“I’m serious,” she added firmly. “You’re no use to any of us if you’re dead on your feet.”
He pulled her by their clasped hands until she was close to his chest. “Will you be joining me? In your soft, warm bed?”
Violet stood on her tiptoes and pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his lips. “Just to sleep.”
He nuzzled her nose. “We’ll see about that.”
“I mean it, Nathaniel.”
She did not.
Shortly after, when their clothes were on the floor and their hearts were in their eyes, Nathaniel wondered at how he could feel so at peace. He should be pulsing with anxiety right about now, downing another vial of his calming draught to keep his symptoms under control and his focus clear. His mind—and body—should be back in the greenhouse, inflicting eviscerating thoughts upon himself for his own failures to solve the blight. But instead, with Violet atop him, legs straddling his hips and her soft skin beneath his hands and her lips on his and the tight heat of her all around him, he felt utterly at home with himself in a way he couldn’t remembereverfeeling. But it wasn’t just the sex. It was the way she made him feel known just as he was, all his rough edges cradled in a way that didn’t make him feel like she was trying to smooth them but to understand their shape.
“Just to sleep,” he taunted, trailing his fingers over the curve of her waist.
She rolled her hips in a way that made him groan and her grin turned vicious. “Would you like me to stop?”
“Never.” His hand continued its wandering, dipping to the tight bud of nerves between her legs where their bodies were joined. She laughed out a moan, and his eyes remained bound to hers as he brought her to a cresting, gasping peak. With her hair wild and her lips parted, she looked beautiful. She looked like she could behis.“Moons, Violet, you make me so happy.”
She paused her movements to lean down and kiss him, slow, lingering. “You make me happy too, Nathaniel Marsh.”
And when they awoke in the soft blue hours just before dawn, Violet, warm and drowsy, was tucked against his chest like she belonged there. As they reached for each other once more, something old and bitter that had long since splintered in Nathaniel worked its way to the surface and finally, effortlessly, let go.
The Oak and the Weed
“He thinks the Eye of the Serpent is here in Dragon’s Rest,” she muttered to Peri, who was batting at Bartleby in a half-hearted duel. “Butwhere?”
Bartleby swung a vine over her shoulder, curling lazily around her neck until she pushed him away. “Not now.”
The town commerce meeting was due to start in two hours, but Violet couldn’t shake the sense that she was running out of time. Sedgwick was trying to bring back Shadowfade. Violet knew what would happen to Dragon’s Rest if he returned, and she knew exactly what her fate would be. There was no place she could run that he wouldn’t find her, not after everything that had happened. Not after everything she’d done. Best-case scenario, she’d be forced to become the Thornwitch again, but after a taste of who she could be without that part of her identity, Violet knew she could never go back.
And Shadowfade would know it too.
He would seek out everything she loved—everyoneshe loved—and he would destroy it all. Her shop. Her flowers. Her friends.
Nathaniel.
All to prove a point: that she was no one without him, and it was foolish of her to try.
No, she couldn’t let Sedgwick bring him back.
Her best chance was to stop him before that ever happened, and it was there that she felt she had the upper hand. Magic was her strong suit. Sedgwick was a powerful alchemist but a weak mage; his own natural magic barely registered as a threat. It was why he’d put so much effort into alchemy, which could gift him power far beyond his innate abilities.
She shuddered to think of the things he’d done—the things they’d done together. The havoc they’d wrought, the destruction…until she met Nathaniel, she hadn’t realized alchemy wasn’t limited to explosions and devastation. Nathaniel used his knowledge to help people in a way that was utterly brilliant—and it wasn’t just her lust-addled brain telling her so.
Perhaps your magic isn’t so bad either, said a small voice, one that had been growing bolder recently. Violet still didn’t understand the garden she’d grown that night in the greenhouse, not fully. But she knew with certainty that even if she’d pulled it from deep inside herself, it wasn’t evil, not in the way she’d always been taught her power was destined to be. Perhaps Nathaniel was onto something after all. Perhaps it wasn’t about the magic itself; perhaps it was how she used it that mattered.
Nathaniel had faced so much, carried the weight of his family’s legacy on his shoulders, and yet he was still usinghismagic to overcome the fear that harried him. Despite the tragedy of his past, he was moving onward, and Violet took inspiration from his actions. She had never fought with anything to lose, not really, and she found now that she wasn’t sure she liked it. But if Nathaniel could push past his fears, then so could she.
She had never been in love before—how could she, surrounded by villains who saw emotion as weakness? But though the word itself frightened her for its foreignness, she wondered if it explained what she had come to feel of late and what she was feeling now, this almost uncomfortable fullness in her chest, like a plant grown too big for its pot. She wanted to expand, to grow, to see where it took her, but there was still something holding her inside, trapped within the walls of her own secrets.
For the thousandth time that week, she wondered what would happen if she told Nathaniel the truth about her past. He cared for her, that much had been madeabundantlyclear, but could he care for who she’d once been? She could explain it tactfully, warn him ahead of time that her past would upset him. Once he knew, perhaps they could find a way to tell the rest of the town. Pru, Quinn, even cranky Jerome…they were her friends, weren’t they? They would understand that Violet was no longer the Thornwitch. They would see how much she was trying, how she had become someone new and better and good. They would understand that she was trying to stop Sedgwick from bringing back Shadowfade, and even more, they would help. Wouldn’t they?
But what if they rejected her? What if they feared her? What if, all this time, Violet had been fooling herself? What if her brief escape from villainy was just that, brief, and she succumbed to the training of her past? It wouldn’t be on purpose, but she couldn’t deny that her first reaction to being surprised or caught off guard was still to protect herself with thorns, to wrap the threat in a stranglehold of vines.
If she told them the truth, she might let her guard fall. She might hurt one of the people she cared about, and as Nathaniel would tell her, even accidents could have dire consequences. Then all of it—her shop, her friends, Nathaniel—would be lost to her.
From his place on the counter, Pericreeaughed at her and butted his stony head against her arm.
