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“Do you think I haven’t found it unusual that werewolves are trying to kill me?” I bite back. I take a deep breath to calm myself. “Tara, listen to me, please. Whatever you or Clare might have thought about your mates’ motives, about our parents’ motives… it goes far deeper than control of the pack. Something was done to Nathan and me. By the thralls.”
Tara’s back goes straight. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know about this already?” If she did, and she never told me…
She shakes her head. “Josh never really clued me in on anything. I was seen and not heard and definitely not briefed on secret plots.”
“I had to ask. Before Clare died—”
“Before you had her executed,” Tara corrects me.
I ignore it. “She told me that the plan had moved on from executing Nathan to executing me so that I could be replaced by my mate’s mistress.”
“The pack doesn’t trust her,” Tara protests. “Clare had to have been mistaken.”
“She was. Or lied to.” Which makes me even more furious. Clare was willing to murder me over pack politics. Did she even have any idea what the true goal of my assassination was? Or was she just content to see me die for her husband’s political ambitions. “The pack wanting us dead has nothing to do with who controls the throne. There’s a spell on Nathan and me. A binding. It’s ancient thrall magic that somehow endangers the pack.”
Tara nods slowly, and I see her mind working behind her blank, grief-erased expression. “So, they were acting for the good of the pack, after all?”
“I suppose you could frame it like that,” I say, a little alarmed that she came to that conclusion. “But since we don’t know what it is those werewolves were trying to protect us from—”
“Guess you should have left some of them alive,” she snaps.
I take a deep breath to calm my urge to respond in kind. “Tara, I’m pregnant.”
She takes a breath that isn’t audible, but which raises her whole chest.
“The spell the thralls did, they did because they want this baby,” I go on. “For what purpose, I have no clue.”
“How did you find this all out?” she asks, not commenting on the pregnancy announcement.
What did you think she would do? Whoop for joy? I’m still the sister that killed our sister. I’m still married to the man who separated Tara from her mate, from any hope of having a child of her own. Why would she congratulate me? Why would she be anything other than furious, at me and at the unfairness of the universe?
So, I answer her question. “When Nathan and I went to London, we met with a human magician.”
Tara’s eyes widen and she turns her head sharply toward me. “Such a thing exists?”
“I know. I had no idea, either,” I say.
“They’re not thralls?” She’s just as bewildered by the information as I was. “Like, thralls that ran away from the pack or—”
“Just humans who use magic.” Since I don’t know the details of how that all works, and since that’s not really the point of the conversation, I go on. “We needed someone outside of any pack, who could examine the spell objectively and tell us what we needed to know, without any investment in the outcome.”
“What did he find?” The fact that Tara is talking to me now, not just looking for ways to snipe at me, feels like a cheap thing to be happy about. It doesn’t mean anything other than that she’s interested in this particular conversation.
But I’ll take it. “I’m bound with runes from Tyr’s aett.” I don’t have to explain what those are; Tara’s always been a bit of a mythology nerd. “And Nathan is bound with etheric chains.”
“Like Fenrir,” she says, referencing the wolf held captive by the gods. She glances down at my stump. “Wait. Nathan didn’t—”
“No, Nathan isn’t the one who bit off my hand,” I say with a roll of my eyes. “Look, I love the guy, but I wouldn’t stick around if he decided to start munching parts off me. Anyway—”
“You love him?”
What a weird question to ask. “Do I love who?”
“Nathan. You just said you love him.”
I laugh out loud. “Okay, I must have misspoken. Because—”
Because there’s no way I’m in love with him.
Because that would be depressing, because he doesn’t love me back.
Because he doesn’t think he can love anyone.
“I don’t really care,” Tara says, waving her hand. Her callousness stings, and I’m pretty sure it’s designed to. “The spell has you marked with runes from Tyr’s aett. You lost your hand. Nathan’s side of the spell is symbolic of Gleipnir… chains that will hold him until—”
I know this part. “Until the end of the world.”
“You paid attention in class,” Tara says with a brief smile, the first I’ve seen from her in a long, long time.
