27 #2
“You have no evidence.” I stop thinking and crush the poisonous purple flower against my gaping wound.
First it turns to dust. Then it burns. Nothing like those explosions of transformations, or even the wicked heat of the silver.
Rather, it feels like a grenade exploding in my flesh and bones.
I cry out, slamming down onto my knees. The wolfsbane gnaws through my hand.
Deeper, deeper. It flays me from the inside out.
I grab my wrist and swallow another scream.
Before this moment, I did not know true pain.
Pale skin withers into gray ash. Into cinders. My blood blackens.
Calix curses and runs for me, his claws and fangs vanishing as he grabs me and scoops me up into his arms. “Fucking idiot,” he hisses.
But he hurries me into an adjacent restroom and sets me on the edge of an ornately carved whalebone sink.
Water splashes from the faucet, but if he’s washing my hand, I don’t feel it.
I don’t feel anything but the hot grip of death.
“We have minutes,” he says, low and gruff, “before someone comes after us. Are you out of your mind?”
“You were… going to expose me.”
“That wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as this .” He swats away my healthy hand, forcing the injured one beneath the faucet. Water trickles through the hole in my hand. Feels like ice on a summer sidewalk.
“Hurts,” I say.
His jaw clenches and unclenches so many times that I begin to count the movements just to stay awake. Stay alive. The world spins, a nauseating carousel where the roof becomes the floor, and the floor becomes the wall.
“Breathe,” he commands.
“Trying.”
“Fuck,” he says. “That really was your big plan? Steal the wolfsbane and poison Evie in the middle of the throne room? As long as she’s dead, who cares if you are too?
” He grabs a cloth from the counter and swipes it on my palm.
Rubs the wound until it begins to bleed anew.
Red again, not black. My head swims further.
I clutch Calix’s shoulder for support. He sighs, deflating beneath my touch.
“Idiot,” he murmurs.
“Yes,” I whisper, and the truth spills from my lips in a haze of torment. “I hadn’t… hadn’t thought about how I would use it. After she stabbed me, and I saw her brother… I know they did it, Calix. I know it. And I’m so tired of waiting, of living here afraid. I saw the wolfsbane and reacted.”
His eyes harden. “You’ve not been transforming enough.”
“I have.”
“Your emotions are—”
“She died , Calix,” I say. “She died, and I’m… I’m a monster.”
A moment of silence stretches between us as he stanches my wound with quick, efficient movements. He rips off a sleeve of his shirt—almost identical to the one I’m still wearing—and presses it against my hand, absorbing as much of the blood as he can. It won’t stop bleeding.
Minutes pass before, in a low, pained voice, he asks, “Why are you doing this?”
I shut my eyes, burying my head in his shoulder because there’s nowhere else to hide. There’s nowhere else to go. He tenses but doesn’t release me. “I miss her, and if I can just figure out who murdered her—”
“It won’t bring her back.”
I withdraw an inch, glaring up at him. A black lock of hair falls over his eye, and I have half a mind to brush it away. Or rip it from his scalp. “ No , but—”
“Vanessa.” He presses his forehead to mine, his golden gaze burning again. “It won’t bring her back.”
I swallow and wait for a sob to wrench from my throat.
But the tears—they don’t flow. They still won’t come.
I turn away from him, and Calix retreats a tentative step.
Though he doesn’t stop washing and rinsing my hand.
Scrubbing a bar of lavender soap on my skin.
More rinsing. Surely, he wouldn’t care about my injury if he was currently measuring the rope for my noose.
“Calix?”
“Yes?” he murmurs.
“Are… are you turning me in?”
He doesn’t answer, cleaning my hand over and over. Again and again. Silence stretches once more, cold and taut, dousing the flames still rippling through my body. Maybe he will turn me in, then. Maybe I’m a dead woman walking.
“Have you heard the story of my uncle?” he asks abruptly.
I shake my head, unsure what this has to do with anything.
“He raised me. My mother—the blood traitor—she murdered her human lover, my father, in order to protect me. It was why Queen Sybil agreed to take me in, but my aunt never wanted anything to do with me. From my birth onward, she’s never looked at me for more than a few moments.
The court says I look like… like her sister. ”
I listen with rapt attention. Not quite understanding but fascinated anyway.
I’ve never heard him speak like this before, with that hint of vulnerability.
Never heard him speak this much before, ever.
And it’s hard to picture his words. Harder to picture him like that at all—small and ostracized and afraid.
The child he was before circumstance forced him to become bigger, stronger, than the rest of the court to survive.
“Queen Sybil’s husband, King Léo Severi, was a general before he mated with my aunt. He was a stern, strict man, but… he was the only one who cared for me. ‘It was the agreement,’ he always said. ‘It would be wrong to abandon a child. Against pack order, court laws, and werewolf loyalty.’”
“He sounds a lot like you.”
Calix manages a small grin, and his cheek dimples. I stare at the sight.
“He raised Sinclair and me as brothers. He taught me to fight, to be better than the weak pup the court expected from my heritage. Half of human-born wolves die before birth. But Uncle Léo said my survival was proof I could be more than my genetics. He said my mother’s stain of treachery had not bled into me.
He believed in me when I only had Sinclair.
For years there was just me and Sin and the king. ”
The story builds, and the more Calix speaks, the more the wound in his chest seems to rip open. It becomes palpable—his pain, his grief.
I press my healthy hand to his chest, and his gaze snaps to mine. He holds my wrist with a gentle touch, calloused fingers brushing over my pulse.
“He died twelve years ago,” Calix says. “Shot near the beach. The bullet grazed his heart.”
My earlier insult echoes around us. You’ve never cared about anyone other than yourself, have you? And I realize just how wrong I’ve been. I glance up at Calix. His yellow eyes narrow with the horror of the memory. “I’m sorry,” I murmur—and I mean it.
Calix nods. “He didn’t die then. Werewolves can survive mortal deaths.
He dug the bullet out. The injury closed.
It seemed simple. Easy. He came home when he couldn’t find the hunter—decided it was some human playing around with firearms as they are so known to do.
Sin was gone, attending an overseas mating ceremony with the queen, so I tended to the wound.
Cleaned it, though it didn’t seem to need much,” he says.
“It looked perfectly healed.” His brows knot.
His eyes shut, as if he can’t bear to relive what comes next.
My fingers contract over his heart. I’m not sure I can bear it either.
“When I woke the next morning, I found the king decayed in his bed. Burned to a char from the inside out. Blackened veins, bloody eyes, and organs spilling from his mouth.” Calix holds me harder.
Tighter. I let him. God knows he needs it.
Blood. So much blood and death in this fucking court. I bite down on my tongue.
“Wolfsbane,” Calix explains with a subtle shake as he returns to inspecting my wound.
“The bullet was laced with it. If not cleaned properly and immediately, it burrows. It becomes impossible to spot until… until it’s too late.
I had to bring his body to the Wolf Queen when she returned.
I had to explain my failure. Most in this castle still think it’s my fault.
The despicable deed of a blood traitor’s son. ”
And my heart—it shatters for him. For the blame he’s placed on himself for years. He was so young. So alone. “It wasn’t your fault, Calix.”
He exhales a humorless laugh. “You would say that. You don’t understand chain reactions. Consequences. If you did, you wouldn’t be so focused on who murdered your friend.”
You wouldn’t be so focused on who murdered your friend.
The words sound cold, jarring, after the quiet pain of his grief. They shatter whatever truce we might’ve built between us.
Shoving him away, I leap off the sink, but my legs are jelly, and they waver like a flag caught in a strong breeze. Calix throws one of my arms over his shoulders and anchors me to his side. Though I want to shrug away from him, I can’t stand on my own.
“Can you not show one ounce of sympathy?” I snap instead. “Why are you always such a… an asshole ?”
“All this,” he begins, with a gesture to the tiled bathroom, the blue waters trickling from the sink, and the siren mosaics on the walls swimming forward and backward, “it’s not a joke. Physical training, alchemy, the history lessons… They aren’t toys. They’re weapons, Vanessa. They’re tools .”
He studies my hand once more, holding it beneath the moonlight, and shudders out a resigned breath. “You should wake in the morning. I think—I think I got it all.”
“If you let me,” I remind him quietly. That’s strike three, Hart.
He nods. “If I let you.”
“Which you…”
“Vanessa,” he pleads, a growl hardening his voice. “Look at me.”
I do. I can’t not look at him.
He closes my palm into a fist. “You can wear pretty dresses and flaunt your beauty and flirt with my cousin all you want, but none of that is going to bring you closure. You’re not using your tools.”
“I’m learning to shift,” I protest. “I can grow my claws in less than a minute. When I find out who—”