Page 68 of Wretched Thorns

Then he let me go.

I stepped back. The grove thinned. The dreamspace folded in on itself the way a candle’s light folds when somebody pinches the wick. I held the onyx thread the entire way back, the way Eli had held the silver thread last night.

I walked back to my body the way you walk down a dark hall, trailing one hand along the wall.

The bed came up firm beneath my back.

I opened my eyes.

I was back in the dark. The shadows in the corners had not moved, but the bond was singing.

I looked down at the dip of my collarbone.

I couldn’t really see it but I knew a glorious hickey was blooming there, warm and dark, in the exact place Callum’s mouth had been a breath ago in a grove a hundred miles north.

I touched it with two fingers.

The heat of it came up under my hand.

I started to laugh. I did not try to stop.

***

I was still laughing when Marcus came back through the door.

I do not know how long I had been laughing.

The bolt threw back. The door swung wide. The candle in his hand threw his shadow long across the floor. This time he had not come empty-handed. A tray rode along one forearm, a covered plate and a tall glass of water sliding on it as he moved. A bouquet of white roses was crooked in his other arm, the blooms too round, too perfect, the way his roses were always too perfect now that I knew what they were for. He stopped two steps inside the room because he had seen the new mark before he had seen anything else.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He said it in the voice of a man whose paint had cracked.

I did not sit up.

I lay there with the new bruise blooming at the dip of my collarbone and my body still warm from the moss in a grove I had just walked out of, and I looked at him through the eyes of a woman who knew exactly how she had spent the last hour, and I let the smile he was looking at do the talking for me.

“Nothing you can stop,” I said, then just for fun I added, “You have no idea what you’re fucking with.”

His jaw set. His hand on the candle shook. He did not step closer, but he didn’t step back either. He stood in the doorway with the light catching the new bruise on my collarbone, and his face went the color of the wet underside of stone.

Then he did the last thing I expected from him. He did not raise his voice, nor did he cross the room. He set the candle into the sconce by the door, and the shake in his hand smoothed itself out the way a man straightens his collar before he means to charm somebody. His eyes had the paper-pale look they got when he had gone too long without feeding. He carried the tray to the dresser and set it down gently. He laid the roses beside it and turned the best of the blooms to face the bed.

“You have not eaten,” he said. He had found the gentle voice somewhere, the one he kept for when he wanted a thing instead of taking it. “I had it made the way you like. There is no sense in you starving in the dark. None of this has to be this way, Serena. I could give you a great deal. You just have to be reasonable with me.”

I looked at the tray. Steam ghosted out from under the edge of the cloth. The scents that wafted across the room were heavenly, and my stomach growled in need. The glass of water sat there, clear and ordinary, the most harmless-looking thing in the room, but I had watched this man pull a tracking spell out of empty air and call it a flower. I had combed his roses out of my hair one petal at a time and lined them up on that same dresser like teeth. I was not going to put anything he handed me inside my body. Not his dinner. Not his water. Not his white roses, blooming beside the plate, every petal of them a window he could watch me through.

“I am not hungry,” I said.

I closed my eyes.

The bond was singing. The bruise at my collarbone was warm. Callum was somewhere out there holding his dark thread open for me.

Whatever Marcus had come for, he decided not to chance it. I knew it would only delay him, but when he walked out, I was still smiling.

I waited until his steps had gone the length of the hall, the far door had shut behind him, and the house had gone quiet around me.

Then I got up. My ribs had something to say about it, and I let them say it. I crossed to the dresser where the tray sat with its steam gone and its glass of water still catching the light, patient as a snake in tall grass. I picked up the glass. I carried it to the corner where the boards were already ruined with everything Marcus and his men had spilled in here, and I poured it out against the baseboard, slow, and watched the dark wood drink every drop. Whatever was or was not in it, it had come from his hand, and nothing of his was going inside me again for as long as I had a say.