What of the castle on Isolacuori?
I’d prefer not to live there . . .His gold stare probes mine.If it’s all the same to you.
I don’t want anything that’s belonged to the Regios,I say as we come to a stop in front of double doors that have been flung wide.
Inside stand three Crows in skin and my grandfather. Well, Justus doesn’t stand. He sits on the bedside of a man I’ve never seen yet know is his son. And not because of the tenderness with which he wraps a band of gauze around the sleeping male’s throat, but because of the veneer of cropped sunburnt-orange hair and the spray of freckles that traipse across the bridge of his nose like a colony of red ants.
Though not Agrippina’s twin, Vance could very well pass for it. I’m so stunned by their resemblance that I cannot get my bare feet to shuffle past the oversized white rug that extends around the bed like seafoam.
“Is that the last of them, Rossi?” Erwin, who blustered in behind us, asks Justus, taking a burlap sack from the female Crow who carried it out of an adjacent room.
Before stepping onto a terrace that overlooks the white-capped expanse of Mareluce, she tosses a furtive glance in my direction. Her hair’s cropped close to her scalp and dark like her wide-set eyes. I still find fascinating a society in which people can grow their hair any length they fancy. I wonder when it’ll stop shocking me.
As she morphs into her Crow, Justus says, “Yes. That’s the last of them.” He secures the gauze with a knot before finally looking away from Vance.
The missing Lucin crystals,Lore explains as Erwin extends the burlap sack upward, and the female hooks it delicately with her iron talons.
So Dante wasn’t lying when he told you he had no crystals to spare . . .
He was lying. He’d stashed them inside the obsidian tunnels beneath Isolacuori. Rossi stole them from him.
I slide my lips together.
Apologies if you were searching for a spark of redemption in the louse.
I wasn’t, Lore.I close my fingers around the mark of the blood-bind on my palm that feels as though it pulses with its own angry heartbeat.Nothing could ever redeem him.Nothing.
Flashes of my incarceration light up my lids—the glint of the knife with which Dante opened my veins to color his vellum, the fingers he used to hike up the dress I still wear, the vile words he—
When Lore’s shadows thicken like the clouds spitting out streaks of lighting through the rapidly-darkening sky, I shut down my thoughts.
No, go on, Behach Éan. Feed me your memories so they stop burdening you.
Sharing my memories will only stoke Lore’s fury, and he’s furious enough as it is.It’s in the past.“Where are Aoife and Imogen?” I try to stalk through Lore, but with only one crow missing, he’s as solid as a shrub.
“In my mother’s closet.” Justus’s voice rises over the shield of darkness pressing against me on all sides.
When I try to sidestep my mate, he tips my chin on a curled finger.You will tell me everything later. And I do meaneverything.His eyes dip to the hand clenched at my side, the one gripping the intertwined rings.
Lorcan waits until I nod before allowing me to stride past him and traverse the room toward the closet beside which my father stands, waiting.
Glittery gowns have been strewn across the marble floor, along with heeled shoes and embroidered slippers. A jeweled sandal was flung so wide that it dangles from what looks like a gold branch, probably the perch of her horrid parrot.
I don’t have to ask where the sisters are. Their obsidian bodies shine black against the white marble. I crouch beside Imogen and remove the black sword speared through her thigh. Instantly, her skin pales and softens. I watch her gasp in air, and it reminds me of the babe Nonna helped birth on our scarred kitchen table. The exhausted woman had come for some herbs to lull her to sleep and had left with a beautiful, little wailing thing who would keep her from her dearly sought-out slumber.
I meet Imogen’s dark stare, offering her a smile that cannot possibly right the wrongs done to her because of me.
She fell because of me, Fallon. Not because of you.Lore stands over me, over his Crow whose gaze latches on to his.
I can see the umber pool of her irises churn at the sight of her misty king.
“No Shabbin blood on the blade,” I say, imagining that was the source of her worry.
Her throat bobs with a swallow, and her lips part, but no words come out.
My father reaches his hand down to help her up. “You’ve been immobilized for a month. I’m afraid it’ll take a few hours for your voice to return.”
A month . . .
