Chapter 44
Graysen
Ileft my heart behind in the rookery and strode across the short patch of lawn toward my aunt and my future.
I’d been here before.
Five years ago, after I’d signed the Alverac, I’d fucking lost it. As soon as my family left the Wychthorns, my brothers dragged me straight to the fighting pit beneath Ascendria because, in their words—I needed to get my shit under control.
I’d been down in that pit, spitting blood and scuffing up dust and sand, duking it out with Zielenski while my brothers watched, wary and concerned.
Rage and despair had been packed so violently inside me I could barely breathe.
Ferne had chosen me for the Alverac. I would own Nelle like a thing.
A trinket. A mindless possession. I would be the one ordering her to stand on an auction block at the Witches Ball, knowing exactly what would happen afterward.
It had been too much, and I’d collapsed under the weight of my family’s expectations.
And so, in the middle of the brawl with Zielenski, I stopped and roared at my brothers that I wouldn’t go through with it.
Nelle had been a kid. An innocent kid caught up in our machinations born from desperation to save my mother.
At fourteen years old, with a stroke of a quill, her fate had been sealed by my family, and from that moment she’d been living on borrowed time.
My boots scuffed through thick blades of dewy grass as I drew closer to my aunt. The cadre surrounded me as I met her on the stretch of lawn, raising my hands briefly in surrender as I came to a halt.
Aunt Valarie stared at me shrewdly, moonlight sharpening the pinched lines in her features. She spoke so quietly that no one else could hear. “You protected her.”
I lied right to her face. “She used our connection against—”
“Don’t you dare lie to me. I was there when you arrived. I saw what you did. You shielded her.”
I let my rage out. Gladly. The cool night air thickened with my threat, with my rising fury. Tendrils of wind stirred, lifting skeletal leaves to skitter across the grass. “You dared touch what is mine. To mark her flesh with the whip. She belongs to me!”
My aunt’s nostrils flared, fury bristling through her entire body as we willfully clashed against one another. Yet I tasted her indecision on my tongue. She wasn’t entirely sure of what she’d witnessed earlier. My fierce response and her self-doubt caused the fury running through her veins to ebb.
Taking a step closer, she held up her hand, and her senses unraveled like a nest of adders, slithering and coiling all over my exposed skin. “You’ve come into your own as a Tamer.” Her hand fell slowly as bewilderment softened her expression. “How?”
Someone else answered before I could even think of a reply.
Kenton stalked up, rotating a shoulder and arching his bruised neck as if easing out a crick.
“Of course it was going to happen with both of them in each other’s pockets up in the tower,” he snapped at my aunt.
His stony expression didn’t alter one bit, but his voice grew a little softer when he addressed me.
“It was inevitable, no matter how hard you fought against your unnatural connection to Wychthorn. And I know you did, brother.”
My aunt took a long moment considering what Kenton had said, her cunning eyes narrowing as she searched my face for any hint of weakness or deception. “What you did to your brothers… You could have killed them,” she breathed.
Guilt cut through me at what I’d done to Jett. The sickening crack of his spine replayed in my mind. My brothers possessed unnatural healing, but only as long as their hearts remained beating in their chests, and I could have easily ripped Jett’s out.
“I need you present and loyal,” she said fiercely. “I won’t allow you to falter. None of us can afford for this to happen again. You are a tamer, and you cannot and will not bend to her will.”
She could lock me in a dungeon to separate me from Nelle easily, but she needed me to remain steadfast to her cause for the Witches Ball.
“Keep guard on Wychthorn,” she ordered Kenton. “At some point, she’ll have to come out of the rookery.”
Kenton fixed his blood-splattered shirt, rolling up the ripped sleeves. With a dismissive snort, he glanced toward the rookery before replying in his dark, deep voice, “We don’t have to worry about her. What is one tiny girl going to do?” He cast a cold look my way, raising an eyebrow. “Right?”
I strained not to blink in surprise. Kenton gave nothing away, not to me nor our aunt. But it was telling he’d used the same phrase Caidan had a week ago in the training pit when I’d been sparring with my brothers. Caidan had been the one urging me to let Nelle out of the tower.
You can’t keep her locked up in there. Let her out. What is one tiny girl going to do?
Fuck shit up. That’s what Nelle was good at, really good at.
“You need me more than her,” I said to my aunt, hoping it was enough to turn her attention away from Nelle and direct it at me.
“I do,” she agreed. Then quietly asked, “Where does your loyalty lie?”
“With you. With my mother.”
She knew what would have to happen next to ensure that loyalty. We both did.
I silently asked that question, arching a lonely brow in expectation.
She released a long, controlled breath, heavy with contemplation, then gave a slow nod.
And I dipped my head in acquiescence.
Ripping the frayed piece of Zrenyth’s rope still tied to my wrist, I tossed it to the ground.
I’d used the surprising strength of a new kind to fight myself free from the rope binding my wrists and the sheet of dark magic that had frozen me in place, before it had bled away from the exhaustion of the day.
I eyed my aunt frostily. “Let’s get this over with. ”
She knew what had to happen to ensure my loyalty. We both did.
Without a word, she turned gracefully, and I fell in beside her.
I knew exactly where she was taking me.
The soldiers kept their weapons leveled on me. Nothing lethal, but a good old-fashioned shot from a stinger laced with a tranquilizer would knock me out cold. I no longer gave a flying fuck.
Wood creaked beneath my boots as we crossed the drawbridge, and stones grated underfoot as we followed the path to the wide steps leading to a terrace and an entrance to the Keep that we used very little.
Up the steps I walked, one foot in front of the other, feeling as if I were walking to my doom.
As I stepped onto the terrace, I couldn’t resist one last look. I doubted I’d see Nelle, she’d stay holed up in the rookery, just as I’d asked. But when I glanced over my shoulder at the tall, crumbling building, a jolt of shock speared through my lungs.
She stood on the rooftop.
Her dress fluttered in a gentle breeze, and she looked like an apparition with her pale figure caught in the delicate cloth of moonlight and shadows.
I watched her lips move.
“You’re mine!”
My godsdamned heart stopped beating as she continued silently shouting.
“Graysen Crowther, you belong to me. I’m not leaving without you!”
Still, after all of this, she wouldn’t give me up.
It was so typical of my little bird. The fire she was born with. The stubbornness too. Pride spiked through me, lifting my spirits for a brief, aching moment before it all came crashing down and black terror bound itself around my chest, squeezing so hard I couldn’t draw a breath.
It was exactly as the Uzrek had warned when he uncovered my deepest fear beneath Ascendria. Nelle would stay and fight for me, no matter what. Even if it endangered her. Even if it cost her freedom. She’d willingly sacrifice herself to stay here for me.
I knew what I had to do.
My little bird deserved to spread her wings and taste freedom.
I needed to break the heartfelt connection between us so she’d escape the estate alone and never look back. And it was going to be so easy to do.
In fact, I’d allow my aunt to do it for me. Where I was heading, I wouldn’t be the same when I returned. There’d be nothing left of me that Nelle would recognize when I stepped out of the darkness.
She wouldn’t know me.
Hells, neither would I.
Oppressive shadows fell over me like a dense curtain as I entered the Keep.
The empty hallways were silent but for the jingle of metal weapons and the echo of our footfalls.
We left the family rooms behind, through corridors and passageways, and passed into the soldiers’ barracks, traipsing deeper to a stairwell lit by wildfire torches burning in iron sconces.
Down, down, down we walked until we finally stepped into the dungeon.
I followed my aunt past the modern cells with their steel doors and cages. Stalked by the older cells with sinister wooden doors marked with wards. The cadre fell away until only two of her favored guards remained, and we entered an even more ancient part of the Keep, one rarely used.
At first glance, it seemed we’d met a dead end, until my aunt pressed an ancient key, etched with Ukkenskrit that simply said yield, against the pitted wall, and the stone rippled, then faded away to allow us inside.
Moisture trickled down dark green walls blooming with mold, and rancid air stuffed itself into my lungs as we descended the damp staircase.
I’d never thought I would be back here. But here I was.
We kept walking down, down, down…
Until we reached the bottom of the staircase and a decrepit door with rotting wood and iron hinges so old the orange-tainted metal was flaking away.
As my aunt reached for the handle, I stole an adamere dagger from a guard’s hip so fast he didn’t realize I’d palmed it until he jerked back, hands raised in quick surrender.
But I wasn’t going to use the dagger to fight my way free.
Instead, I used the blade on myself, wedging the sharp tip beneath the thin leather ties and silver chains bound around my wrists, cutting them off. They fell, rattling across the stone floor layered in dust and pooling water. I hacked away every last one until my wrists were bare.
I hadn’t seen them for five long years.
The scars were brutal.
Rough indentations of looped chains and coiled rope dug deep into my skin. A buckle too—the imprint of its metal prong and the holes punched into leather permanently gouged into my flesh from hanging by my wrists for days, for weeks, for months. I had no idea at the time.
My aunt pushed the rotting door open and it yawned with an eerie creak.
I followed her inside, greeted by yet another staircase, one that was long and narrow and curved along the sides of the pit chiseled out of the earth.
Down I walked. Down, down, down into a well of icy air and absolute darkness.
And it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
Because I wasn’t doing this for myself.
I was doing it for Nelle.