Chapter 7 #2
Sirro sat down, and his Familiar kneeled beside his chair, her liver-spotted hands clasped on her lap and head bowed with dull silver hair falling over her bony shoulders.
A crone. She had little life left in her.
Sirro had sucked her almost dry. No doubt the reason he was pissed was that the tithe intended to replace his Familiar—Red—had been stolen from him in this supposed hijacking.
Sirro addressed me. “I hear you Crowthers are having a family reunion, and Nelle’s staying with you for a while.”
I nodded, but my gaze momentarily shifted to Byron. I’d assumed he’d filled Sirro in as to what had happened to Nelle…up to a point, of course. At his daughter’s name, his outright hatred of me blazed through his returning glare.
“Well,” Sirro drawled, a smile appearing and growing broader as he glanced toward Byron.
“I guess since her twentieth birthday isn’t that far away.
You might as well get used to the idea that she’s not returning home.
” He crossed a knee over the other, turning a cunning look my way. “And how is sweet, young Nelle?”
An urge arose to wrap my fingers around his throat and throttle him. Horned God or not, I didn’t care. Just the taste of her name on his lips had lust spiraling from him, strands of dark power shining a little brighter.
I forced the rising anger down because, in Sirro’s sly way, he was helping me chip away at Byron. Hitching a shoulder nonchalantly, I replied, “She’ll have a much more pleasant stay if she can have a moment with her mother and sisters and speak with them.”
“Byron?” Sirro asked.
The other man remained silent, square jaw locked, and his hateful gaze still fixed on me. I didn’t know if he simply refused to answer, or if his abhorrence of me choked the words in his throat.
Sirro sighed, leaning an elbow on the armrest, and swept his fingertips across his short, neat beard. “There’s nothing given freely in our world, is there, Byron?”
We needed what was in Byron’s treasure trove.
And he knew it.
But did Sirro?
Byron’s gaze hadn’t left mine, and so I smiled, flashing a sliver of teeth. I enjoyed his nostrils flaring and the way his mouth tightened in response.
“What would a moment with your daughter be worth?” Sirro mused in a conversational tone, a tone that didn’t expect an answer.
Everything.
Byron would put himself in a dire position by handing over what we desired. If it should be discovered.
What we wanted had been passed from Great House to Great House when the reigning family had been usurped or annihilated at the will of the Horned Gods. It was given over to be kept safe, but it was also a symbol of the family’s ruling authority over all the other Houses—Brangwene’s Hjarte.
And we desperately needed it. Enough to lay claim to Byron’s beloved daughter and threaten him with her welfare.
Byron steeled himself against me.
My hands gripped the edge of my armchair hard, fingernails carving moon-crescent grooves into the wood. Fucking hellsgate, Byron was going to be hard to break.
Silence once more descended the room while I internally fumed, recalculating what I could do to shatter the man. It wasn’t only his youngest daughter at risk. He had a wife and two other daughters. An entire House to safeguard.
We waited for Sirro to address the reason he’d called our House here, and still nothing from the Horned God. My father shifted forward, the woolen fabric of his Zegna suit whispering with the movement. “Master Sirro, Jett—”
Sirro snapped up a hand, cutting him off.
“Just a moment, Varen, I’m waiting for someone.
” He straightened his posture right before we heard hurried footsteps and a reedy voice barking at Sarnia from the hallway outside.
“Ah, here he is,” he purred, but the tone edged with the quiet savagery of a mountain lion who’d finally spotted its quarry.
The solar door swung open, and Aldert Pellan barged in with a harried Sarnia behind him.
Beyond the doorway, a spider scuttled into view.
Its hairy legs clacked against the boned ceiling, and its chittering was a creepy trill accompanying the noise of snapping fangs and guttural snarling coming from the pack of wraith-wolves awaiting Sarnia’s order to attack.
Aldert Fucking Pellan.
The air got sucked out of my chest. The room felt too small, too enclosed, with his vile presence in it.
Danne and his brothers had all learned their cruelty from this man.
A fierce need to end him tore through my entire being and set my teeth grinding, filling my ears with a chalky, grating sound.
I gripped the arms of my chair to stop myself from lunging at the smaller man. Wood creaked beneath my ferocious grip.
“It’s fine, Sarnia.” Sirro relaxed back into his armchair. “Thank the Heads for waiting for me. We shouldn’t be too long here before we begin our meeting.”
Sarnia flicked a concerned glance Jett’s way and at the roll of velvet balanced on his trembling thigh, before nodding to Sirro. She closed the door and left.
I willed my blood to cool, drew in a breath through my nose, a second, a third, and loosened my grip on the armrests.
I glanced to the side and saw my father’s glare and fingers twitching, as if he desired to reach for his blade.
Even Jett’s gaze, shot through with pain, was fixed on him.
And when my sight returned to Sirro, surprise washed through me as I observed his hard features and unblinking focus locked on Aldert.
A heartbeat later, a calm state returned to the Horned God.
Aldert Pellan hadn’t noticed us. However, his youngest son did.
Gerrit Pellan, sixteen years old, was right behind his father. His gaze met mine first before darting away to the others in the room, flaring wide to see the hunger burning from my family to snap his father’s frail bones into tiny shards.
“Father.” He tried to curl a hand around his father’s arm in warning, but Aldert shook it off with an irritated jerk of his shoulder. Gerrit swallowed, his gaze now resting on the Horned God, before retreating a step and bowing. “Master Sirro.”
Sirro inclined his head and leisurely gestured toward a seat with brass plating adorning the round-backed wood. The lanky boy quickly seated himself, his posture rigid.
I hadn’t seen much of Gerrit over the years.
Even though he’d been present at Evvie’s engagement ceremony and stayed with his family at the Wychthorns that weekend, he’d kept out of my way.
He favored his mother, Irma, in his looks, with a warm complexion and sun-kissed freckles across his nose rather than the heavy splattering his redheaded siblings possessed.
Even his hair was browner than his autumnal brothers.
But it wasn’t only his appearance that set him apart from his family.
He couldn’t conceal the unease. If it were any other of his siblings seated before me, all I’d see reflected would be the conceit and entitlement the Pellans seemed to be born with.
And something like remorse flickered across his features before he looked away, quick as a startled sparrow.
The sound of Aldert’s curt, imperious tone stole my attention from the younger Pellan. He bowed and addressed the Horned God. “My son is missing.”
“Which one?” Sirro frowned before a small, sly smile bloomed as he leaned forward and drawled, “You have so many.”
Aldert blinked.
His beady eyes shot about the room, and he realized rather belatedly that he had an audience of Crowthers.
“Danne.” Aldert took a step closer to me, an age-spotted hand fisting tightly at his side.
I glimpsed my father tense, readying himself to intercede.
I didn’t think Aldert would try to attack me.
There was nothing of the man, all skin and bones and cruel intent.
But I wouldn’t mind if he godsdamned tried.
Aldert’s shifty gaze slid back to Sirro. “He hasn’t been seen since the morning after the engagement blessing.”
Sirro’s finger tapped a beat on his armchair, but each tap was a hard press. The strangest, faintest tang on my tongue was coming from him. A simmering rage he was trying to curb.
“The last message I received from my son. Danne had something of worth and was returning to the Carpellean Mountains. But he never made it home.”
Byron’s jaw slackened the moment he grasped the answer he’d asked of me last night—Who stole my daughter? His stunned gaze sliced to Aldert.
Sirro had been walking this earth since before our god Zrenyth had birthed the Horned Gods and was clever at hiding himself. However, I suddenly realized that he didn’t look surprised at all.
His simmering rage spilled over into fury. Those coiling threads of power roiled like black storm clouds, and the entire room shook in a single pulse of rage as his dark magic punched outward. It was a split second—a surge so fast and sharp it tore through the air, detectable only by my family.
Sirro knew. Somehow, he knew Danne was behind Nelle’s abduction.
But why the outrage?
Sirro dampened that wrath. His power settled back into soft metallic silvers, which drifted like ghostly kelp about his figure. “I’m sure he did have someone of worth.”
The word someone registered within the room, and finally with Aldert.
“That would be Nelle,” I provided in a flat tone that belied the fury pumping my heart faster just to speak to the rat-faced man. “Danne was the one who abducted Nelle and replaced her with a changeling.”
I watched the confusion wash over Aldert’s pointy features, morphing into trepidation as I unfolded myself from the chair, rising and stepping closer.
He was intimidated by my size and wary of my family, as he fucking should be, but there was still arrogance in the disdainful curl of his mouth.
As Head of an Upper House, he believed his position protected him from the likes of me.
“Surely you Crowthers were behind the changeling.”