“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “He’s not my real husband. He’s just a means to an end.”

“Famous last words. All bets are off if you don’t have an easy way to off him.” She brushes her hair back over her shoulders and smiles at me. “I think it could be good for you. Every girl needs a hobby, and you do love your murder games.”

I ignore the jab. “Aidy, what if I can’t do it? I’ve never had to be charming for more than a night.”

Her face softens. “What is the only thing stronger than the stone this house was built on?”

“My will.”

She’s asked me that question so many times over the years. But my will never feels weaker than in the moments when I cling to this phrase. It took me years to understand that the strength isn’t in not wanting to give up, but in desperately wanting to and continuing to persevere.

“I’ve made a decision.”

“Oh?” Aidia asks.

“I’m not going to let our parents use me anymore. I’ll do my time at Mountain Haven, but you and I are leaving this city when I’m done.”

A crease forms in her brow, her expression morphing from humor to concern. “Low, you know we can’t do that.”

There’s so much conviction in her words, but I don’t want to hear it.

I want to rage at her for giving in. Her surrender to her circumstances feels like a betrayal. She’s always been too strong to break, and I can’t bear to live in a world where she’s irreparable.

A dull ache forms in my temples, and I lie back and stare up at the light reflection patterns on the stone ceiling to try and summon calm.

I’m tired of everyone acting as though this is a problem we can’t solve. I don’t care about peace for the city if it means chaos for my sister. I don’t care if that makes me a bad person. Maybe it means I’m unworthy and ungrateful for my magic, but I’d give up both my social and literal power if it means bringing Aidia home not just to us, but to her old self.

OceanofPDF.com

7HENRY

My morning meeting with a new contact in our Lunameade network ran much longer than I expected it to. The man could certainly drink, especially for so early in the day. I had hoped to be in and out, but it was clear the messenger from several of the high magical houses knew the value of his information and had every intention of getting as much out of me as possible while he revealed it.

When I step into the boarding house suite and see that my mother’s bedroom door is closed, I know I’ve missed my chance to have lunch with her.

“She’s resting,” my father says. “It was a lot of stress for her to play nice with the Carrenwells at dinner last night.”

Guilt sinks in my stomach. I hate that she’s here in Lunameade instead of tucked safely back at the fort. She’s too valuable to spend so much time here, and every moment under their hawklike observation feels like an opportunity for them to find out exactly what she can do. It’s an enormous risk. I wish we had left her behind, but she insisted we had a better chance of seeming legitimate as a full family unit.

“It takes a lot out of her to smile to their faces when she knows what they’ve done,” my father says, his voice withered with weariness.

The Carrenwells are the reason Holly is gone—the reason my parents lost their daughter and heir. She was always the responsible one—the one with holy fire to protect the fort.

Holly’s smiling face still glows in my memory, her dark eyes full of laughter, her lips twisted in a mischievous smile. She loved to tease me. She’d find this entire situation hilarious and likely be taunting me endlessly about having the very difficult assignment of flirting with a pretty girl. But that’s how Holly was; she found lightness in even the most dire of situations. Even the day she died, she’d been teasing me not five minutes before her death blow.

When my father looks at me, I can see her absence in the heavy creases in his brow and around his mouth. His dark hair is streaked with gray. It’s cut short and styled neatly, just like his beard. It feels like he aged overnight, but it’s just as likely that managing the fort through crisis took as much out of him as Holly’s death.

He sits down in a plush chair and stokes the fire. It’s not as cold here as it is at the fort, but he gets restless without something to do with his hands.

“Your betrothed is quite beautiful,” my father says.

This is the first chance we’ve had to debrief about my time alone with Harlow. I don’t want to meet his eye. I’ve always been bad at lying to him. “Yes, I suppose she is. Also a handful.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him that she tried to kill me, but I hold back. I don’t believe her story, but if I tell my parents that the Carrenwells have already made an attempt on my life, they will bail out on this plan, and I cannot bear to meet the ten-year anniversary of their betrayal without giving the Carrenwells the revenge they deserve. Nearly ten years of rebuilding, and the driving force motivating me through it all was the promise of vengeance.

My father arches a brow. “Did she get under your skin yesterday?”

“One wrong move and she might have jammed her blade under my skin. She carries a dagger.”

My father’s brows shoot up. “Smart. Does she know how to use it?”

I shrug. “I didn’t have the misfortune of finding out, but I appreciate the vote of confidence in my charm.”

“So how did you know?”

I wince. I didn’t want to admit that I got so close or it might give him the wrong expectations. “I felt it.”

He grins. “I knew you’d make headway. She gave you a look when you walked into the room to sign the contract.”

Yeah, a look that said I’d nearly fucked her the night before. A split-second look of shock and lust that transformed into terror and then a forced, placid calm.

“She expected me to look like a wild animal. To use her charming words, she was happy to see I knew how to walk on two legs,” I say.

My father rubs a hand over his beard. “The Drained are hardly the only danger in this world for a young woman. I gave your sister her first blade to fend off mortal men, not the Drained. It sounds like Harlow is similarly prepared.”

I can’t believe how casually he mentions my sister. Every time someone brings Holly up, I still feel blind with rage and grief. I feel her absence in every lull in conversation, in every failure, in every passing day when the Drained scratch at Mountain Haven’s walls.

I push through the emptiness in my chest. “Harlow is smart. She’s not going to be easily swayed.”

“You knew that might be a possibility.”

“She’s used to safety. I assumed she’d be more pliant,” I say.

My father shakes his head. “There’s different danger here. People resent those at the top of the food chain just like they do at home. She’s used to a different type of survival. Blessed Divine, she didn’t even flinch when her father sliced her arm, and that was no scratch.”

I should have known my father would have picked up on that. I was hoping to impress him with that fact, but it’s almost impossible to be more observant than he is.

He rubs the back of his neck. “You look tired. Make sure you’re eating enough and resting. We need to be ready to head out at any time if this goes wrong.”

I blow out an exasperated sigh. “I’m a grown man. You don’t need to coddle me.”

My father holds out his hands to brace against my frustration. “I’m not trying to patronize you. I need to know you’ll get your mother out. It’s just the first time we have been away from home since the attack.”

“It won’t come to that, but if it does, I will get her out,” I say. “I can’t say I’m rested, and being here makes me feel nauseous, but I’m fine.”

My father’s eyes narrow on me as he leans back in his chair. “Just stay ahead of it.”