Sickly abhorrence sluiced through my veins. My hands shook and my bottom lip quivered. I didn’t understand how I was still standing with the way my burning legs trembled. After everything that had happened this evening, it was too much, what I’d been part of, what I had done.
A wrathful gaze clashed with my own. Jett’s features twisted in fury. “Collens, Hollis… Cousins of mine,” he snarled, shoving to his feet, surging for me in a blur of flesh and rage.
I jerked back. Stumbling against the bookshelves.
Varen’s rough voice boomed. “Jett!”
Graysen lunged—
Grabbed Jett by the throat—
His momentum spun them both around, and he slammed his brother into a bookcase. The vicious move shook the pictures of Tabitha, and books thumped onto the floor.
Ferne cried out.
Kenton and Caidan moved fast to flank Graysen.
Graysen pitted his entire weight against Jett, letting go of his throat to cross a forearm over his chest. They were locked in a death glare, breathing hard, as Jett struggled to free himself. The other brothers hovered close, ready to intercede.
“She killed them! They’re dead because of her!” Jett roared.
“And if the roles were reversed?” A voice cut through the room. Varen surprised me by saying, “What would you do if you found yourself cornered?”
Graysen hadn’t said a thing, simply keeping those animal-bright eyes fixed on his younger brother.
Jett’s gaze snapped to his father, his nostrils flared, and then reluctantly slumped in defeat.
Graysen shoved himself off, placing himself between Jett and me.
Kenton and Caidan backed away, retaking their original positions, both now wary. Jett kneaded his throat where bruises bloomed and went to stand near his aunt while Graysen stepped closer to me.
The atmosphere in the room crackled with tension, and my heart pounded so loudly I was sure every single one of them could hear it.
Valarie approached slowly, and I steadied my frayed nerves. She parted her lips, and there was a slight pause before she spoke. “Danne Pellan.”
My body swayed at the sensation of the ground tilting beneath me.
That name, that insidious name, wrapped around me, splintering through my mind. The feel of Danne’s greedy hands pawing at my skin, a phantom memory branded on my flesh. Hatred and revulsion curdled in my gut and sweat broke out across my palms. I pushed hard at those memories that had my nerves twitching with the desire to slough the skin from my body like a snake.
For a brief moment, as my grays met Graysen’s stormy blacks, it was only him and me in the room. Surrounded, not by his family, but by the shared terror we’d both been under…
Until I reminded myself of Graysen’s betrayal had done. He’d spun deceit and lies. Hunted me. Captured me. And stolen me.
Loathing frothed in my blood, and I clung to it, letting it shine brightly in my gaze.
He had no right to me anymore.
But through that ill feeling, I slowly realized that at the mere mention of Danne’s name, all the Crowthers, every single one of them, had bristled. My gaze slid to Ferne, where she crouched near Caidan. She’d stopped in the middle of searching for the zipper on the leather medicine bag, and I watched her hands fist, and the knuckles burn white.
The anger sparking in the air was no longer directed at me but at Danne Pellan. And a flash of another emotion, not quite pity, but some other feeling that confused them. That they should feel anything else but contempt for me.
Valarie snapped that moment in half like breaking a dead branch across the knee. “Why did Danne Pellan steal you?”
Refusing to answer, I petulantly clamped my mouth shut and crossed my arms over my chest, shifting my weight to one hip.
“He exchanged you with a changeling. I find it hard to believe someone like Danne Pellan could come up with such an elaborate plan on his own.”
“Wychthorn,” Graysen murmured.
