Page 22 of Crow’s Shadow

“I am careful of them.” He resets his face, folds the fear back down under the fake tenderness. “A lesson for later. You are nowhere near ready for it.”

He studies me a long moment. Then he does a thing I do not expect. He frowns.

“Though you are further along than you have any right to be,” he says slowly, half to himself. “The piece I keep turning over. A witch does not wake on her own, you understand. Something has to pull the thread. And you, sweetheart, have a thread out already. I can see it.” His gaze moves over me, clinical, hungry in a new and worse way. “Someone has been reaching for you a long time, and you back for him, and neither of you are the wiser. Tell me. Who is he? The one you follow. The one whose name sits where your mother’s ought to.”

Something under my ribs gives one hard tug, and I would swear on the good book he feels it happen, because his smile deepens.

“No,” I say.

“You needn’t tell me. I felt it move in you.” He sits back, and the tenderness comes flooding into him again, and it is worse than the hunger, so much worse. “It changes nothing. Whatever half-built thing you have with some grease-stained ghost who cannot bring himself to look at you, it is a candle beside a house fire next to what you could be. What I will teach you to be. Your mother never got the chance. I mean to give it to you where I could not give it to her.”

“You keep dangling her.” My voice comes out low and even, and I am proud of it, of the flatness of it, in a room where I have nothing else. “My mother. If you knew her, if you’re the only one left who did, then tell me one true thing about her instead of using her to pry me open. What happened to her?”

For a while he does not answer. Water drips somewhere out in the ruin, slow and patient.

“She said no to me,” he says at last. “I told you as much already. What I have not told you is what the no cost her, and I have been saving it, the way I have noticed you save the last of your water.” His eyes flick to the capped bottle by my knee, and I hate that he clocked it. “Would you like it now? I think you would. You cannot abide not knowing. It is the loose thread in you I have pulled from the start.”

He does not wait for me to answer.

“Twenty years ago, I gave your mother the same choice I’m giving you. Stop hiding. Stop being afraid. Become what she was meant to be. She listened to every word. Then she looked at you. Five years old. Asleep in the next room.” His hands tighten in his lap. “She chose you. Told me no.” A beat. “So, I took what I needed.” My stomach turns. “There are ways to take power from a woman who won’t give it willingly. They aren’t clean. Most don’t survive it.” His eyes stay on mine. “Your mother didn’t.” For one second, I cannot breathe. “When I was done, there wasn’t enough of Maren left to save. So, I burned the house down with her inside.”

“You’re lying.” My voice does not sound like mine.

“You know I am not. You have a memory you have never once trusted. Smoke. The dark. Being carried. A doorway with the fire behind it.” He tips his head, gentle, merciless in the same breath. “No dream, Shadow. The last night of your mother’s life, and you were in the middle of it, and you have carried the smell of it in the back of your throat ever since without knowing why the embalming room made you feel at home. Three nights ago, I gave you a name. Tonight I give you the fire.” He almost smiles. “Consider it a courtship.”

And here is the thing he does not know he has done. The thing opening under me like the black water in Darkwater, taking me all the way down.

Because I know who carried me out of that doorway.

I have known my whole life, the way you know something you were too small to have words for. Smoke. Dark. Arms around me. A face above mine in the orange light. The face I have chased ever since.

I was five. Crow was fifteen. Just a boy himself, but that never mattered to the little girl he dragged out of a burning house. He came through the smoke, picked me up, and didn’t leave me there to die.

That is where everything starts for me. The debt. The worship. The hook that went in behind my ribs when I was five and never came out.

He saved me.

Whatever Crow is now, whatever wall he hides behind, I know what is underneath it. The fifteen-year-old boy who ran into a burning house and carried me out. I loved him before I even knew what love was.

But the house did not catch by accident.

Renner burned it. Burned it down over my mother’s body, on purpose, to hide what he had done to her. And a man was standing in the smoke of it to carry me out.

Which means the man I have loved my whole life was standing in my mother’s grave the night it was dug.

I don’t let it show. Years of hiding what I feel keeps my face blank. If Renner sees this hurt, he’ll use it. He’ll dig into it every chance he gets.

So, I give him nothing.

But something inside me has changed. The thing Renner wants. The thing no one at the club ever knew was there.

It’s awake.

And this time, I can feel it.

“There she is,” Renner breathes, and he misreads it, seeing only the color leave my face the way he said Maren’s used to. “There is the trouble in you. I have missed it so.”

He stands, smooths the coat down the front, and crosses to the door. At it he pauses, one hand on the frame.