Page 138 of Veil of Blood and Bone

“Well, well.” My voice carries through the clearing. “Look at you.”

Some part of me wants to connect with this piece of real, lived history while the other searches for an exit.

There are none.

My eyes burn.

Maybe this scene is too powerful to look away from, and maybe I want to because it’s easier to go back to the hole I’m used to, to crawl inside and wish for freedom.

I back away slowly, drinking my fill of the past and make it halfway to the trees. Reaching behind, I scratch nails against a trunk and stop.

“You’re not a quitter.” My voice trembles as I speak out loud to ground myself. “You came to see this. Now look.”

With a whispered curse and a deep breath filling me to the bottom of my stomach, I face the scene.

My gaze collides with Forest’s.

Tension strings through my vertebrae but he doesn’t wink. He doesn’t acknowledge me before he turns to the river and reaches for Hellevi. He’s the first to touch her.

Scars line his forearms, some still bleeding.

I let myself be held, caught, hauled to his chest and breathed in. My head falls against Forest’s shoulder as his hands span my waist and hold.

Nicholas strides forward, the man, not the monster. Human, his sun-bronzed skin battle-hardened and stretched over sharp cheekbones.

Already he has the hard ridges of a man who’s survived too much. Marks stretch down from his collarbones.

His face is unfairly beautiful, long dark hair draped across his brow and eyes burning like storm clouds.

His black pants contour the contours of his hips and ass, his expression closing my throat. Desire grips me in a vise.

There is something hot about the way he watches me. Her.

Fuck, I don’t know anymore.

Wren doesn’t watch. He arrives. When his attention settles on the woman I used to be, my heart twists and I tense.

I’m chosen. And condemned in the same breath.

They are the kind of men legends warn women about. A warrior, a prince exiled from a ruined empire, a shifter who kneels for no kings and prays to no gods.

But somehow they all chose to ruin themselves for one woman.

The air tightens around me, rich with pine and smoke and moss.

They aren’t the heroes of my story.

They’re the fucking tragedies.

Nicholas’s lips move in familiar words I can’t make out. But I’ve been here before. I know it; I just can’t remember it, and the combination sends me into combustion.

I hate this as much as I crave it.

My scream, Helene’s scream, disappears somewhere beneath the rawness. The wrongness of the situation hits hard in the chest and catapults my heartbeat into an uneven rhythm.

Forest is the first to strip. His long hair falls in a single braid along his spine, several smaller braids framing his face.

Wren dips in for a kiss while my gaze tracks the line of Forest’s throat and his fingers untying the leather straps of his shirt.