Chapter Twenty-Five
Rain trailed her across Manhattan, keeping even the gutters free of monsters.
It left her feeling like a drowned rat when she finally made it back to the brownstone.
The warmth greeted her like an old friend as she passed the dragon knocker on the front step and entered the house in the early hours of the morning.
Isolde and Edgar had long gone for the day.
Walter was safely asleep upstairs. He lived normal human hours compared to her and Graves.
The sounds of the old house felt as if it was speaking to her through its creaks and groans.
She ran a hand along the stair banister before noticing that a fire burned in the sitting room.
Kierse headed toward it, shaking rain out of her hair. “Graves?”
She found piles of books littered from one corner to the next.
Anne Boleyn lounged against a precariously arranged stack a little too close to the crackling fire for Kierse’s liking.
She swished her tail at Kierse’s entrance and then leaned her head back toward the flames as if she sunned herself on the beach.
Graves had abandoned his books. They were scattered around him, but for once, he didn’t have his head buried, or in his lap, or paging through them.
His eyes were cast to the fire, unseeing.
The light flickered thunderstorms in the gray irises.
His pianist fingers held onto a crystal glass half full of scotch.
But the rest of him was incongruous to the put-together warlock she was used to.
He’d changed out of his suit and was in a black athletic shirt and pants.
His hair had a sheen to it like he’d been out jogging in the rain.
She’d seen him do that before when he needed to clear his head.
An old Druidic technique that never quite left him.
“Hey,” she said, trying to draw his attention, but it was so focused on the fire that he didn’t even look up. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Graves?”
He snapped to attention, grasping her wrist in a grip that was almost painful. As if he were going to toss her across the room as he had the first night they met. When he had thought she was just a little thief and not yet his little wren.
A puff of air exhaled from his lips. “Wren.”
“I called your name a few times.”
“I wasn’t expecting you back this early.”
Kierse frowned. “It’s almost dawn.”
“Is it?” he asked, releasing her wrist.
Normally he would have drawn her into his lap, pressed a kiss into her hair, and enveloped her into his heat.
“What happened? Did you not make it into the building?”
Graves returned his attention to the fire. “It was sealed. We’re working on clearing it.”
“By tomorrow?” she asked skeptically.
“Today, if you have it right.”
There was something else bothering him, but Kierse didn’t know what it could be.
“Tell me about the spell. Niamh gave me a million reassurances that you wouldn’t be harmed.” His voice was flat as she cleared a space on the coffee table before him and took a seat. “Were you harmed?”
“Not exactly,” she said.
She felt the tug of her magic like a lifeline. It was a brittle trickle compared to what she had. If she’d been able to get that door open a touch wider before Lorcan realized what she was doing. But now that it was open, she was sure she could work her way under it more.
She pushed her wet hair behind her ears and let him see the pointed ends. His eyes lit up when he realized.
“You did it? Your magic is back?” he asked, immediately reaching for her bare wrist.
This was the wrinkle. Her glamours were back. She experimented with brief bouts of slow motion on the way home. She could even sense exactly where the scores were for the few people who were on the subway with her at this hour. But her absorption was finnicky.
“A bit but not all of it.”
He released her when he realized what she meant. “You can’t let your absorption down.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. But I’m working on it.”
“I see,” he said, clearly disappointed. “How did you do it? What happened when the spell was cast?”
She swallowed. “I went to a field of wildflowers in Ireland. The Wicklow Mountains.” Graves’s eyes shuttered closed. “Lorcan was there, and he told me the story of the Sons of Tuireann.”
“Ah,” Graves said, immediately understanding. “You understand why he has not forgiven me in all these years.”
“But he didn’t understand why I, in turn, would not forgive him.”
Graves’s laugh was sardonic. “No, death is unforgivable, but uniting soulmates was always seen as a good thing. Couples were frequently coerced if not flatly forced to join. He wouldn’t see that as the same.”
“But I do,” Kierse argued.
Graves rested his elbow on the arm of the chair as he leaned his chin into his hand. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “And I told him as much. Then I got under the magic and told him to fuck off and die.”
“How did you get under the magic?”
She sighed. Her stomach was in knots. She didn’t want to tell him this part. “I lied.”
His brows raised at that. “Elaborate.”
“I let him think that I might forgive him,” she said carefully. “And when he began to believe me, I tried to work under his defenses, but he wasn’t sufficiently distracted.”
Graves met her gaze. “You kissed him.”
“I didn’t want to, but I remembered you said whatever it takes.”
He waved a hand in acquiescence. “I did say that.”
She brought her hands to his face and forced him to look at her. “It was a distraction so that I could get around the magic. There was a lock, and I managed to pick it.”
“Always a thief,” he said as his hands slid around her waist.
Kierse ran her hands up his jaw. “The only thing I want to be stealing is your heart.”
“It already belongs to you.”
“Then make me forget what had to be done,” she whispered.
And then Graves drew her into his lap, tugging her against him and kissing her long and deep. She could have lived in that embrace forever. Just the feel of him against her.
“Have you forgotten now?” he breathed against her lips.
“I think I need some more convincing,” she purred, dragging him against her mouth again, their tongues volleying in the heated space. His heat was an inferno as if he’d done a significant amount of magic tonight. Every inch of him a map of heat licking against her skin.
This was paradise. This was eternity. This was all she ever wanted.
Graves finally pulled away with a sigh. “Better?”
“Much,” she told him. “I’d be happy never to see him again.”
Graves was silent a beat too long. “I know that’s what you want. The bond is just…all consuming.”
He wasn’t wrong. It seemed to eat away at her more every day. And he knew this. He’d seen it happen so many times before. They both needed to find a way to stop the bond.
“I’m still me. I’m still making the decisions,” she told him, meeting his stormy gaze. “Until the time that it consumes me, I’m yours.”
He sighed, dragging her to his lips once more. The kiss was feverish. She leaned her body against him, wanting to bury the last few hours and drown in Graves. Forget everything that happened in that wildflower field and live only here and now in the darkened brownstone of Graves’s life.
But eventually, he pulled back. His breathing erratic. Those turbulent eyes locked on hers.
“I fear I’ve taken out my poor night on you,” he admitted.
“I fear I took mine out on you,” she said, placing another kiss on his lips.
“Walter finally cracked the hard drive we gave him,” he said. Her eyes widened in surprise. “Laz and Schwartz made it through the video footage. They both found concerning things inside.”
Kierse sat back fully on her heels. “What did they find?”
“Kingston,” he admitted.
“Well, that makes sense. He was her mentor.”
“Rosetta said that Kingston paid her to help with her mental gaps, but they were getting nowhere. That was suspicious on its own. Kingston, who is known to have persuasion abilities, could make someone forget what happened.”
“But we don’t know that he did.”
“The footage shows Kingston showing up in Vegas at the same time every month. Persuasion powers degrade month over month.”
Kierse swallowed. “So you think that she would start to remember and then he would top her off?”
“Yes.”
“Then why send her to Rosetta at all?”
“Rosetta is working for him,” Graves said through gritted teeth. “I had Laz double back after we left. He broke into her shop and found information of detailed payments and instructions. She wasn’t helping her. She was keeping her confused.”
Kierse closed her eyes and breathed out heavily. “Why would he do all that?”
“Their acquaintance began roughly a hundred years ago,” Graves continued as if he could finally speak all of the puzzle pieces into place.
“The first Fae killings were also a hundred years ago, and they ramped up until they were extinct, culminating in you and your mother. Then and only then did Dallas move to Las Vegas and start her work there.”
Kierse pushed back from him, walking around the table and trying to steady herself. “So she helped the Fae Killer kill off my entire species and then retired to the desert where she had memory loss that coincided with Kingston’s appearances in her life.”
“And when Laz and Schwartz found her, she was dead within the week.”
She pressed her hands to her temples. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Graves said, reaching for papers at his side. “Dallas Llewellyn is.”
He pushed the papers into her hands. They were notes from the app on her computer, and some parts had been highlighted.
Kierse read aloud, “He came again a day later. I wasn’t happy to see him.
I think I’m losing my mind. I know that he’s visiting me, because we’re friends, but I can’t help but remember him with a gun and blood on his hands. ”
Kierse looked at Graves with wide eyes. “Is this?”
“Laz cross-referenced it, and it’s the day Kingston showed up.”