Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 145721 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145721 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“What?” he asked in utter disbelief. “Tonight?”
“Yes, I’ve just returned.”
“That goes expressly against the terms of our arrangement.” He looked like a dragon ready to unfurl his wings and breathe fire. “Lorcan will pay for this.”
Kierse stepped into his path. “I am safe and hale, as you can presently see. We just talked.”
“You do not know Lorcan the way that I do. He does nothing without purpose. And if he brought you to Equinox, then he’s encroaching. I can assume he recruited you?” he asked, going very still as he waited for her answer.
“Something like that.” She looked up at him through her lashes, feeling the vulnerability in the moment. “I told him that I would tell you about what he did. I think he expects you to react.”
“Are you suggesting that I am playing into his hands?”
Kierse held her own hands up. “I don’t know. I just can’t think of another reason he’d kidnap me and then set me loose if it wasn’t to dangle me before you.”
Graves’s jaw tightened farther as if he saw the wisdom in her words. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing really,” she lied. He’d given her enough to chew on, but it wasn’t really what Graves was asking, anyway. “He just wanted to know more about me. I think he was testing me more than divulging anything.”
“He said nothing about our relationship?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t know what’s between you two. He wouldn’t tell me, and I hardly expect you to if he wouldn’t,” she said with a sigh.
Graves’s gray eyes smoldered. He looked torn between two worlds in that moment. As if he were standing at the mouth of a canyon, wondering if he could jump to the other side but only seeing deep into the abyss. Finally, ever so slowly, he met her gaze. She could see shadows dancing in those dark irises. Shadows of his past and whatever had happened there.
“Many years ago, long before you were born, Lorcan and I were . . . family, of a sort,” he said, his eyes drifting to the closed window as if he couldn’t bear to speak the words while looking at her. She held her breath, unable to believe he was giving in even a little and frightened that he would spook like an alley cat if he remembered her existence. “We were an unlikely pair, but for a time, he was the other half of my coin, my brother in all but name. When tragedy struck, it fractured what was between us. He blamed me.”
He was silent a moment, and Kierse thought that may be the end of his story.
“Perhaps his blame was placed correctly,” he finally said. “But no amends were sufficient. They never could be. And thus, we have been enemies ever since.”
The ache in his voice struck her plainly in the chest. She didn’t want to feel for him, and yet she couldn’t help but feel anything else. He told the story so succinctly and with such pain that it was clear that no matter how long ago the events had unfolded, they would always hurt him. Whatever the supposed tragedy was and even if Lorcan had in turn become his enemy with a score to settle, the beginning, when Lorcan had been his found family, would always remain. No one could hurt you like family.
“Graves,” she whispered.
He came back to himself then, almost startled, as if he hadn’t planned to tell her that much. “Let’s go to the library. I found what I was looking for.”
She wanted to go back to that moment of vulnerability, but it had passed. So, she just nodded and followed him out of her room and to the Holly Library. Anne was curled up on a cushion of the couch. Kierse took a seat across from her, and the fiery thing got up in offense before trotting over to another empty spot.
“I see how it is,” she told Anne.
She thumbed through the book on the side table with half a mind as Graves poured himself a drink. She declined one for herself. And though she was trying to focus on the reading at hand, she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Anne Boleyn. The cat, of course.
It seemed uncharacteristic for him to have a cat. After all, cats chose people. Not the other way around.
She had met many an alley cat that loved her and just as many that hated her on sight. She’d befriended them and fed them when she could manage and watched Gen try to sneak a tabby past Colette.
So, why had Anne chosen Graves, of all people? Of all monsters?
Graves took his own seat beside her, breaking her from her thoughts.
“What are you reading?” she asked. She hadn’t noticed that he’d been carrying a book all this time. A little green thing that he held out to her. She took it from him and looked at the cover, which had three spirals connected to a small triangle on the front.