Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Sienna
I am barely keeping it together.
We are in Lucas’s office. I’m on the leather couch, still wearing his shirt, while he is behind his desk. The morning sun is up well over the trees outside, slanting hard across the floor between us. The screen on the wall blinks awake and shows us Alpha Darius’s study at Moonvale.
Whatever he and Violet were doing on a quiet Sunday, they have been pulled into this call with no warning.
Darius is dressed, wearing black trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves already rolled to the elbow.
He holds a coffee in one hand. He looks like a man who has been awake for hours and is ready for another meeting.
Violet, on the other hand, is in flannel pajamas with a shawl pulled around her shoulders and her hair in a sleep-tangled knot. There is a pillow crease running along her cheekbone that she probably has not noticed yet. The mug in her hand is the size of a soup bowl.
“Sienna.” Her voice is gravelly. “It’s Sunday. What’s wrong? Why are you—”
She stops. She squints at the camera and rubs an eye with the heel of her hand.
“What are you wearing?”
I open my mouth.
“Is that—” She leans toward the camera. The shawl slips off one shoulder. “Sienna, is that Lucas’s shirt?”
The bond pulls taut. Lucas, across the room, hears the question but does not look up from the desk. His knuckles have gone white on the armrests of his chair.
“Yes.” I let out a deep breath. “He marked me.”
Violet’s mug freezes halfway to her mouth. Darius goes very still.
“Sienna—”
“There’s more.” My voice is shaking now, and I do my best to steady it. “I need your help. Is your mother around?”
“She’s upstairs. Hold on.” Violet is already pushing back her chair, the shawl bunched in one fist, the mug set down somewhere off screen with a clatter, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Mom! Mom, come down! You need to come down here, now!”
A few years ago, Violet wouldn’t have been caught dead screaming for her mother like this. But then, she had been under the impression that her mother hated her. How things have changed.
Darius looks at me through the camera. Then, his eyes track sideways to Lucas at the desk. He sighs, sipping his coffee and eyeing Lucas warily. I bury my head in my hands.
“You marked her.”
“Yes.”
“After you put my best strategist through hell and convinced her she was nothing to you.”
“Darius.” His name comes out of my mouth sharper than it should. “Not now.”
He looks at me. Whatever he sees in my face holds him off, but only just. He sits back in his chair and folds his arms. “Fine. But this conversation isn’t done.”
“It isn’t. I know.”
There are footsteps approaching. Violet comes back into frame towing her mother behind her.
Lillian is in a cream nightgown with a robe pulled over the top of it and her hair pinned at the nape of her neck.
Her movements are unhurried. Whatever Violet may have said to her on the way down the stairs, Lillian came at her own pace.
She lowers herself into the chair Violet vacated. Her gaze finds me through the camera.
“Sienna.” Her voice is even. “What is it?”
“Lillian.” My throat closes for a beat. “I’m sorry to pull you out of bed. I need your help.”
“Tell me.”
“What do you know about magic?”
Her eyes sharpen. There’s a twitch at the corner of her mouth, a slight tilt of her head. She has been asked this question before in places she did not enjoy.
“Depends on what you mean.”
“Anything.” My voice steadies. “Whatever you have.”
Several seconds pass while she studies me.
“Back in the community, before it was destroyed, there were two practicing hybrids. One of them was older than me. She taught me a little. Not enough to do much with.” Her hand has found her daughter’s shoulder where Violet has come to perch on the arm of her chair.
“Lately, with all my traveling, I’ve taken an interest. I have met witches in three different countries. Asked them questions.”
“Curses.” My voice comes out hoarser than I want. “What do you know about curses, specifically?”
Her gaze sharpens further. “What kind of curse, Sienna?”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I press my lips together and try a different angle. Generational. The word stops at the back of my teeth. Bloodline. The same. Witch. Each one bunches up against the iron bar that wasn’t there ten seconds ago, along with the word marked.
My hand lifts. Thumb and finger drag across my lips, pinch them shut, then turn the imaginary key.
Violet’s hand flies to her mouth.
Lillian’s expression has not changed, except that her eyes are like flint. “A curse.” Her voice drops half an octave. “One you cannot speak about.”
“I can’t answer that.”
She looks at me. I look back. There is a pause as I watch her brain work.
“Darius.” My voice comes out clipped. “I think I should make a will. I’d like to leave everything to my parents.”
The room on the other side of the screen goes silent.
Darius’s brow furrows. “Sienna? What the hell…”
Violet has pressed both her hands flat against her thighs, still trying to follow.
But Lillian gets there. I see when the comprehension lands. Her jaw tightens, and her tone does not soften.
“You’re cursed.”
My eyes close. The relief that drops through me is so heavy, I almost slide forward off the couch. She has said the word for me. The thing I could not put into the air is in the air now, and someone else carried it there.
“How long?” Lillian asks.
I open my mouth and can’t answer again. Frustration fills me.
“When do you want to make the will?”
“Within a year,” I whisper.
Her head turns toward the corner of her screen where she can see Lucas at his desk.
“Do you also need a will, Alpha Steele?”
He shakes his head once.
“Is this desire to make a will recent?” Lillian asks me slowly.
I nod jerkily. I reach out and touch my neck where the mating mark is. “Last night.”
I glance at Lucas. He is watching me, and I can see admiration in his eyes.
Lillian’s gaze drops to my throat. The shirt slipped a little when I leaned forward, and I have not bothered to fix it. She sees the mating mark when I crane my head to the left.
“A curse activated upon receiving a mating mark.”
Darius’s jaw is tense, and he looks at Lucas. “You knew?”
Lucas just sighs.
Violet’s eyes are bright with sudden tears. “Is there a way to break it?”
“No.”
The word comes out of me without resistance. I blink. My mouth opens again.
“It’s a generational curse on Lucas’s bloodline,” I say carefully, testing each word as it comes. “A witch laid it more than a hundred years ago. There are no records left. We don’t know how—”
I stop. The words are coming out. The damn words are coming out!
“Clever woman.” Lucas’s voice is low.
He has not moved from the desk. There is heat along with pride underneath the quiet tone, heat that I can feel through our bond. It goes through me at the wrong angle and lights up at the base of my spine.
My eyes drop, and I bite my lip before my face can tell on me.
“You worked the seam,” Lillian says. “The curse won’t let you raise the topic. Once it’s named, you can talk around it. Useful.”
“Apparently.”
She sits back. Her hand has not left Violet’s shoulder. Her thumb is moving in a small, steady circle, and that is the only soft thing about her.
“Tell me the story. From the start.”
Lucas sits back in his desk chair. He talks about his great-great-grandfather.
The witch. The baby. The murder. The curse the witch built as she was dying, the wording she chose, the bond becoming the punishment.
The progression of it on the body. The marks at the wrists and ankles.
How long it takes to kill. He tells the story the way a man delivers news he has been carrying inside himself for so long that he is tired of it.
When he finishes, Lillian is quiet while she thinks. “That sounds like blood magic.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“Meaning it is the most binding kind there is. Cast with the witch’s own blood and life force, anchored into the bloodline of the man who wronged her.
That sort of magical working can only be unmade by someone of that witch’s blood willing to do so, or by another witch more powerful than the one who cast it. ”
Violet leans forward. “Hybrids are powerful.”
Lillian shakes her head. “Hybrids have potential. Most of us never develop it or even care to. You weren’t raised in it, Violet.
Nobody taught you workings as a child. The hybrids in our community who could do real magic learned it from their mothers, and their mothers learned it from theirs.
The rest of us had physical strength and a few small workings, and that was the extent of it.
Nowhere near advanced enough for something like this. I’m certainly not powerful enough.”
My fingers rub my forehead. “So, what can we do?”
“You need a witch.”
The word lands in the room like a coin dropped on a stone floor.
“There aren’t any witches in Moonvale territory,” Lillian goes on. “Used to be. Not anymore. But there should be a few in Silvercrest. They prefer human towns, smaller ones, places where they can blend in. Silvercrest has more of those than we do.”
Lucas has been motionless at the desk. Now, his elbows find the wood as he leans forward. “I’ll have my people ask in every human settlement we border. Quietly.”
“Be careful.” Lillian holds his gaze through the screen.
“The more powerful the witch, the harder she will be to find. The good ones do not announce themselves. The ones who do announce themselves are usually charlatans, or weak, or both. You will get a lot of false leads before you find a real one.”
“Understood.”
Violet sets her chin the way she does when she is about to pick a fight with her mate. “Mom and I will come help you.”
Darius doesn’t move. “No,” he says calmly, sipping his coffee.
She doesn’t look at him. “I am not asking.”
“Violet.”