I frown when I turn it over. It says just two words.
Trust Hawthorn.
And then, as soon as I’ve read it, the words disappear, replaced with requirements for the essay Ian has tasked me with.
I try to read the first few pages of the top book on the stack, but quickly realize I’m in no mood to parse through the dense text. I flip the book shut and stretch, knocking my knuckles against the book Hawthorn got me for Yule, ready to chuck it out of my nest.
Only to realize the cover is an illusion.
That the book on comportment for omegas is actually the biography of an omega saint: Saint Rosamund, the Black Rose.
And that, that’s something I can get right into.
CHAPTER16
Hawthorn resists every attempt I make to draw him into conversation over the next few days.
So unlike the brother who called me up and encouraged me to engage in every silly euphemism for sex he could think of while I groaned and squirmed in the backseat of one of my father’s town cars as Marcus drove me to Fairhaven.
So unlike the brother who texted me a string of crude emojis after I told him not to ruin my next “study session” by calling again and again if I don’t pick up the first time.
So when Hawthorn texts the phone no one else in the family has the number to, telling me to meet him in the game room for a few rounds of billiards—which my father would hate—I’m more than a bit confused. Still, I roll out of my nest where I’d been idly scrolling through everything I’d missed in the group chat I share with Alyssa, Ellie and Bitsy, throw on something more presentable than pajamas, and make my way to the game room, padding softly down the quiet, carpeted halls.
It’s almost too quiet in the manor—until I reach my father’s study and hear the voices leaking through the door. Turning, I see a shimmer in the old-fashioned keyhole. A spell?
“—can’t believe you locked her magic like she’s some deranged criminal—” I hear Hawthorn say. “She’s your fucking daughter!”
I crouch beside the keyhole and press my ear to it, only to hear my father’s stern rejoinder. It must be a spell, but who on earth would cast such a spell on my father’s door? Who wouldwantme to hear such a conversation? Unless it’s a warding gone wrong. “Don’t you dare raise your voice to me or question my decisions, boy. Your sister is a far greater danger than you know. How in the devil’s name did her magic get unlocked? Have your sources at Fairhaven found anything out?”
I freeze, my stomach lurching. His sources? Saints above, I told Hawthorn exactly how my magic was unlocked, that Professor Reinhardt came upon me and undid the complex spellwork my father put in place to hold back my magic. And he wasappalledwhen I told him. But his sources? Has my brother been spying on me?
His voice is dry, almost bored, when he responds. “I haven’t heard anything. Certainly, there are talented enough mages at Fairhaven who could have figured it out, but as to who performed the unlocking? I don’t know.”
“I suppose how her magic was unlocked is of little consequence now. I knew I shouldn’t have sent her to the damnable school,” my father says, and I hear the soft footfalls of his pacing in the carpeted study.
Willow speaks for the first time. “Well, you had to get her out from underfoot somehow. She knew too much. How I don’t know, but all of our plans were in jeopardy because of her. I still say you should have shipped her off to a finishing school for omegas as soon as her designation revealed and been done with it.”
“She’s strong,” Hawthorn sighs. “Too strong for a lowly omega. She shamed you on her assessment, Aspen.”
“Has she shown an affinity?” Willow asks, and I can imagine her as she sits, poised and elegant, in one of the leather chairs beside the fire, one lean leg crossed over the other, one nude patent leather-clad toe tapping.
“Pitiful little Juniper?” Aspen scoffs. “You believeshecould possibly have an affinity?”
“Pitiful? Perhaps,” my father muses. “She is weak of character, for certain, but her magic is another thing entirely.”
I swallow hard. I knew my father didn’t really think of me as brave, but to hear him call me weak strikes me like a dagger of ice to the belly. But an affinity? I’ve never heard of such a thing, magical or otherwise.
“Affinities are cropping up in Rose laboratories around the globe. With her innate power, she could have one of the strongest affinities history has ever seen. I suspect some form of telepathy.”
“Telepathy? You’re joking,” Aspen sneers.
“You still don’t believe she read you when you struck her two summers ago,” Hawthorn realizes.
Struck me? Aspen’s never struck me before… unless that’s one more memory stolen from me when my father locked away my magic.
“That was a fluke, surely!” Aspen insists. “Or she found out about the container through some other means.”
“However she found out, she nearly cost us everything. She’ll be our downfall if she ever remembers,” Willow says quietly.
