Chapter 5 #2
But Odessa preferred to galivant around town in a tornadic frenzy, tormenting the townsfolk.
She’d work her wiles on anyone foolish enough to get close, married or not, though most people knew better.
It had always been a point of contention for his elder sister that there were no male sparrows.
That she had to keep her maiden name to inherit.
That she had to behave like a lady.
Cal glanced over at Nadine, who was watching him intently. And as he had so many times before, he put his compunctions on ice. “Ravensgate is our family home. There’s history behind it, as I told you in my letter, and it’s a big house. Big enough that it doesn’t really feel like sharing.”
Her right eye twitched when he mentioned the letter. “That didn’t answer my question.”
Cal gave her a predatory smile. “Want to see if you can get a better one?”
She squirmed in her seat, and the hand that she still had on the table moved restlessly. She clenched it into a fist. “How did Ben meet Noelle?”
“A chat room.”
“What kind of chat room?”
“I bet you could guess.” Or maybe she couldn’t, sheltered as she was.
For all that poetry she wrote, charged with a longing for dark skies and cruel hands, she could still be a naif.
“Your sister’s not the pious angel you think she is.
Of course, my brother’s no saint, either, but then, he doesn’t pretend to be. Not like you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So why was Noelle screaming about sparrows in the town square, then?”
The world stuttered to a halt. Fuck. “Who told you about that?”
She looked panicked. Rael—it would have to be.
Dottie didn’t know that much, for one, and for another, Rael had already made his stance painfully clear.
Get rid of her. But Rael didn’t know Nadine.
Didn’t know that beneath all the shy glances and skittish gestures, she was as stubborn as the granite beneath their feet.
Or maybe he did, Cal thought darkly, straightening.
Maybe his plan was to send her flying right into the path of his father.
The panic on Nadine’s face was fading. She gave him a look of such fragile defiance that he was nearly humbled by it. “It doesn’t matter how I know. Answer the question.”
Cal sighed angrily. “Noelle didn’t like that Ben hunted,” he said, opting for a fragment of the truth. “He knew that she was vegan and made accommodations for it, but refused to be a part of that lifestyle himself. Hunting is in his blood.” As it should be in hers.
Images flooded his mind with visceral salience: Noelle brandishing the crumbling pages from the book.
Their book. The one that revealed all their secrets, which should have been denied to her until Ben, who had been too cowardly and faithless to do things properly, confided in her at the festival before claiming her in the woods.
Noelle—screaming, fighting with every fiber of her being as his brother dragged her to her death. And the smoke that smelled like nothing else, greasy and acrid and human—
His fingers gripped his thigh, nails biting to the brink of steadying pain.
“She said she understood that and for a while, it seemed like she did,” he heard himself say, his voice remote and alien to his own ears.
“But on that day in the square, she had gotten pretty unstable already. Seeing him come back from the hunt with a clutch of dead sparrows must have pushed her over. We eat them, you know. Just like quail.”
A flash of suspicion sparked through her eyes. “Did Noelle ever go down to the mines?”
“I’m not sure. It’s possible. Why?” he demanded.
“I was just curious,” she said with a deliberate sort of innocence that didn’t fool him for a moment. “It’s one of the main points of attraction around here, isn’t it? Back home, she had an active social life and the people in town aren’t exactly friendly.”
She babbles when she’s nervous, Cal observed, drawing a finger down his cheek in thought. It was also a chilling reminder that her sister was a woman who had been violently wrenched from the tapestry of life, leaving behind far too many dangling threads for an entirely clean break.
“She wasn’t a prisoner, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“Were either of your parents against Ben marrying Noelle?”
“No. They liked her just fine at first. That’s why they paid for the wedding.”
It had been an investment and his brother had turned his happily-ever-after into a glaring omen by choosing to celebrate his newfound union in the shadow of the first Cullraven bride.
Chin propped on his fist, he studied the dead woman’s sister with an indolence he did not feel.
She was difficult and easy to read, and not in the ways he expected from either.
She didn’t trust him and she shouldn’t, but fuck, part of him still wanted to charm her to his side just to see if he could.
She stared back at him—not at his face, but at his chest, where he’d left his shirt unbuttoned to get a bit of a breeze on his neck. He leaned forward and didn’t think he imagined the catch in her throat when the fabric buckled.
Keep looking at me like that and your sister may not be the last Cullraven bride to step over that threshold, little sparrow.
“Here’s your omelet.” The waitress broke the heady silence by plunking down the ceramic plate and Nadine took a rather desperate drink of her water, as if she sought to purify rather than quench.
“And your avocado toast. The chef said our seasoning powder has cornstarch in it, so we’ve just given you the spread and some finishing salt. Enjoy.”
“Okay,” said Nadine. “Great. Uh, thanks.”
“You seem distracted,” he observed. Pointedly.
Her eyes dipped from his and her sharp white teeth sank into the toasted bread with a crackling sound.
“I’m just thinking.” A flash of pink tongue appeared to lick a fleck of salt from her lip, reminding him that his tongue had swept across that same slightly-pouty lip not two hours ago.
“What did my sister do around here, anyway?”
“For fun?” He tore his eyes away from her mouth.
His omelet sat before him, still untouched, and he could tell at a glance that the steak was under-seasoned and tough.
He should have asked for it rare, but the thought of raw meat didn’t appeal to him now.
“She did some charity planning with my mother, went on walks.” He stabbed a piece of meat, eying it critically.
“She tried to befriend some people in town but you can imagine how that went.”
She looked chastened. Cal quickly moved on.
“Odessa tried to involve her with some of her design work, but mostly she just spent a lot of time with Ben.”
“Did she go to the Running of the Deer festival?”
“Initially. Ben sent her home early because he thought it might upset her.” Which was an overly generous assessment of his capacity for mercy; it was far likelier that he hadn’t wanted their father taking the matter of her correction into his own hands when he discovered her disdain for taking on a position of subservience during her brief tenure at Ravensgate.
(That’s frighteningly draconian, even for a lawyer)
“Did Ben—would he ever hurt my sister?”
Again, he felt that spark of suspicion, honed by years of picking apart minor details, sifting through them like an old prospector panning for inconsistencies. This line of questioning was far too targeted. Someone had primed her with information.
“I never saw him raise a hand against her. Her leaving wrecked him.”
More half-truths. They felt like lies. She clearly thought so.
“He’s . . . intense.” Nadine hazarded another look at him.
“Yes.” The light grey irises of her eyes were darker when she tipped her head at certain angles, just a few precarious shades away from navy. “I’ve been told we all are.”
He shouldn’t have brought her here. It was wrong to toy with her like this, knowing her fate hung suspended over her throat like a hovering sword. If his family knew what he intended for her, they wouldn’t even bother waiting out the festival.
Originally, he had merely intended to gauge the depths of her knowledge and have some fun doing it. But this was a far cry from the brutal follow-through that came from a passion that overflowed like blood from a sliced artery. He was as close to relaxed as he had ever been.
The paragon of all of his infinitely possible selves.
She slid her plate around with a soft scraping sound as she considered her next question. “You were going to kiss me at the wedding.”
Cal felt his mouth twitch at the memory. “That’s not a question.”
“Why then?”
Rather than the challenge she intended, it came out sounding like a plea. “Because you looked so scared and lost,” Cal said, picking up his steak knife. “Like a bird in a cage. And all that nervous fluttering you were doing made me wonder what you’d be like in bed.”
Her warped look of shock reflected back at him from the mirrored surface of the blade.
She was too discomfited to bother closing her mouth or composing her face, and he found that he vastly preferred her this way: out in the open, with nothing to shield the beating of her innermost heart or her far-too-honest face.
“You looked trapped,” he continued, rotating the knife in his fingers.
“Unhappy. But you don’t look quite as trapped now.
That just makes me think you need the bars, though.
Some women do.” When he looked at her this time, he made it deliberate.
She had gone utterly still. “Does it scare you, Nadine? How badly you want it? Having control taken from you again and again, while someone tells you to do things you can pretend you don’t want to do? ”
When he set the knife down with a quiet clink, she jumped like a hare.
“Maybe,” he said, letting out a steeled breath, “I wanted you to pretend with me.”
“How dare you,” she said, in a way that was quite at odds with her scandalized declaration.