I hit the floor hard, and the breath goes out of me in one short burst. White-hot pain explodes through my collarbone. I roll onto my back, blinking up at the rectangle of yellow light at the door. Lydia is standing in the frame of it, looking down at me.
“He was mine, Sienna.” Her tone is oddly conversational. “He was mine for twenty years before you walked into his life. I helped him with his homework when he was nine. His hand was in mine at his father’s funeral. The week his mother died and he could not eat, I sat at his bedside. I built a life next to that man, one quiet, patient day at a time. Then, you showed up, and you took twenty years of work from me in less than a month.”
I drag myself up onto my elbow. The curse mark on my throat is screaming. A hot, live wire pulses in my chest, but I make my voice come out steadily. “He was never yours.”
The smile flickers. “I beg your pardon.”
“He never loved you. He cared about you, but love? Maybe a part of him knew that you weren’t loyal to him. Or maybe he just didn’t find you appealing.” I’m bleeding from somewhere on the inside of my mouth, but I don’t care. “Even when I wasn’t in the picture, he didn’t want you.”
Her eyes have gone very pale. The corner of her mouth twitches. “You’re going to die in here, Sienna.”
“Mm.”
“Slowly.”
I sneer at her.
She laughs once. Then, she steps back into the corridor. The door swings shut between us, and the sound of iron meeting iron is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
Her key turns in the lock.
The darkness is total.
I lie on my back on the cold floor, close my eyes, and let my body have one shudder, just one, before I push it down and lock it away.
A pair of handcuffs comes through the bars of the small grate at the bottom of the door.
I don’t fight when an operative’s gloved hand reaches in. My wrist goes into the metal, which closes. Then, the second cuffcloses around my other wrist. Cold iron sinks into my skin, and my wolf, who was already weakened by the silver-lined room, drops away from the front of my mind. The bond with Lucas dims at the edges. It’s not gone, but it is fainter now.
The hand withdraws. The grate slides shut.
Footsteps.
Lydia’s heels click down the corridor at her usual measured pace. I count them. Why I count them, I do not know. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. They round a corner, and the sound is gone.
I lie on the floor in the dark.
The cut on my jaw has begun to throb. At my collarbone, the mark burns against the chain around my throat. My shoulder is pulsating from pain. Both wrists are bound. Violet has been dragged off down a side corridor, and Lucas is somewhere in the yard, fighting things he has never fought before.
I let myself breathe in. I let myself breathe out.
The bond hums. Far. Faint. Real.
Through it, there’s Lucas. Even dimmed by the silver-coated iron, his fury reaches me. His terror. His fierce love for me carries under both his rage and his fear. So much that it strikes behind my sternum.
I close my eyes against the dark.
In my head, Violet’s voice keeps fading down that side corridor, swearing she’ll be the one to gut Lydia. And I can sense that Lillian is nearby.
An hour ago, Lucas was kissing my forehead in the moss above the compound. “Both of us,” he assured me.
The promise of it sits in my chest now, the only warm thing in this room.
I won’t die here.
Chapter Thirty-One
Lucas
