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"No, thank you," I said, putting my still-full glass on her tray. "I seem to have lost my thirst for it. "
"Men will do that to you, won't they?" she agreed.
Her voice was pure country twang, although the hard, knowing smile on her face told me that she was much smarter than the aw-shucks demean
or she radiated.
Before I could tell her that Jonah McAllister was in no way my sort of man, she moved on to the next person. I shook my head. First, the woman working the door had frozen up at my appearance, and now a waiter was giving me tips on my supposed love life with the smarmy lawyer. The night just kept getting weirder and weirder.
I'd just started to wade back into the crowd in search of Finn when a sly wink of silverstone caught my eye, and I noticed one more display tucked away in a recess in the back wall of the rotunda. Curious, I wandered over and finally found something noteworthy after all.
Two silverstone rune pendants lay on a bed of blue velvet behind a sheet of glass. One pendant was shaped like a snowflake, the symbol for icy calm. The other was a curling ivy vine, representing elegance.
I knew the symbols, knew exactly what they meant.
I'd once had a pendant just like them, one shaped like a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. A spider rune, the symbol for patience.
The symbol that was branded into my palms to this day.
My hands balled into fists, my nails digging into the spider rune scars there.
Mab had put the marks there the night she'd tortured me, using her Fire magic to melt my silverstone pendant into my palms. It had been one of the most excruciating things I'd ever endured, but it was nothing compared with the utter shock I was feeling right now.
Because the snowflake was my mother Eira's rune. And the ivy vine had belonged to my older sister, Annabella.
Chapter 4
I leaned forward, until my nose was almost pressed against the glass, and studied every single millimeter of the runes. The pendants weren't polished to a high gloss like everything else on view was. Rather, the chains they hung on were blackened, and what looked like streaks of soot and bits of ash clung to the surface of the silverstone runes, as though they'd once been in a fire and had never been properly cleaned.
They'd been in fire, all right - Mab's murderous elemental blaze.
Mab . . . Mab must have taken my mother and my sister's rune necklaces after she'd killed them that horrible night. I'd thought that the pendants had been buried in the rubble after I'd used my Ice and Stone magic to collapse the mansion on top of us all; or perhaps they had been pilfered by looters later on. But somehow Mab had gotten her grubby, greedy hands on them. She'd had the runes all these years, and now here they were, on display for everyone in Ashland to see, like a - like a damn trophy celebrating my family's murder.
I'd thought by killing Mab that I was finally free of her, that I was finally done with her, and that she couldn't shock, surprise, or hurt me anymore. I'd even gone to her funeral and said my piece to her ebony casket. But once again, the Fire elemental had managed to reach out from beyond the grave and mess with me.
Shock, anger, rage, hate. Those emotions surged through my body, matching the sudden, rapid, painful thump of my heart. For a moment, I considered using my magic to harden my fist so I could punch right through the thick glass. It would feel good, so fucking good, to smash the glass and grab the runes. Because they were mine - mine and Bria's - and I'd be damned if Mab or the museum was keeping them.
But I forced myself to slow my ragged breathing and calm my racing heart. No, I couldn't do that. There were too many security cameras in here for me to get away with such a crude smash-and-grab job. The guards would swarm me en masse, and I'd end up like the dwarf at the Posh boutique - bloody, beaten, handcuffed, and escorted off the premises by the esteemed members of the po-po.
No, this would require a different approach - a nice, quiet, after-hours visit to the museum. I wasn't leaving these last few precious pieces of my family behind.
I turned around to find Finn and tell him about the runes - and came face-to-face with Owen Grayson.
* * *
My breath caught in my throat.
Perhaps absence really did make the heart grow fonder, because I couldn't stop staring at my former lover. Black hair, intense violet eyes, a slightly crooked nose, a faint scar on his chin. I drank in the sight of his rugged features before my eyes traced over his broad shoulders and then down his muscled chest. The tuxedo he wore only made him look even more handsome and perfectly outlined the raw strength of his body.
Owen's eyes widened, and he almost lost his grip on his champagne flute before he clenched his fingers around it once more. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
"Hi," he finally said in a soft, cautious voice.
"Hi yourself. "
We stood there staring at each other for what seemed like forever, although I was ticking off the seconds in my head the way I always did. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . .
Finally, at the forty-five-second mark, Owen cleared his throat. "I didn't expect to see you here tonight. "
