“Can someone turn the lights on?” I yell, my heart thundering in my ears.
Light rises in the room, and I see that my hands are not stuck to a rope at all but to a strand of a massive spider web, and right in front of me, so close I can almost feel the brush of her pinchers, is a black widow spider the size of a bear.
I open my mouth to scream, but my breath catches in my throat. I’m too terrified. I’m frozen from fear. And then I notice something odd. A gilded frame surrounds the spider. I don’t understand what I’m seeing until I reach out a hand to touch the frame and the spider’s leg moves.
The spider isn’t in front of me. It’s a mirror. I am the spider.
Welcome home, Zoe.
Now, I scream. Again and again. Squeezing my eyes shut as the terror bleeds out through my voice.
“Zoe? Zoe! I’m here.”
Sebastian’s arms wrap around me and squeeze. The bedside lamp turns on. But even with Seb’s bedroom coming into focus, it takes several seconds to stop screaming. He takes my face in his hands, and I just lose it. My screams turn into sobs. He holds me as I weep into his chest.
When I finally simmer down and pull back from him, he wipes away my tears. “You need to eat something,” he says, as if it is totally normal that I’ve soaked his shirt with my meltdown. He stands and moves to where a nearby tray awaits as if a waiter has only recently come by and left it there for us. I wonder what time it is.
I turn and tap my phone screen. It’s two a.m. I’ve missed multiple messages from Jeremy and my mother while I was out. Shit, I am going to hear about this later. I thumb through them as I rub my throbbing head.
“I took care of it,” Seb says, gently taking my phone and replacing it with a plate filled with fresh baked bread and a selection of meats and cheeses arranged with grapes and strawberries. I’m so hungry, I instantly scoop up a healthy serving of Brie with a slice of the bread and sink it into my mouth.
“It’s still warm,” I mumble passionately around the bite.
“I had Patrick bring in a fresh tray about an hour ago when I could tell you were waking up.”
“How did you know I was waking up?” I shove another bite into my mouth.
He glances away from me as he sets my phone back down on his side of the bed and climbs back in beside me. “Your brain waves changed.”
I pause with a piece of cheese halfway to my mouth. “You were monitoring my brain waves?”
With a snort, he shakes his head. “Not actively. I didn’t enter your head or anything. But dragons can always tell. It’s like…” He stops and thinks for a second. “Like you can hear someone breathing. I can sense your mind.”
Weird. So fucking weird.
I take another bite of bread and cheese, coming fully awake.
He holds out a drawing to me, and my eyes widen as I realize he’s completed the sketch of the ring. Everything I saw in the Gold Room is on this sheet of paper. “It worked! Your dragon remembered!”
He nods. I grab my phone again and snap a picture for future reference. I want to research these spells using the grimoires in my parents’ library. But after I snap the photos, I see again the numerous calls and texts from Jeremy and my parents. “Wait… What did you mean before when you said you took care of it? What exactly did you take care of?”
He points at the phone. “I called your mother and told her you couldn’t call her back because you were in the recording studio and that we’d see her this weekend for Beltane.”
I drop the grape I’m holding back onto my plate. “You…you…you phoned my mother? How the fuck did you get her number?”
“From your phone. I used your face to unlock it and call her back when I saw her last message on your lock screen.”
I am flabbergasted. There haven’t been many times in my life when I would use that word. It’s the type of descriptor you read in novels but don’t often experience. But I understand flabbergasted because I am speechless with a combination of surprise, anger, and violation.
“Who is Jeremy to you? Your mother said he was a doctor, but what doctor texts his patients twenty times in a matter of hours?”
“This isn’t okay, Seb,” I say firmly. “I didn’t give you permission to access my phone or to call my parents. What the hell?”
He looks confused. “But if I hadn’t called her, she would have kept messaging. You don’t have to worry. I explained that you had asked me to call and that you’d be working late. She isn’t worried at all about you now.”
“In the recording studio,” I clarify, making sure I have all the details about the lie.
“Yes!” He grins brightly.
