TWELVE
The dining room was eerily quiet, save for the soft clinking of silverware against delicate porcelain plates.
The long table made of a dark wood stretched out, separating Silas and Amelia from his mother, sitting at opposite ends.
The skylight above let in the soft glow of the moon.
The lamps had been lit, sending varying shadows across the table, lending an otherworldly air to the room.
The silence was uncomfortable and had been since Silas’ mother had sauntered in.
Veralind Finley, the Lady of the estate, sat at the head of the table, her presence alone enough to make the vast space feel small and suffocating.
White-haired and dull-eyed, his mother was draped in deep indigo robes that were craftily embroidered with arcane symbols.
She had floated into the room, carrying herself like a woman who had seen more than she would ever say.
A ring adorned the middle finger of her pale left hand, a glittering onyx stone sitting in its centre, while her other hand idly stirred at the bowl of steaming broth before her. Her icy blue eyes had not met his once since entering.
It had been a while since they had last seen each other, and though it was expected, his spirit still tied itself up into knots that she hadn’t acknowledged his presence in their ancestral home.
Amelia sat next to him, casting him wary, awkward glances while she fiddled with a piece of bread that the staff had laid before her.
Silas sighed deeply, finally breaking the silence. “Mother.”
“Silas,” she replied, eyes not straying from her food while she addressed him coldly. Then, to his surprise, her eyes snapped up, but not to look at her son. No, her steely gaze flicked right to Amelia. “You must be Amelia Winslow?”
Amelia quickly swallowed her bite of bread with a cough. “I must be,” she responded, placing the remainder of her bread down.
“Silas has told me about you over the years,” Veralind said ominously. His hand clenched atop the table, silently begging that she keep her mouth shut. He couldn’t even recall what he had told his mother about Amelia, but he knew he wouldn’t want it repeated.
Amelia side-eyed him briefly. “Is that right?”
Veralind smiled knowingly, nothing warm behind the smile.
It was alarmingly cool, making the air in the room feel frigid even as the fireplace flared merrily near them.
His mother finally slid her eyes to Silas, the smile deepening.
He still couldn’t relate this person before him to the mother he had used to know when his father had been alive.
He had memories of warmth and love, of a singing voice and bright eyes that had adored Silas.
It was like looking at someone with the ache of knowing that love had used to be there, only to be replaced by something harsher, a husk he no longer understood.
“Yes,” his mother said, looking back to Amelia, “he once visited me quite regularly and would regale me with tales about you. Of course, he has been absent more often than present of late, so I fear I’m out of the loop.
” Her smile was calculated as she stared Amelia down.
“Tell me, have you stopped loathing my son enough to start a relationship with him?”
Silas’ eyes fell shut.
Amelia sputtered nonsensically next to him.
He opened his eyes to glare at his mother, who looked smugly back at him.
“Shall I expect grandchildren?”
“Mother!”
“No!”
They both protested at the same time, Amelia’s voice shrill with mortification.
Veralind sighed as though losing her patience, tapping her fingers against the table. She lifted her spoon with a deliberate precision. “Fine then. What has you crawling back here, dear son, into my home after so long?”
“Is it not his home, too, Veralind?” Amelia said.
Silas looked to her, finding Amelia with a cold glare of her own, for once not directed at him.
His mother tutted, fixing her with an unimpressed stare. “Silas has his own home, far away from here, so as to avoid me at every possible moment. And you will not address me so informally in my home.”
A sharp feeling stabbed in his abdomen. Anger .
He didn’t know how, but he knew the feeling was not his own. It was different, sharper, more concentrated.
Silas whipped his head around, finding a blush creeping into Amelia’s cheeks, a familiar anger tightening her features. Her lips parted, and he shot his hand out, gripping at her thigh beneath the table.
Amelia flinched, knee jerking under his tight grip. Her eyes found his and he silently warned her. Indecision passed over her face, but he pressed his fingers in tighter. She breathed in slowly, swallowed, and faced forwards without a word.
He slid his hand away slowly, turning to face his mother with a sharp, fortifying exhale. “Mother—”
“Have you heard?” she said conversationally, like she hadn’t just admonished a guest in her house.
“The noticeboards this morning warned of a strange anomaly near the borders. It seems the Rift has expanded its territory by several metres in the past few days alone. The border patrols are quite concerned.”
He shifted uneasily.
She arched a manicured eyebrow. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”
An irritated sigh left him. “We’re not here to discuss that, but we wanted to ask you…about pair bonding.”
The spoon froze halfway to her lips.
For an extended moment, the only sound in the room was the crackling fire and the wind whistling against the darkened windowpanes.
Slowly, Veralind set her spoon down, folding her hands over each other atop the table. She pierced him with the same blue eyes he had inherited from her. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” Silas said plainly. “We want to ask what you know, and if the bond can be disabled?”
Veralind glanced between them, eyes narrowing. Her chest rose and fell quicker, beginning to breathe unsteadily. He felt a coil of unease.
“Why?” she hissed. “You have never been interested in my research before.”
“I joined Winslow and her team in the Rift this week,” he said, not missing the way darkness crept into her eyes, “and we made a discovery. However, that discovery has seemed to forge a bond between us that we would like to sever.”
Veralind inhaled sharply before reaching for a handsome goblet, swallowing the contents quickly, and setting it back down roughly. She glared at Silas. “Do you have any idea what you’re asking?”
He felt his patience thinning. “Mother, if you know something—”
“We wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” Amelia implored.
“Important?” Veralind said, voice softer but no less sharp as she set her gaze on Amelia. “If you have forged a true pair bond, you have triggered something more important than you could possibly fathom.”
Amelia leaned forwards on the table, impatience rolling off her. “You know something about how to break it, but you’ll refuse to tell us out of spite, won’t you?”
Veralind’s expression darkened quickly. A pale, ringed hand slammed against the table, the sharp cracking sound echoing around them. Something ominous and cold curled into the air.
Silas shifted uncomfortably. “If you tell us what you know, we’ll explain how it happened,” he said, an appeal to her scientific curiosity.
The silence that followed was deafening, then she rose from her chair, the wood scraping against polished floors. Her hands braced against the table as she glanced between them. Her head shook. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
Then she was moving with quick steps for the exit. A butler opened the door, but Silas stood abruptly before she could leave.
“Mother!”
She halted at the threshold but refused to turn and face him.
His fingers curled in towards his palms. “This is dangerous for us,” he pleaded. “We need to know how to break the bond.”
Veralind turned slowly, sweeping her gaze between them. For a brief second, Silas swore he saw something akin to fear passing across her face. Just as quickly, it was gone. Masked.
Silas hadn’t realised Amelia was standing beside him until her arm brushed his.
“Why won’t you help us?” she asked, voice unusually small.
Veralind looked at them coldly. “Because some things were never meant to be undone.” With one sharp turn, her back faced them before she was rounding the corner and out of sight.
Silas lay on his back, staring at the canopy of his bed, vision blurring.
He unblinkingly replayed the conversation at supper.
He had said little to Amelia afterwards, feeling responsible for their predicament.
He left her at the door to her room before shutting himself away across the hall, promising to return before midnight to discuss how they would approach the pull.
He needed a moment to decompress, to let it sink in that his mother had so little love for him that she would subject them to a fate of being riddled with unstable magic. She would let him be tied to someone who hated him.
Because she knew.
The tales of the ‘ irritating Winslow girl ’ were obvious in the way he had talked nonstop about her. A mother always knew, as she had once said to him, and he believed that now, having witnessed her shrewd gaze flitting between them.
She knew .
Silas had been taken by Amelia for a long time.
It had been obvious to him for years, in the way he longed for her presence, looked forwards to conferences and debates that included her, in the way his heart jumped at the sight of her.
Silas had known her for nine years and had identified how he felt for perhaps eight and a half. He was just very good at hiding it.
But his mother knew . And she would still seal his fate to be tethered to Amelia, against her will. Even if he craved her presence, he would never wish to force it.
Silas spent those eight and half years, having accepted his feelings, finding a way to accept that Amelia felt the opposite. He had played into it in the way he would verbally and intellectually spar with her at every opportunity.
He had noticed a need for it when they were younger.
Amelia, brilliant and quick-witted, seemed like she had tried to make herself smaller, fitting into some sort of mould which she had the strange notion she needed to succumb to.
The only thing that brought her out of that shell, that forced her brilliance to the surface? Fighting with her.
It ignited a spark, bringing her to life. It was simultaneously what made Silas fall in love with her, while Amelia slowly loathed him.
He would never say that it hadn’t been worth it.
Now they were tied together, forced to endure pain at the hour of midnight, and who knew what else.
Possibly being privy to her feelings, if the slice of her anger Silas had felt at supper were any indication.
His stomach clenched with frustration to think she might be afraid or feeling caged by this bond to him.
He would break it in a heartbeat, even if it meant he might never see her again, just so she could be free.
Time passed as he stewed in his melancholy, and he didn’t know how, but eventually, Silas fell into an uneasy slumber.
Pain .
It tore at every cell that made up his body and soul, and Silas screamed without sound as his understanding of the space around him became meaningless.
A million shards of glass sliced at him, hot pokers branded every inch of him, and then—
His feet slammed into solid ground, and he groaned with discomfort as a body pressed flush against him, accompanied by a startled, feminine sound.
Silas’ arms instinctually wrapped around her, but the sudden shift from lying down asleep to standing awake in the middle of a dark hall, had him lurching, feet stumbling.
Disoriented, they started to fall. He twisted mid-air, afraid to land on her, but they careened into the wall instead. His head struck the wood painfully before landing flat on his back, holding Amelia to his chest.
“Fuck,” he groaned, head throbbing.
Amelia uttered a low moan of discomfort, her breath warm against his collarbone. She pushed herself up, two hands sitting flat against his chest. Squinting in the darkness, he could only just see her. Her hair was loose again, falling around her like a curtain and obscuring her face.
“You…” she breathed out unevenly, “…were supposed to come find me before it happened.”
Silas sighed deeply. “I fell asleep, I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright, so did I,” she groaned. “That sucked .”
He was about to agree, but his body froze instead, awareness skittering over him.
Amelia’s legs sat snugly on either side of his hips, an intimate position that Silas could never have imagined would occur with her. An intense warmth sat between them.
He couldn’t see her clothing, but his hands were gripping at her hips, thumbs pressing into the delicate flare of her hip bone, and his forearms…they brushed against the unmistakable soft warmth of bare thigh.
She shifted against him, and Silas pressed his eyes closed, holding in his groan. He hurriedly lifted her and rolled, depositing her on the cold flooring beside him.
Silas sat, rubbing a hand over his face with a deep breath.
After a beat of silence, he faced her. She hugged her knees to her chest, chin resting atop them, eyes on him. Vision adjusting to the dark, he could see she was, in fact, not wearing pants at all as he’d feared. He had never seen her bare legs before, and he felt unworthy of seeing them now.
“You alright?” he asked softly, forcing his gaze away from the slope of her calf muscle.
She bobbed her head on top of her knee.
Silence fell again, their eyes on each other in the dim light.
It felt like something passed between them, his heart still racing.
In that moment, Silas considered offering up his entire wealth to know what was running through her brain, but it was in his scrutiny that he noticed she had begun to shiver.
He stood and offered to help her up.
Silas watched with fascination as she eyed his hand, as though debating whether to accept it. She reached out, and he felt a moment of triumph, like he’d won some valuable prize as he gripped at her fingers and pulled her to stand.
He let her go and they shifted towards their own rooms.
“I don’t care what mother says,” he said, “we’ll find the answers. They’ll be in this house somewhere.” Amelia nodded, keeping uncharacteristically quiet. “I have a lab in the city, too, so we can start our experiments tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she agreed quietly, arms hugging around her middle.
He swallowed, hating how small and vulnerable she looked. Silas was used to her grandiose personality, her fierce intelligence and willingness to display that before him.
“Okay,” he said.
They held eyes for a lingering moment, before shutting themselves away in their rooms.