“Hudson,” I snapped.
“I’m not leaving you after witnessing your nightmare come to life. I don’t have to be in the same bed, but I won’t sleep somewhere I’m not close enough to catch you should those demons try to drag you to Hell.”
“I’ve been to Hell, and it’s not half as bad as you think.”
He snorted, rolled off the bed, and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser to snatch spare blankets into his arms. He pointed at the wall separating the bedroom from the living area. “I’ll be right through there.”
My heart melted a little. No matter how hard I pushed him away, he refused to leave.
“And tomorrow we can talk about what wedding decisions you need to be cited on. The rest we can delegate.”
He left the door ajar and retreated, leaving me once again in silence, but this time I was not alone.
Sleep didn’t come. It stalked. When it finally pounced, it sank its teeth deep. Stone. Cold. The kind that remembered screams.
The room wasn’t a room so much as a glass box made of rules. Chalk lines on the floor, iron pins hammered into the corners, sigils that tasted like rust on my tongue. A drip somewhere I couldn’t see, steady as a metronome ticking out the moments I was not allowed to own.
“Again,” my grandmother drawled. Eloise’s voice was a ribbon tied in a knot, pretty, choking. She didn’t raise it. She never had to. Power hummed through the wards like bees in a jar.
The Hound circled me with the lazy patience of a predator that knows there is nowhere for me to go. A cruel smirk lifted his lips as he carried the knife the way some men carry flowers. He was picking a place to plant it. There were a thousand punctures on my skin where he’d grown an entire garden of pain.
“Hold,” Eloise murmured, and the wards obeyed. They coiled tighter. Magic crawled over my arms with a million icy legs, settling, pinning, drinking. It wasn’t the pain that took me apart. It was the theft. Every pull of power was a memory unstitched.
Indigo paced behind my ribs, snarling, starving.“Let me out.”
I gritted my teeth. If I did, there would be no one left to put us back in.
The Hound pressed the blade just below my collarbone. He hummed a tuneless, off-key song while he mapped me like a cartographer of cruelty. “Everyone breaks eventually, Cora. This would go much easier if you unleashed what she wants.”
I choked on a laugh that tasted of blood. “You wouldn’t need to resort to verbal threats if you truly believed that.”
He smiled as the red-hot knife slid into my flesh. I arched my back and gritted my teeth.
Eloise leaned in and brushed hair from my forehead like she used to when I was little and feverish. “Hush now,” she crooned. “Stop fighting.”
“You are a crime against humanity, and I hope you burn for an eternity in Hell,” I whispered.
“That’s no way to speak to your grandmother.”
“You have to earn the right to that title.”
“Blood binds us,” she pointed out.
The words drilled into my mind like an answer to an unspoken question. Blood binds us.
Glass pressed against my lips, and a fluid burned my tongue and scalded my throat. The wards brightened. I dimmed.
“That’s it,” Eloise encouraged. “Let me in. I trained you to kneel.”
My gaze snapped to hers. “No, you taught me what love doesn’t look like and how family is chosen.”
Eloise raised her brow. “Continue,” she decided with a nod at The Hound.
Indigo slammed her palms against the cage of my ribs.“He dies.”
“Agreed,” I breathed.
Eloise’s cool hand brushed against my cheek. “Everything worth anything has always belonged to me.”
