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Auri nodded, her chin quivering, then looked down as she shook her head, tears dropping to the floor.
“Where’s Jessamine?” Tarley asked.
Brinna turned to look at Tarley, still in Lachlan’s arms.
Tarley scrambled from Lachlan’s embrace and flipped the bedding back to a starkly empty bed. “Has anyone seen Jessamine?”
35
If you take this path, you will lose,Baba had said.
The wizard frowned and looked up at the monstrous hedge before him. That fucking witch was in his head, the old crone who’d been helping Azleah all along. He shook her ridiculous prophecy from his mind and patted the vial containing the witch’s thread of magic—her magical signature—in his pocket. Though he didn’t like that she had a thread of his magic in exchange, he’d known getting what he wanted—access to Azleah—would cost him. He had no intention of letting the hag steal his glee at finally meting out Azleah’s comeuppance. Besides, she was wrong. He was about to get everything that was coming to him.
Power.
Immortality.
Revenge.
With the witch’s thread giving him access, coupled with his own magic to enhance the power, he muttered an incantation and reached out to touch a vine. The hedge shifted, vines pulsing and wreathing into a doorway. As he walked through, the hedge closed behind him, continuing to shift as it created an unobstructed passageway directly through to the other side. Once through, he looked at the lair of his nemesis, but what awaited him was disappointing.
Azleah wasn’t standing there, bursting with hatred.
Tom wasn’t trying to protect her.
There wasn’t a glamoured castle or maze where they’d been living all these years.
No.
It was a small, understated cottage tucked up against a thicket of giant evergreens. It had a thatched roof and mullioned windows decorated with flower boxes he assumed bloomed in the spring but only contained dead plants. There was a garden, harvested now as they had slipped into fall. A barn. It looked… domestic.
He sneered and kept walking, relishing the moment Azleah would realize she’d lost.
Once at the door, he hesitated a moment, ready to burst in and destroy the object of his rage. But when he opened it, silence greeted him, an eerie quiet that made what lay inside feel like a tomb. As he stepped inside, his boots echoed loudly against the planked wooden floor. The cottage was cold and appeared empty, as if abandoned.
But then he saw her. His nemesis, curled up asleep—a quick check confirmed—in Tom’s arms, older, but still as lovely now as she’d been all those years ago, more so even than when she’d been locked in her tower prison at his mercy.
Now, it appeared, she was locked in the prison of her dreams.
The wizard crouched down and ran a finger along her cheek. “I told you I would find you,” he whispered. “Now you will pay.”
He stood, considering his next steps. “This” –he glanced around– “wasn’t what I expected. A bit…dire and morose for my taste.”
He looked back down at Azleah’s face, who as just a slip of a girl had evaded him for decades. This, now, felt anticlimactic to their game of cat and mouse. Besides, he’d loved her once—as much as he could love anything. Loved her enough to desire her heart to take the place of his own. Ending it this way wasn't satisfying. He wanted her cognizant that he’d won. He was honorable, after all.
“Here’s what’s going to happen, Princess. I’m going to make you feel my victory. When you escape this spell, you will know that I found you, and it was because I was merciful that you are alive.” He crouched down once more. “It will torture you to know what you stole was returned. To me. Then you will submit, and I will win.”
With a sigh, the wizard stood and walked through the cottage.
He found the boy asleep in a bed inside the only room on the first floor. But that wasn’t what he wanted. The youth wasn’t hidden from the wizard’s sight. Curious. He wondered if the spell had modified the protective ribbons, if the cottage negated the need for them, or if it was because he now carried a thread of magic of the witch who’d cast the spells.
He didn’t linger, sure the fools he’d gained the witch’s name from were trying to find their way through. Walking up the narrow stairs, he found the daughters, huddled together in their cold sleep, but he wanted only one.
And she wasn’t hidden from his sight any longer.
She was breathtaking. Her dark hair, her alabaster skin, her ruby-red lips. He wondered what color her eyes were?
“My heart,” he said and picked her up just as a loud yell sounded from outside the cottage.
