By then, I’d managed to shove my legs into a set of Bones’s workout joggers. I hadn’t dared use magic to shrink them, soI just yanked them up and tied the ties, tightly enough to stay around my waist. I was listening with everything in me as I buttoned up one of his shirts over my bare torso. Leaning over my dress, which he’d tossed in a corner of the closet, I ran my fingers all over it until I found the belt, then the crystal.
When I heard the door open, I still had it gripped in my hand.
I froze.
The closet door remained slightly open, presumably because Bones thought it would look more suspicious if it wasn’t. I couldn’t see anything but a strip of the far wall near his desk, but the sounds through that opening between the wall and the closet door were loud, as if I stood right there in the room with them.
That’s why I heard the crack and thud of the blow, Bones’s grunt of pain, and the crash when he stumbled into something, and knocked something to the floor.
I rose to my feet, breathing harder.
It never once occurred to me that Bones wasn’t the one who’d gotten hit.
Panic and adrenaline shot through me. I stayed totally silent, and didn’t move other than to straighten, but every nerve in my body seemed to ignite in that same instant. The sound was unmistakeable. I knew what I’d fucking heard.
Rage boiled through me, so intensely I had to bite my tongue to remain still.
I heard the voice then, and that’s when I knew. I fuckingknew,somehow, that it was him.
Not just Bones’s father.
That prick I’d met at the base of the tower on my birthday.
I recognized his alien presence in every cadence, every sneer, every tone drop and lift, even his word choices and his silences. It was him.
I didn’t just think it. Iknewit.
“Howdareyou,” the slow, low, dangerously cold voice hissed. “Howdareyou defy me. If I had the time, I’d beat you unconscious, you disgusting, ungrateful animal.”
Anothercrack.
“Where were you?” he spat. “Why did you not answer? Over and over I called. Over and over, only to receive nothing but your insolentsilence.”
Anothercrack.
“Answer me, whelp, or I’ll break your jaw. Then beat you until you answer me with your mind.” His voice darkened with rage. “How did you do it? How?”
Blood rushed into my face. My fingers clenched around the crystal, hard enough to hurt.
I stood there, shaking with fury, with adrenaline.
Also with disbelief.
Why would he allow this? Why wasn’t he fighting back? It couldn’t be the money. His father didn’t give him any money, not in a way that actually mattered. Was belonging to the infamous Bones family that important to him, that central to how he saw himself, that he accepted this, as part of the cost? Was it something to do with his mother?
Did his father have something else over him?
Why the fuck would he tolerate this?
Stay out of it, Shadow.The thoughts were a bare whisper, but I flinched, my heart hammering in my chest. I couldn’t mistake the fear there, the terror.Please, gods, stay out of it. Don’t make a fucking sound… please, darling, please.
I paled.
Anothercrack.
That time, I heard Caelum gasp. The pain in it was unmistakeable.
“What did I do?” he gasped. “I’ve been here. I’ve been here. You know I can’t––”
