“What did you brother just say, treasure?” Bohdan asks.
Her hand drops to her side and fists air. No, not air…her skirt. “That he’s succumbed to the charms of shifters, just like my misguided twin.”
The train careens to the right, sending everything that isn’t nailed to the floor, skidding. There’s a soft thud, like somethingdropping. Isla trips, shuffling her feet. I assume it’s to catch herself on the mirrored panel above my head. It’s not.
She’s just slid something between the wood and my body…something which I make quick work of concealing beneath me.
As the train rights itself, so does Isla. Layer by layer, she steels her spine, rebuilding her façade so others will see a pitiless jailor while all I see is my Cauldron-forged angel.
My winged tempest.
My everything.
51
ISLA
Itest my nails to check if they’ll elongate into talons.
Not yet.
Traces of obsidian from the bullet Vance extracted must still be floating through my bloodstream.
Isla Mara Ríhbiadh, talk to me!My father’s resonant voice causes me to flinch and Konstantin, who tracks my every movement through the eye not swollen shut, to frown.
What they’ve done to him and to Izolda fills me with such unadulterated fury that I want to commit heinous crimes.
Tonight, I will.
Tonight, I’ll become the demon the antimorphs already believe me to be.
The yearning to be done with this night—to see my parents, to save my lover and his sister, to wake Lachlano, Aodhan, and Imogen from their paralysis—spurs me to enact my hastily-hatched plan.
I swivel toward Lev’s father, who’s still examining Fake-Isla’s sex. When he traces the shape of my birthmark with his finger, I swear I can feel the violation on my own skin. The rage it engenders numbs the ache in my side and whets my focus. Itraipse over to the snoring half-blood and bend over to dig two fingers into his neck.
“What are you doing?” asks the gray-haired man standing over Izolda with his gun barrel all but pressed to the back of her skull.
“Checking that his vitals are still strong,” I lie, ringing the front of his neck with blood and then the back.
Once I connect the semi-circles, I rise, pretend to stumble in order to snatch the fur coverlet from the bed and drape it over my victim. May it absorb the blood that’s about to gush out of his body.
“Think I can fuck her before we kill her?” one of the half-bloods asks. It’s the one who kept the fumes from penetrating into the cabin.
“We do not fuck animals, Vasily,” the older halfling hisses. “I’ve taught you better.”
The quiet rattle of chains makes me glance over my shoulder and pin Konstantin with a look that pleads with him not to spring his chains off.
Not yet.
“I don’t think the great Konstantin Korol appreciated you calling his fiancée an animal, Atsa,” the pervert jests.
Atsa… Could this be the infamous Volkov patriarch? Bohdan’s cousin? Are the five boys—well, four now—his sons?
“Like I give two shits what the poltroon appreciates,” the father grumbles.
I picture toppling his head from the rest of his body.
“Can you all concentrate on emptying the Crow witch of blood?” the old man growls. “This is taking too fucking long.”
