To my surprise, she snorted. “Some sort of vigilante, then? Trying to be everyone’s hero?”
Something clicked against the hard floor nearby, and I stepped closer to her. “I never said I was a hero.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you?—”
I pressed my hand to her lips, silencing her. “Someone’s coming,” I murmured, close enough that my nose brushed the top of her head. She went stiff beneath my touch, her breaths shaking in an attempt to stay quiet. Slowly, I felt them even out, matching with mine as her body began to relax. Her nearness sent warmth coursing through me. I couldn’t seem to remove my gaze from hers, even as the tapping of heels on stone faded away.
I saw so much in those emerald eyes. Ferocity, caution, pain, loneliness. The guarded expression of someone forced to build a wall, suddenly stripped bare by a stranger in a dimly lit corridor.
Removing my hand from her skin, I swallowed, silently chiding myself for getting in this position. I’d almost been spotted not once, buttwice. I should be out of the palace and halfway back to my family’s cottage by now.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not supposed to be here?” she asked, a bit breathlessly.
“And here I was, thinking I was being subtle.”
She cocked her head, unamused. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Wolff!” a familiar voice shouted, coming from the stairs. She jerked her head toward it, her eyes widening.
I cursed under my breath. That sounded like Horace, and if he knew I was here, he would tell my sister in a heartbeat. Pulling the hood of my cloak over my head, I quickly backed away and disappeared down the hall before she could say anything else.
16
Rose
“What happened back there, Wolff?” Horace asked as he guided me down the stairs and back to the third floor. “With that Illusionist?”
I’d managed to momentarily push Callum’s cruel trick aside after the shock of finding the same stranger from the forest again, but as we entered the hallway where I’d seen Horace’s dead body, everything slammed back into me.
The memory of my father’s death was a wound that had never fully healed. I’d covered it for two decades with layers of flesh, bone, and pure nerve, pushing it down so far I’d convinced myself it hadn’t happened. I hadn’t thought of that day inyears, beyond the ghost of a scar burning beneath my flesh.
Now, the scab had been ripped open, and I couldn’t stitch the mangled skin back together, no matter how hard I tried.
It had been my fault.I’dled those Illusionists straight to my father. I’d been too trusting, too young and naive to see the danger they posed. And because of me, my father had been murdered.
I could still feel his blood, warm from the gaping cut in his neck, pouring onto my little hands as I knelt over his body and screamed.
I could still see his dark blue-gray eyes fixed on the ceiling, glassy and unmoving despite my pleas for him towake up.
I could still smell the lingering herbs from his charms, weighing down on my senses and making me dizzy.
Aunt Morgana and Uncle Ragnar had found me hours later, lying next to him with my arms flung around his chest and my body covered in blood. I didn’t remember much of the following months. Or years, if I was being honest. People didn’t know how to act around me, how to talk to me—the orphan Alchemist, whose mother had died giving birth to her and whose father was murdered before her very eyes. They kept their distance, afraid of getting too close to the strange, quiet, cursed little girl.
Rumorsstillcirculated. What had Hamilton Wolff gotten himself into? How had two mysterious men from Iluze crossed the border undetected and snuck onto the property? What did they want from the Wolff family?
I never found out the answers. Any time Morgana and Ragnar had tried to talk to me about it, I’d shut down like I did moments ago. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember. I didn’twantto remember. But the dam had broken, the suppressed memory pushing and surging forward, and suddenly, it wasallI could remember.
And one phrase stood out among the rest. Like a slow-burning flame, a festering poison that slithered on the fringes of my mind, fueling my rage, my pain.
“Branock Aris sends his love.”
I’d forgotten that snarled confession, but twenty years of repressed wrath and blame rested on that single sentence.SomehowBranock Aris was responsible for my father’s death.
My jaw clenched. It was a shame he was already dead.
Horace grunted and pulled me to a stop, crossing his arms in front of his large chest. “What did that boy make you see?” he asked, his normally gruff voice surprisingly gentle.
I understood now why I had such a fear around people like Callum.Illusionists. Why he had ignited something colder, something deeper than mere anger when he’d used his powers on me inthe Decemvirate meeting. Ihatedthat he could incite such dread, that he now held this power over me. The mere thought of him made me tighten my fingers around the pouch of herbs dangling from my vest.
