Sour wine in the mouth of Ithrandril, he called me.
Ransom straightens and comes to sit beside me.
“I think we should make one thing clear.” His voice is almost soft now, rose petals on grass. “I only want to help you.”
I lift my eyes to him. The gunpowder is gone, replaced by something like spring rain. It melts away the ice. All the stars reflected in his face.
“How can you help me?”
He smiles again, and I think how beautiful he is—a broken, bloody man standing here in the light of a harvest moon, trying to be every inch the lord he is expected to be, and only wanting to do good. My edges soften.
“I told you my father was obsessed with death.” He lays a hand on mine.
My skin thrills with the touch. Father’s words once more permeate my brain.Surely ruined. I push them away. If sin was so wrong, why did the cosmos create Ithrandril and Erybrus alike?
“He would have done anything to get my mother back. He held seances, hired mystics, even spilled blood.Myblood.”
I glance down at his hands, his wrists. And that’s when I see them.
The thin, pink scars threading up against the dark lace cuffs of his shirt. My stomach flips, a fish on a line. Is this why Ransom Black carries a sewing needle and thread? To stitch up his own wounds?
“Ransom, I—”
He holds out a finger. “Wait, let me finish. He was so close in the end, my father. Knew about the bells, those held by the Reapers. Knew that if he could only get his hands on one, he could—”
He could what?
I sit on every word, hanging onto them like the crumbling rocks of a cliff. Because Ransom is not the only one who wants to get his mother back.
One soul, a fool. Two, a thief.
What would three make me?
I don’t think I want to know.
“Everything you’re saying sounds like madness.” My hand now trembles against the brass in my pocket.
In one fluid motion, Ransom pulls me to face him, eyes glinting like green glass. My breath catches, a finger going to my throat to count the ragged beats. But to my surprise, they are even.
A-live, a-live, a-live.
I flex my palms.
“You know of what I speak, Adelaide Thorn.”
His words are hungry things matching the muck and mold of the old house. The soil cries out beneath our feet with so much pain, and it feels like a living, breathing thing. So, I choose my own with equal bite.
“But do you, Ransom Black?”
A flicker of amusement lights his face, sends the freckles that dot his nose dancing like a constellation.
“There it is,” he says. “I knew it. Show me the bell.”
“And if I say no?”
He moves closer, hands dipping to my waist, breath hot on my ear. A shiver dances up my spine, so warm and delicious, and I can almost taste the spice of him on my lips.
“You won’t say no, Thorn.”
