Chapter 27
SEAN
Distracted by David, Sean failed to block Cathaire’s blow to his face. The pain slammed into his jaw, and he winced, holding a hand to his bloody lip.
“Pay attention!” Cathaire demanded. “Do you think you’ll survive Viterra if you can’t focus?”
Sean’s attention returned to the back of David’s head, and the urge to follow him grew impossible to ignore. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
Cathaire followed Sean’s line of sight, his brow scrunching. “In what way?”
“I’m not sure.”
Anna stood alone, gaze cloudy as she stripped off her leather guards. Holding up a staying finger toward Cathaire, Sean approached her. “What happened?”
She looked toward David’s retreat. “Honestly? I don’t know.”
Sean frowned, trying to understand this nagging pain inside him. “He’s…hurt or something.”
“Hurt?” Anna’s tone was puzzled.
It was pinching. Sharp. Like a nail driven between two ribs.
But it wasn’t his own. Suspicion brewed like a thunderstorm in his chest.
“Hold up!” Sean shouted, starting toward David.
In the distant recesses of his awareness, he sensed Cathaire’s incredulous orders to return, recognized Anna’s footsteps in his wake, felt Isobel rise to follow, but he couldn’t respond to any of it—even when people bowed as he passed through the milling crowds.
Across the bridge, David turned, gaze finding Sean’s, all hints of feeling padlocked behind a blank wall.
Sean slowed. “What’s wrong?”
A golden eyebrow lifted. David looked at the gash in Sean’s lip and rubbed his thumb over his own mouth. “Don’t you have a magic girlfriend who follows you around to keep you from bleeding?”
Right on cue, Isobel reached his side, followed closely by Anna.
Sean touched the cut, making it sting. The slightest wince narrowed the space between David’s brows.
Such a small reaction. Tiny. Infinitesimal.
But Sean saw it. The suspicion gathered speed, whirling through him with hurricane force.
For weeks now he’d sensed something different, a thread inside himself that didn’t belong, that hurt in ways he didn’t hurt and breathed in when he was breathing out.
He could see it now, mirrored in David, in this man who had hated him the very moment they met.
The ground beneath Sean’s feet disappeared. “Something’s different,” he whispered.
David’s expression didn’t change. His eyes stayed caged and cold, but the disquiet practically screamed. Sean bent to unsheathe the dagger he now kept at his ankle. Before he could rethink it, he pulled the blade across the skin inside his forearm.
Beside him, Isobel gasped. David’s hand clenched. He stared at his arm—bloodless and uninjured.
Sean’s breath vanished. “You feel that?”
“Yeah,” David said, tone flat. “I feel it.”
“Sean,” Isobel said, glancing all around. “This isn’t the place—”
“What the fuck is going on?” he asked, zeroing in on her.
They could feel each other’s pain. Sean could sense David’s feelings. The hate between them was gone as if it had never been. Only one person had feared that hate enough to do something irrational.
Sean pointed the bloody knife at Isobel. “What did you do?”
Taken aback, her eyes widened. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
Anna gripped Sean’s wrist holding the knife, and sparks lanced from her touch, scintillating over his nerves like they had earlier. She wrestled the knife from his grasp. Her network connected to his and her voice whispered through it. Calm down. People are staring.
Bel stepped toward him. “Sean, you’re bleeding.”
“Don’t touch me.”
She stopped in her tracks.
Anna made short work of slipping off her training tunic and wrapping it around his arm, leaving her in a short-sleeved cotton thing too thin for the chilly air.
Her fingers dug into his biceps. “Come on.” She dragged him down the path toward the Tree, grabbing David’s arm as they passed.
Isobel trailed behind, silent.
“You should go somewhere private,” Anna said once they reached the Tree.
“Let’s go to our suite,” Bel said, already heading through the atrium toward the stairs.
Anna released both Sean and David, apparently content to leave them to their drama, but David grasped her wrist tight enough that his knuckles blanched, forcing her to accompany them.
As they entered the antechamber, Rowilda jumped to attention, but none of them greeted her.
“Tell me what you did, Isobel,” Sean said as Rowilda swung the door open. “Why can I feel his pain?”
Autumn leapt from the couch as soon as they entered, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and for the first time in their acquaintance, her forever smile disappeared as she set her gaze upon Bel.
Ah. So maybe she knew what this was.
Isobel moved straight to the cookery and poured herself a glass of wine.
Autumn’s attention flittered to each of them as they followed Bel, finally settling on David, who still had Anna chained to him.
The pixie’s expression spoke of deep discomfort, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from studying her surroundings.
Isobel turned, glass in hand. Her attention fell on Sean’s injury, his blood now soaked through Anna’s cream shirt. “Will you please let me heal that?”
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
Her hand clenched around the stem of her glass. “I—I did something.”
“Something?” he asked, losing his patience.
“I bound you.” She blurted the words in a rush.
David took a measured breath. “Bound us?”
Isobel stared at the red wine. “I—I bound your souls.”
A long moment of quiet reigned with shell shock. Luster flashed and flickered, but the room was otherwise still, along with Sean’s thoughts.
They’d frozen on two words. Bound souls.
When his mind jumpstarted, it was with a single question: What did that mean?
Eventually, Sean looked at David. His expression remained a mask, but chaos unfurled inside him, a torrent so clear, he might as well have been screaming.
“What does that mean?” Sean enunciated each word with serrated precision.
Bel, who’d been avoiding his gaze, winced. “It…fuses your souls. Together.”
“Like, one soul in two bodies,” Autumn whispered, hovering between Isobel on one side of the room, and David and Sean on the other.
David took a step forward, dragging Anna with him. “What does that mean?”
“It means you share your lives now,” Bel said, tone tense. “You’ll share everything. You’ll be one.”
Another silence spread between them, allowing Sean’s brain to descend to utter anarchy.
Share everything?
As one?
“Share our lives?” he asked. “Share…a soul?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It combines you into one consciousness. Two bodies. One person.”
One person.
One person.
It took Sean an entire minute to process that, and even then it made no sense. What kind of magic fused two people into one?
“You stole my soul?” David spat as anger broke through his restraint, sharpening his words.
Bel flung an arm out at him. “I wasn’t even convinced you had one. Here’s proof Galadaine’s heir isn’t soulless.”
Autumn’s jaw dropped. “Isobel!”
“Who’s the soulless one here?” David finally released Anna’s wrist to advance on Bel. “You took my life. Did you think about what that would mean for me?”
Bel set her glass on the counter beside her. “Why else would I have done it? You were the variable I couldn’t control, so I took control.”
Sean looked between them, utterly confused why this had been done to him, why she’d felt compelled to take his soul and merge it with his greatest enemy. “But why?”
David’s green eyes blazed. “Obviously she did it for you.”
Wait. Why—
No.
Fuck, no.
From the moment he met her, Isobel had been overly concerned for his safety.
She’d been excessively scared of David. She’d been ruled by some prophecy that Sean still hadn’t read.
She believed David would follow in his ancestor’s footsteps, which would place Sean in a great deal of danger.
If David’s soul was tied to Sean, that meant—
He swallowed. “If one of us dies?”
“The other follows,” Autumn said. “Or so it’s thought.”
“It’s thought?” Sean stared at her. “This hasn’t been done before?”
She fidgeted, unable to hold any of their gazes. “Rarely. It’s not exactly permitted.”
Sean gripped the back of a dining chair. “It can be undone though. Tell me it can be undone.”
Autumn’s contrite expression was answer enough.
David cupped one hand over his mouth and locked his gaze on Bel.
She scowled. “I’m not sorry.”
Wow. Was she stupid? Couldn’t she see how close David had come to lashing out?
But no. None of them would. David didn’t let people see those things. Sean was on the inside now. A strange place to be.
David advanced on her.
Bel narrowed her eyes but held her ground. “Threaten me if you want. I found a way to keep you loyal. We both know you would have buckled under your inheritance.”
His skin went bloodless. “You don’t know anything.”
“I know what you’re capable of,” she hissed. “I’ve seen it.”
“I am not Galadaine,” he said, cold and slow, still in complete control. “I don’t know how many times I have to say that.”
“Doesn’t matter now. You can’t touch him without hurting yourself.”
David’s hands clenched and unclenched. “You—you meddling bitch.”
Her mouth fell open, and she pushed him. He barely moved, so she pushed him again, and he grabbed her wrists, pulling her close.
Isobel raised her chin, glaring in defiance. “You want to hurt me, David? Just like he did?”
He shoved her away from him. “Fuck you.”
Sean braced his temples with one hand as the stirrings of a headache began. “Just…why?”
“To protect you!” Bel said.
“I never asked for your protection, Isobel.”
She scowled, and her next words came out sharp. “I didn’t ask for you, either. I never wanted you.”
The insult barely grazed him. Their desires didn’t matter in the end. His disbelief in fate failed to stem the allure of her. Resistance proved futile as the magic in his blood shoved him right over the edge into love with her.
Obsessive.
Twisted.
The sane, logical part of him knew the love wasn’t healthy, but the irrational portion had lunged for it. Grasped tight. Wouldn’t let go.
He hadn’t asked for her, but he was stuck with her anyway, this woman who stitched his soul to David Berkeley without permission, who made life-changing decisions without consulting him, who believed she knew better than him how to exist in his own life.
It made sense now why he’d felt so connected to David, why he’d wanted David involved in every aspect of this new life, why the unfairness of David’s situation had felt like a personal attack.
With a sigh, Sean’s gaze switched to Autumn. “How could you let her do this?”
David turned to her, crossing his arms. “Is this your idea of doing things right this time?”
Her eyes squeezed shut. “I didn’t know until it was too late, and then it just seemed…pointless to tell you.”
David rolled his eyes. “I asked you how you could have faith that I’d be different than Galadaine Manae, and you lied to my face. You knew I wouldn’t have a choice.”
“No.” She reached for him. “It isn’t like that.”
“What’s it like, then, Autumn?”
She pressed her palm flat to his chest. “I see your mind. I wasn’t lying when I said you have a good heart.”
Bel snorted, and David took a deep breath, ignoring her.
Inside Sean, heat simmered, and he was no longer sure who it belonged to. How could Bel have done this? How could she betray him this way?
His hands balled into fists, aching to break things. He could barely feel the pain from the gash in his arm. “I can’t be here.” He turned to Anna, totally silent in one corner of the room. “Do you want to train some more?”
Her blue eyes widened.
In a surprising move, David yanked her to his side, throwing an arm tight about her shoulders. “You’re not using her to vent your frustration. In the state you’re in, you’ll kill her. Use Bel.”
Anna tried to remove herself from his grasp, but she didn’t get far. “I can come.”
“No, you can’t.” David kept his gaze on Sean.
Sean threw his hands up, surrendering. He left them all to their own devices.