“I don’t know.” Cal gave Nadine’s fingers, which were still clasped with his, a playful squeeze. “What do you think, Nadine? Would you kneel before me?”
Her eyes leapt to his, that pink in her face shading to a deep scarlet.
Interesting, he thought, observing his effect on her with pleasure.I think you would.
“Stop toying with the girl.” Ice rifted through every word. Ben straightened, leaning forward from his throne of hypocrisy as he condemned Nadine to her fate while she sat there,oblivious to her own trial. “You know you shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“I didn’t.” Choosing deliberately to misunderstand and therefore undermine, he said silkily, “She brought herself here. To me.”
Because she’s mine.
Nadine set her jaw, that stubbornness he’d only glimpsed before now asserting itself in full-force as she tried to figure out who in this room was her enemy. “Was my sister here?”
“We’ve been over this,” Cal reminded her. “She’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”
Odessa made a moue of concern that looked like the pantomime it was in this locked-room spectacle, but Ben was visibly furious. He wasn’t used to having his authority questioned by the gentler sex. Their mother had always bent to his will rather than suffer the storm of his wrath. Even Odessa, who prided herself upon being provocative, was wary of teasing him.
“Did you search the forest?” Nadine asked.
“Those trees go on for miles.” The ice in Ben’s words became bladed and lethally cold. “They stretch into canyons, lakes, and mountaintops. There are parts that are completely inaccessible and backed up by years of windfall and brush. Where the fuck do you propose we start?”
“I don’t know.” She looked smaller. Her voice sounded smaller, too.
Odessa tucked her nail file into her pocket like a duelist sheathing a blade. “Don’t talk to her like that, poor thing. She’s going to think that we’re heartless.”
“Depending on who she’s been talking to in town, she probably already does.” Cal turned on her so suddenly that she jumped, taut as a wire and just as tempting to pluck. “Did you speak to Helena Peters, Nadine? I bet I can imagine what she said aboutme. That I have my way with girls and kill them in the woods while they’re still smiling—is that right? You know they say all Cullraven brides bleed on their wedding night, regardless of whether or not they’re virgins.”
Ben went stiff. Noelle, he knew, hadn’t been. A point of contention with his brother, even if he hadn’t voiced it to her; he’d taken it as a sign that she might be too worldly. But the maids had still whispered of blood on the sheets during that first night spent in his bed, so it hadn’t stopped the claiming, and it wouldn’t stop him now if Nadine incited his wrath.
“Cal.” Odessa gave him a chastising look—as if he were the one grimacing like a guilty corpse. “She doesn’t want to hear about our silly old family history.”
“She should know what she’s dealing with, don’t you think?” Meeting Nadine’s fearful eyes, he went on blithely, “You know they call us theKillravens in town. Every death that happens within a fifty-mile radius is laid at our family’s front door. They’ll tell you that to walk into Ravensgate is to walk into the very mouth of hell.”
Out here in the middle of the mountains, rumors ran wild as weeds. They sank roots into everything they touched, blossoming with pale, trembling petals of half-truths. But under the soil, buried with the bones, there were real truths.
That was where the bodies were buried.
Nadine paled, drawing her hand back from him. A shame, that, but his teasing had shifted Ben’s disdain from Nadineto the more familiar enemy of the townsfolk and the need to protect the legacy and preserve his own honor.
“They’re backwards hicks,” he seethed. “Helena Peters has had it in for us for years.”
“She didn’t tell me anything like that,” Nadine said quickly. Too quickly. Which meant shehadtalked to people in town. God only knew what poison they’d spilled into her willing ears.And yet she came here anyway, that dark voice whispered.Some poisons are sweetest on the tongue.
He exchanged another look with his sister.
“Aren’t you friends with the sheriff?” Nadine persisted. “His son was at the wedding—the redhead, right? Can I talk to him?”
She’d have better luck trying to press water from granite. “Rael,” he clarified. “And Gideon’s his father. They’re well aware of the situation.”
“Can I talk to them? Either of them?”
“No.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And why not?”
“Sheriff Crocker was called out to a pile-up on the interstate.” Ben shifted his weight, bristling with importance. “So he’s not around right now. And Rael’s not here.”
“I can’t say I blame him.” Cal looked not at Ben, but the boar’s head behind him with its cloudy glass eyes, killed almost a century ago by his great-grandfather and carried over from England. “Sometimes I don’t want to be here, either.”
