Chapter 1 #3
Loathing frothed in my blood, and I clung to it, letting it shine brightly in my gaze.
He had no right to me anymore.
But through that ill feeling, I slowly realized that at the mere mention of Danne’s name, all the Crowthers, every single one of them, had bristled.
My gaze slid to Ferne, where she crouched near Caidan.
She’d stopped in the middle of searching for the zipper on the leather medicine bag, and I watched her hands fist, and the knuckles burn white.
The anger sparking in the air was no longer directed at me but at Danne Pellan. And a flash of another emotion, not quite pity, but some other feeling that confused them. That they should feel anything else but contempt for me.
Valarie snapped that moment in half like breaking a dead branch across the knee. “Why did Danne Pellan steal you?”
Refusing to answer, I petulantly clamped my mouth shut and crossed my arms over my chest, shifting my weight to one hip.
“He exchanged you with a changeling. I find it hard to believe someone like Danne Pellan could come up with such an elaborate plan on his own.”
“Wychthorn,” Graysen murmured.
I arched a brow at him, silently communicating that he was the one who had told me not to say a word.
He arched a brow back as if saying—You may speak.
“He discovered my secret,” I finally shared, and even I was surprised at how steady my voice sounded.
Danne had learned the truth, but only because Silas Boon had let enough of it slip. Instead of delivering me into Silas’s hands, he’d double-crossed the other man, hoping if he gave me to his father, it would be enough to be forgiven for stealing from the Horned Gods.
“Do all the Pellans know?” Valarie asked. And that was the right question because I was sure it could seriously shift their plans for me. If anyone, like the Pellans, discovered my truth and revealed I had a wyrm living inside of me, the Horned Gods would claim me and kill every single Wychthorn.
And I was beginning to suspect, with the threatening message of Zrenyth’s magic cinched around my neck, the Crowthers needed something else from my father.
I wasn’t sure if the Pellans knew what Danne had discovered.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said airily.
I heard a breath sucked in and caught Graysen tipping his head to the ceiling, briefly closing his eyes as if to say—here we go again.
They might have captured me, but I wasn’t going to go easy on them.
Graysen’s gaze slid sideways as he warned, “Wychthorn.”
I slipped a fingertip beneath Zrenyth’s cord. “It’s really hard to think with this thing around my neck.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. But there was some other feeling, not on his expression, but as if his entire body exhaled in relief at my biting response.
“Silas Boon is the one behind it all,” Graysen answered for me, still holding my gaze.
“We couldn’t find anything of worth about him, other than Danne owed him a debt,” I heard Caidan say.
Surprise washed through me. They’d already known about Silas?
I tore myself free from Graysen’s stare to watch Caidan crouch beside Ferne, zipping up the medicine bag and taking her elbow, urging her to sit down on the couch.
He scooped up the bag, carrying it back toward the filing cabinet.
“Is he working for the Pellans? Someone else?” Valarie asked, not Caidan, but me.
I shrugged lightly as if I didn’t know.
Graysen’s heavy attention pressed into my skin. I met his dark gaze and watched his eyes become shrewd. He tilted his head slightly as he considered me, and he ran his tongue along the front of his teeth.
Your lies taste sweet like honey.
He knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth.
Last night there was one thing that I hadn’t shared with him. I’d told him about Silas Boon’s involvement with Danne. However, I hadn’t told him I knew that the warriors in the catacombs were the Children of the Harbinger and that Silas Boon was part of it all.
And yet, Graysen didn’t push for an answer.
“Either way,” I answered Valarie, “the Pellans will know by now that Danne is missing. His family will want answers and retribution.”
“Let them demand it.” Graysen took a step toward me, and I held my place, refusing to allow him to see me intimidated. “They came between me and you. Danne dared to take what was mine. The Alverac protects my actions in relation to Danne.”
He meant Danne’s death. And with those words, he’d insinuated to his family that he was the one who ended Danne.
But that wasn’t true at all. Because I’d killed Danne.
So easily too.
A rapid knock and a scraping sound of wood on stone quickly followed as the door to the Crowthers’ family room opened.
A young woman entered. Her crisp and somewhat old-fashioned servant’s uniform was black with a white-trimmed collar, belt, and cuffs.
Her footsteps were silent as she approached the Crowther twins.
Valarie addressed the servant. “Penn?”
Penn looked to be about Graysen’s age. She held her hands stiffly at her sides and spoke in a soft voice. “Byron Wychthorn is here.”
My heart exploded into a rapid beat against my ribs. Euphoria blazed through my veins. My father was here!
The corners of Valarie’s mouth slowly curled downward. “The Wychthorns still think she’s dead.”
Someone cleared his throat before speaking. “No. No, they don’t.”
Valarie, along with every single person in the room, turned toward Caidan, who slid the filing cabinet drawer shut with a metallic, jarring clank.
He straightened and approached his aunt with heavy footsteps. The burn marks on his face had receded to a reddened state with small blisters.
“What did you do?” she asked in her bitter, raspy voice.
A grating noise resounded in the quiet as Caidan’s booted feet scuffed against the stone as he widened his stance. “I informed them a few hours ago that Nelle was still alive.”
I shot him an inquisitive glance. One that he caught and blatantly ignored. Had he done it for my sister? For Evvie?
“Why would you do that?” Valarie snapped. “It was to our advantage to use this knowledge—”
“Valarie,” interrupted Varen. “How are we to break Byron if he thinks his daughter is dead?”
“I’d have liked his suffering to be a little longer.”
“She’s here with us. I’m sure that is suffering enough,” Caidan muttered under his breath.
Varen frowned at his son but carried on speaking to his sister. “Besides, in due time, he would have followed protocol, and the autopsy would have revealed the truth of the changeling.”
With a vexed sigh, Valarie agreed but disliked it.
Penn gestured behind her. “Byron Wychthorn’s at the front door, demanding to be let in.”
Please, please, please—I silently begged.
I didn’t care to speak with the Head of Great House Wychthorn, or for him to find an impossible way through this situation. I just wanted my father. For him to fold his arms around me and hug me tight. Hold me as he did when he found me confined within the tithe prison.
“Let him in,” Varen ordered.
Penn inclined her head, turned on her heel, and left.
“We need Byron to know his daughter’s alive and that she’s with us. It doesn’t matter if it’s today or tomorrow when he learns the truth.” Varen told his sister.
And stupidly, I felt grateful to these Crowthers.
I was going to see my father.
His next words crushed my fragile hope. “As Head of Great House Wychthorn, he has every right to come here. But he has absolutely no authority over us regarding his daughter. He can demand to be let in, and we will let him. But he’ll never be able to see her or speak with her unless we allow him to. And tonight isn’t the night for that.”
A monstrous feeling of despair and desperation tangled within me. I wanted to scream. I wanted to sob. Of course, they’d never let me speak to my father.
But the door was ajar.
And so far, no one besides myself had noticed.
Valarie and her twin brother shared a look—a silent communication, a shared twin-link, perhaps.
“It’s moving faster than we anticipated,” she said.
“Then we move faster,” he replied.
She turned to Kenton, her skirt catching around her shins as the decision settled. “Take her to the holding cells beneath the Keep. Lock her away until we have need of her.”
The words holding cells echoed in my mind. A place I imagined being cold and dank, with little to no light. I had barely anything left of me and, in that nightmare place beneath the fortress, my paralyzing fear of the dark would be my end.
Some spineless, pitiful part of me trembled.
It whispered from me. “Dungeon, you mean.”
“No.” It was more snarl than a word.
Frigid silence thickened in the room as everyone’s gaze sliced to Graysen.
Graysen pushed his shoulders back and walked closer to his aunt. There was a predator nature about his stride.
Kenton shoved off the table to flank his brother at a polite distance, and Caidan shifted sideways to take the other.
Everyone was paying attention to Graysen.
Not to me.
If I could get to my father…
Move, move, move!—I shrieked at myself. Adrenaline pumped through my heart, my veins, my blood.
“She can’t go anywhere, can’t do any more damage without her wyrm,” I heard him tell them all as I stealthily slipped toward the door, closer, closer, closer, stepping carefully over the books that had fallen from the shelf, willing myself to be a shadow.
“That’s not—” Valarie began to say.
“She’s mine,” Graysen cut her off. His claim rumbled through the air, skating over my skin, prickling the fine hair. “It’s my signature on the Alverac. It’s my name spelled in blood. I decide what happens with her.”
And that was the last I heard because I’d made my escape.
While the Crowthers were focused on Graysen, the audacity that he should overrule his aunt, I slipped through the doorway and bolted. I knew I’d have little time before they realized I’d escaped and came after me, but I had to try.
No dark power wound itself around my bones, urging me on, increasing my strength and speed.
Instead, I rallied the last scrap of energy left, burning through it, existing purely on adrenaline and desperation, and hurtled down the hallway.
I gasped ragged, frantic breaths, pumping leaden arms. My lungs were aflame as I pushed myself faster, darting past servants, a blur of startled glances and half-uttered exclamations.
No one stopped me.
No one would dare to.
Not with the fierce look on my face.
My father is here… My father is here…
I fled the same way I’d come, following the twist of hallways, through open rooms and a short flight of stairs, to the inner balcony that led to the grand staircase. I flew down its wide steps toward the entranceway of the fortress.
The sound of furious pounding came from behind the heavy oak doors. “Unlock this godsdamned door!”
The young woman, Penn, who’d announced my father’s arrival to the Crowthers, had a guard on either side gripping the hilts of their swords. All three of them faced the massive entranceway. Unaware of my approach, Penn pulled at the door.
My muscles burned in protest. Legs ached with agony.
There…nearly there…
Leaping off the bottom step, I crossed the foyer. “Father!”
“Nelle?!” My father’s rich tone, even though it was laced with panic, surged through my heart and eased my terror.
Penn half-twisted around in surprise.
Both guards whirled.
But the door in Penn’s grip had already begun to swing open.
I caught the barest sliver of my father’s face. A bloodshot eye flared wide to see me, the emotion shimmering in its depth—relief and icy rage and anguish.
My hands reached forward, about to shove aside the shocked-faced servant and fling open the door. I wanted it to be between us, when—
Harsh fingers gripped my upper arms, biting my flesh and bruising my skin.
I was yanked back—
Swung upside down—
My stomach curved around a broad shoulder.
Gone, with only a single word drifting in the air, a name I so rarely used. “Papa!”