predator that knows there is nowhere for me to go.
A cruel smirk lifted his lips as he carried the knife the way some men carry flowers.
He was picking a place to plant it. There were a thousand punctures on my skin where he’d grown an entire garden of pain.
“Hold,” Eloise murmured, and the wards obeyed. They coiled tighter. Magic crawled over my arms with a million icy legs, settling, pinning, drinking. It wasn’t the pain that took me apart. It was the theft. Every pull of power was a memory unstitched.
Indigo paced behind my ribs, snarling, starving. “Let me out.”
I gritted my teeth. If I did, there would be no one left to put us back in.
The Hound pressed the blade just below my collarbone. He hummed a tuneless, off-key song while he mapped me like a cartographer of cruelty. “Everyone breaks eventually, Cora. This would go much easier if you unleashed what she wants.”
I choked on a laugh that tasted of blood. “You wouldn’t need to resort to verbal threats if you truly believed that.”
He smiled as the red-hot knife slid into my flesh. I arched my back and gritted my teeth.
Eloise leaned in and brushed hair from my forehead like she used to when I was little and feverish. “Hush now,” she crooned. “Stop fighting.”
“You are a crime against humanity, and I hope you burn for an eternity in Hell,” I whispered.
“That’s no way to speak to your grandmother.”
“You have to earn the right to that title.”
“Blood binds us,” she pointed out.
The words drilled into my mind like an answer to an unspoken question. Blood binds us.
Glass pressed against my lips, and a fluid burned my tongue and scalded my throat. The wards brightened. I dimmed.
“That’s it,” Eloise encouraged. “Let me in. I trained you to kneel.”
My gaze snapped to hers. “No, you taught me what love doesn’t look like and how family is chosen.”
Eloise raised her brow. “Continue,” she decided with a nod at The Hound.
Indigo slammed her palms against the cage of my ribs. “He dies.”
“Agreed,” I breathed.
Eloise’s cool hand brushed against my cheek. “Everything worth anything has always belonged to me.”
The Hound chose a new place. The knife kissed my thigh and then bit, and for a second, the world was a perfect, bright white. The wards throbbed to the beat of my heart. On. Off. On. Off. A lighthouse to guide my power straight out of me and into hers.
I slammed it closed. I would not give this woman another pound of my flesh.
“Again,” Eloise said. The demand opened a door beneath me, bringing with it a monster coming to claim its own. The world tilts, and then I’m falling through it, falling, falling—into a bed that isn’t stone and a night that isn’t quiet.
I jerked upright and clenched my teeth, a cool sweat glistening across my body in the pale moonlight. My breath clawed at the back of my throat, ragged, animalistic. For a strangled second, the knife still sat under my collarbone, hot and pulsing.
Something heavy landed on the mattress, and a pair of golden orbs opened in the dark.
Keverin moved with impossible grace for a prehistoric beast. The bed dipped under his weight as he padded closer.
His huge head nudged my knee once in question.
I didn’t trust my voice. I shoved shaking fingers into thick silky fur.
He stretched along my body, offering me his heat and strength to chase away the icy tendrils of terror.
The steady thunder of a heart that was not mine and yet was.
His purr started low and rolled through my bones, grounding me in reality.
“I hate them,” I muttered.
Keverin huffed, a warm, damp exhale over my wrist. The pressure of his body was an anchor.
Indigo uncoiled slowly, talons withdrawing from the inside of my breastbone. “Accept the comfort, then sharpen the knives.”
“Working on it,” I whispered, thumb rubbing along the groove where Keverin’s jaw met his cheek.
His whiskers tickled my palm. Somewhere, beyond the half-closed door, a floorboard creaked, a quiet reminder that there was a man on my sofa who would tear down the world if I asked, and a tiger on my bed who would keep it from falling on my head in the meantime.
The kiss of the knife faded.
“Tell him I don’t need babysitting,” I murmured. Keverin flicked an ear in a way that absolutely translated to no chance, little witch.
“Fine,” I conceded, and the admission didn’t taste like defeat. “For tonight.”
He shifted closer, an indelicate sprawl of striped warmth, and curled his tail along my shins like a question mark. I slid down until my temple rested against his shoulder. He smelled like rain and wild grass and something older.
The ceiling still held its shadows like secrets, but they no longer looked like knives. The wards hummed their familiar note. My last clear thought before sleep found me. The next time Eloise walked into my house would be the last time she did so as a Roberts.
Keverin’s purr answered like a promise.