“I bet you could guess.” Or maybe she couldn’t, sheltered as she was. For all that poetry she wrote, charged with a longing for dark skies and cruel hands, she could still be a naif. “Your sister’s not the pious angel you think she is. Of course, my brother’s no saint, either, but then, he doesn’t pretend to be. Not like you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So why was Noelle screaming about sparrows in the town square, then?”
The world stuttered to a halt.Fuck. “Who told you about that?”
She looked panicked. Rael—it would have to be. Dottie didn’t know that much, for one, and for another, Rael had already made his stance painfully clear. Get rid of her. But Rael didn’t know Nadine. Didn’t know that beneath all the shy glances and skittish gestures, she was as stubborn as the granite beneath their feet. Or maybe he did, Cal thought darkly, straightening.
Maybe his plan was to send her flying right into the path of his father.
The panic on Nadine’s face was fading. She gave him a look of such fragile defiance that he was nearly humbled by it. “It doesn’t matter how I know. Answer the question.”
Cal sighed angrily. “Noelle didn’t like that Ben hunted,” he said, opting for a fragment of the truth. “He knew that she was vegan and made accommodations for it, but refused to be a part of that lifestyle himself. Hunting is in his blood.”As it should be in hers.
Images flooded his mind with visceral salience: Noelle brandishing the crumbling pages from the book.Theirbook. The one that revealed all their secrets, which should have been denied to her until Ben, who had been too cowardly and faithless to do things properly, confided in her at the festival before claiming her in the woods.
Noelle—screaming, fighting with every fiber of her being as his brother dragged her to her death. And the smoke that smelled like nothing else, greasy and acrid and human—
His fingers gripped his thigh, nails biting to the brink of steadying pain.
“She said she understood that and for a while, it seemed like she did,” he heard himself say, his voice remote and alien to his own ears. “But on that day in the square, she had gotten pretty unstable already. Seeing him come back from the hunt with a clutch of dead sparrows must have pushed her over. We eat them, you know. Just like quail.”
A flash of suspicion sparked through her eyes. “Did Noelle ever go down to the mines?”
“I’m not sure. It’s possible. Why?” he demanded.
“I was just curious,” she said with a deliberate sort of innocence that didn’t fool him for a moment. “It’s one of the main points of attraction around here, isn’t it? Back home, she had an active social life and the people in town aren’t exactly friendly.”
She babbles when she’s nervous, Cal observed, drawing a finger down his cheek in thought. It was also a chilling reminder that her sister was a woman who had been violently wrenched from the tapestry of life, leaving behind far too many dangling threads for an entirely clean break.
“She wasn’t a prisoner, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“Were either of your parents against Ben marrying Noelle?”
“No. They liked her just fine at first. That’s why they paid for the wedding.”
It had been an investment and his brother had turned his happily-ever-after into a glaring omen by choosing to celebrate his newfound union in the shadow of the first Cullraven bride.
Chin propped on his fist, he studied the dead woman’s sister with an indolence he did not feel. She was difficult and easy toread, and not in the ways he expected from either. She didn’t trust him and she shouldn’t, but fuck, part of him still wanted to charm her to his side just to see if he could.
She stared back at him—not at his face, but at his chest, where he’d left his shirt unbuttoned to get a bit of a breeze on his neck. He leaned forward and didn’t think he imagined the catch in her throat when the fabric buckled.
Keep looking at me like that and your sister may not be the last Cullraven bride to step over that threshold, little sparrow.
“Here’s your omelet.” The waitress broke the heady silence by plunking down the ceramic plate and Nadine took a rather desperate drink of her water, as if she sought to purify rather than quench. “And your avocado toast. The chef said our seasoning powder has cornstarch in it, so we’ve just given you the spread and some finishing salt. Enjoy.”
“Okay,” said Nadine. “Great. Uh, thanks.”
“You seem distracted,” he observed. Pointedly.
Her eyes dipped from his and her sharp white teeth sank into the toasted bread with a crackling sound. “I’m just thinking.” A flash of pink tongue appeared to lick a fleck of salt from her lip, reminding him that his tongue had swept across that same slightly-pouty lip not two hours ago. “What did my sister do around here, anyway?”
“For fun?” He tore his eyes away from her mouth. His omelet sat before him, still untouched, and he could tell at a glance that the steak was under-seasoned and tough. He should have asked for it rare, but the thought of raw meat didn’t appeal to him now. “She did some charity planning with my mother, went on walks.” He stabbed a piece of meat, eying it critically. “She tried to befriend some people in town but you can imagine how that went.”
She looked chastened. Cal quickly moved on.
“Odessa tried to involve her with some of her design work, but mostly she just spent a lot of time with Ben.”
“Did she go to the Running of the Deer festival?”
