Page 102 of Wretched Thorns

She held the front of her shirt over her chest with both her hands as if her hands could hold the bond inside.

The bond could not be held inside.

It tore.

She screamed.

She folded over her knees on the bedroom floor and shook, but did not weep because she had not been the kind of woman to weep in years, and her body could not remember how.

She had built her life on that bond. Whatever it had cost to get, whatever she had told herself in the early years to make the getting sit right, she had laid every brick of who she was against the fact of it, and now that fact was coming apart in her chest like wet paper and taking the walls down with it. She did not know why.

There was no reason for it, no wound she could point to, no slow cooling she could have watched coming. It simply began, all at once, on an ordinary night with thunder shaking the windows, as though somewhere far off a hand had pulled a thread and the pulling had found her by accident, a thing she had been standing too close to when it broke.

The bond pulled again. Another thread of it left her. She rocked on the floor, her arms wrapped across her chest as pain sliced again against that which she held most sacred. She screamed again, but the thunder drowned it out.

She did not know that on a gulf road, in the midst of the storm, four people were navigating a derelict plantation to find a woman who had just turned a centuries-old warlock to ash.

She did not know the warlock was dead.

She did not know there had been a warlock.

She knew the bond was tearing. She knew the man she loved was being torn from her. She knew she was going to be alone or worse if she didn’t let them know.

She did not know about the swamp. She did not know about the garçonniere, or the ash on the cypress floor, or the woman who was walking out through wards that should have killed her. She did not know how many strands ran through the dark between her bedroom and the other room, or how old some of them were, or that when a strand that ancient burns away, the whole web shudders. She only knew that she was on the floor, and that the man whose name she was screaming was not coming, and that something she had spent years certain she would never have to feel was happening to her, anyway. For the first time in longer than she could remember, Naomi was afraid in a way she could not plan her way out of.

Chapter twenty

No One's Victim

The wards still stood between the tree line and the garçonniere. The brothers had been holding out in the storm longer than any of them wanted to. They poured everything they had through their bond into a fight on the far side of a door they could not reach, and then it flowed back to them.

Dex had gone very still beside her. His hand had come up to his chest.

“Dex.”

He did not answer.

Callum spoke first.

He spoke so quietly she almost missed it.

“She’s coming out.”

The door of the garçonniere opened.

Tara had been picturing the door coming open the way doors come open in a rescue — a measure of caution, then a body half-collapsing across the threshold, the rescuers running forward to catch what came out. That was not what came out.

Serena walked out.

She came down the steps of the garçonniere into the rain in the manner of a woman walking out of her own house at the end of a long day. Bare feet on the cypress steps. The torn cotton blouse she had been wearing for days hung off one shoulder and was dark with what appeared to Tara as a mixture of dried blood and dirt. Her hair was loose. Her hands were down at her sides. There were burns at her wrists, seeping and raw to the muscle, and there was a mark that strongly resembled a hickey at the dip of her collarbone visible through the open neckline.

There were shadows moving around her and with her, like a halo of darkness.

They moved at her hands and at her feet and around the line of her ribs in a slow steady tide that did not stop at the edges of her body. She wore them as if they were a part of her, a natural, flowing part of her like the curls that cascaded across her shoulders and down her back.

Tara had been braced for a victim. She was ashamed of it later, but it was the truth; some part of her had spent the whole drive south building the picture, the half-collapsed woman, the one who would need carrying, the one whose eyes would not quite be with them all the way home. That was not the woman who came down the steps of the garçonniere into the rain. This woman walked. She walked through wards that should have flayed the skin off anyone who touched them, and they died under her bare feet like candles pinched out, one after another, and she did not so much as glance down at them. Tara stood at the tree line with the rain running into her collar and understood that she was looking at something she did not yet fully comprehend, and that the closest label her grandmother had ever given her for it was not an assumption you said out loud about a person you loved.

She crossed the binding circle without seeming to notice it.