Page 17 of A Lady’s Guide to Witchcraft

And really, at this point, why bother keeping up the subterfuge? It had worked for the moment in which it needed to work, but now she knew more. She couldn’t break the shields and it would take two minutes in Haven for someone to tell Ethan that she was not Petal. She was the other sister.

“I’m not Petal,” she mumbled. “I’m Briar.”

“Ah.” Why did he seem oddly vindicated? Pleased, even? “That’s better.”

She blinked. “It is?”

“It suits.”

She sighed. “Of course it does.”

So her mother had thought when Petal was born perfect and pink and glowing like a rose, followed immediately by Briar, whose right leg had stuck out at an odd angle. Like a little thorn, their mother had said. Petal, Rose, and Thorn—we shall be a little garden.

“What’s that expression?” Ethan asked softly.

“Nothing.” She tried to make her face calm, cheerful. Anything but whatever it was doing that made him arrow in on her that way. Like he would pluck the secrets from her as easily as treasures from a ship run aground. “Petal is my twin sister,” she said finally.

A pause. “Ah.”

“But I don’t know where she is,” she rushed to add.

“And you would tell me, if you did?”

“Absolutely not.”

“That’s my girl.”

Everything about that was deeply inappropriate, up to and including the heat that it kindled in her belly.

“But we’re still going to need her, little thorn,” he said. “Though I suppose it can wait until morning.” He stepped aside, bowing with a flourish like a gentleman in a London ballroom. With that hint of mockery, of course. The bite of a certain kind of darkness.

“You’re letting me go?”

“Do you want to stay?”

Absolutely not.

Maybe.

Briar Foxglove, stop being such a goose.

She had no business feeling safe with him. He’d tied her to a mast. She’d stabbed him.

“Go home, little thorn.” His voice was a promise and a threat. He really was very good at that. “It’s not like any of us are going anywhere.”