She had promised herself, twelve years ago, that she would know her brother's voice anywhere, in any condition, after any length of silence. She had not expected to be tested on that promise while standing barefoot in her own kitchen with a case file open on the table and cold coffee going colder in her hand.
The rain had entered its third day, casting Veyr in a murky gray. From her apartment window, Rose could barely make out the towers, dark masses receding into the mist. Closer at hand, water crawled down the glass, drawing the streetlights into distorted yellow streaks. Whenever the wind rose, a bare branch scraped against the window. The dry scratching had become so familiar that she no longer looked up, though sometimes, in her most exhausted hours, it still made her think of fingernails scraping the lid of a coffin.
On the table lay the files she had opened almost two hours ago and scarcely managed to read. Rose bent over them, trying to find her place, but her attention kept slipping from the page to the hallway. The elevator stopped. A door closed. Pipes rattled in the wall. She knew each sound was harmless. She also knew that one unfamiliar noise among them would be enough to keep her awake until morning.
You could stop doing this, she told herself, the way she told herself most nights, knowing exactly how little it would change anything. You could close the file and sleep like a person who has grieved and finished grieving. Other people manage it.
Since that night, sleep had never returned to Rose whole. Sometimes she woke with a start, certain someone had called her name. Sometimes, after switching on the light, she had to stare at the coat hanging in the corner before she could believe no one was standing there. She understood that the old fear was still inside her, finding new shapes in which to survive. Understanding did not help her sleep. Her body had learned to endure; it had never learned to stop waiting for the next terrible thing.
Rose drew the top sheet closer. The copy of the Veyne mansion fire report was dated November 17, twelve years ago. She knew the figures beneath it by heart: three missing, one dead, one arrested. At the bottom of the page was the child who had never been found.
Noah Veyne, presumed dead.
She held her gaze on the word presumed longer than on anything else. Hundreds of readings had softened the edges of the paper, but the phrase had lost none of its power to send pain through her chest. No one had found Noah's body. Not a bone, not a shoe, not anything she could hold in her hands and understand that her brother was dead. They had given her a sentence that sounded cautious, then used it to end every search.
As long as he's a missing child, someone still has to look for him, she thought, the old bitter arithmetic surfacing again, worn smooth from years of handling. The day they call him dead, the looking becomes mine alone to carry, and mine alone to eventually set down. I have never once managed to set it down.
She lifted her coffee, took a cold mouthful, and set the cup beside the files. Her phone vibrated. In a room filled only with rain, the sudden sound made her shoulders stiffen.
An unfamiliar number lit the screen. Rose watched until the call stopped, breathed out, and tried to return to the page. Probably a wrong number. But before she had finished a line, the phone vibrated again: the same digits, the same persistence that irritated her before she had even heard the caller's voice. Suddenly it felt as though someone were waiting on the other side of her door, certain she was home.
Rose answered.
"Hello?"
No reply. She heard a thin silence, different from the quiet of a line that had not yet connected, and frowned.
"Who is this?"
A faint breath reached her. Broken, labored, held back so hard that she had to press the phone closer to her ear. Rose stood, the chair sliding away from her knees, but the person on the line still said nothing.
"Who's calling me?"
Three knocks answered, slow and distinct. They came from the phone, yet for a moment Rose was standing before the old wooden door of the basement bedroom. She remembered the grain of the wood, the darkness beneath it, her mother's voice just before everything ceased to make sense.
Rose, whatever you hear, you must not open the door.
Her fingers tightened around the phone. Rain still struck the glass; the apartment was still around her. But before the memory could release her, a voice slipped through the static.
"Rose..."
The cup fell from the table and shattered on the floor. Cold coffee spread into the gray carpet, but Rose did not look down. She stood rigid, afraid that the slightest movement would make the sound vanish. The voice was hoarse and weak, distorted by the line, but something in the way it called to her was what she had been waiting twelve years to hear.
"Noah?"
Silence returned. Rose moved toward the window, almost believing that if she stood closer to the city, the signal would clear and she would not lose the person at the other end again.
"Noah, is that you?"
"Rose..."
This time the voice was clearer, carrying the panic she remembered from when Noah would crawl under the table to hide from thunder, both hands clamped over his ears. He was older now. His voice could not be unchanged from memory, but she recognized the effort to reach her through that fear.
"Rose, can you hear me?"
"Yes. I can hear you. Where are you?"
"You mustn't come here."
She stared at her reflection in the glass, her mouth forming the question while her mind struggled to grasp that her brother was speaking to her.
"Where are you?"
"You have to listen. Don't—"
A heavy crash cut him off. Rose held her breath, listening for him amid the jumble of sounds.
"Noah?"
"Don't come to Blackthorn Manor."
The name made her turn toward the files. Blackthorn, home of the Draeven family. The most powerful family in Veyr, and the name connected to the last people seen on the night her home burned. For years, Rose had circled clues that refused to fit together. Now a telephone line was drawing them all to one place.
"Noah, are you at Blackthorn?"
No answer. She heard something dragging across a floor, a stifled moan, the clink of metal.
"Noah!"
"Rose, don't come—"
"Where are you? Noah, answer me!"
"Don't trust the one who bears—"
The line went dead in the middle of the sentence. Rose kept the phone against her ear, refusing to understand the silence, then called back. A recorded voice told her the number did not exist. She tried again, checking every digit to be certain she had made no mistake, only to hear the same indifferent reply.
Her hand shook as the screen went dark. Inside, though, a terrible stillness was taking hold. She heard Noah telling her not to come, remembered how he had been cut off, and held on to the one thing more certain than all the rest: he was alive. She believed he was at Blackthorn. The pointless train journeys, unanswered calls, evenings bent over files, and advice to let go all receded. She no longer had to decide whether to keep searching. She had somewhere to go.
Rose opened the bottom drawer of her wardrobe and took out the handgun and folding knife hidden behind old coats. She checked the magazine, secured the knife inside her cuff, and pulled on her coat. Back at the table, she paused beside a wooden box, lifted the lid, and took out the silver bracelet her mother had left her.
The cord coiled around the drop of blood on its face had worn smooth from years against her skin. It was the only thing her mother had left her, something she had almost never been without. Rose fastened it around her left wrist and pulled her sleeve over it. She looked once more at the open file, then left the apartment, leaving the coffee spreading across the carpet and the conclusion she had refused to believe for twelve years.
⁂
"You can't go alone."
Mara Quinn's voice filled the car, angry and broken by the rain at her end of the call. Rose watched the wipers sweep the windshield. Each pass brought the road briefly into focus before it blurred again, forcing her to keep her eyes ahead while the only friend who knew she was still looking for Noah tried to make her stop.
"I don't have time."
"Then wait for me. I'll come and get you."
"No."
"Rose."
The way Mara said her name made her tighten her grip on the wheel. She knew her friend was frightened. She also knew that only someone close enough to her would dare let that anger show now.
"I've waited twelve years."
Mara fell silent. Rose felt no sense of victory. She only heard the pause and thought of the weak breathing on the earlier call. In twelve years, she had agreed to wait so many times: because there was no proof, because someone had not replied, because another journey might be a waste. Now she was afraid that every minute she stopped was another minute Noah had to spend there alone.
"Blackthorn Manor isn't somewhere you can just walk into," Mara said at last. "The Draevens aren't like ordinary people."
"They're still human."
"You don't know that."
Rose looked through the window without answering. In Veyr, people always lowered their voices when they spoke of the Draevens. They owned hospitals, banks, and the largest estates in the north, but rarely appeared in the papers as other wealthy families did. There were rumors that the family was older than the city itself. Rose had no way to verify them. She knew only that their power had no need to display itself often. It was there in conversations that abruptly changed direction, in questions no one was willing to answer.
"At least let me call the police," Mara said.
"The police won't help me."
"You don't know until you try."
"I have tried."
She heard her own voice go dry. Her father had been arrested twelve years ago on suspicion of killing a member of the Draeven family. They had taken him away before she could speak to him one last time; three days later, they told her he had died in custody. Suicide, the report concluded. In the years that followed, every visit Rose made to the police only confirmed that no one wanted to reopen the Veyne family's case.
Mara sighed. "Rose, listen. If Noah really is alive, there may be a reason they've kept him. Don't walk in without knowing what you're facing."
"I know who I'm facing."
"Lucien Draeven?"
Rose said nothing. The name lay between them, heavier than the warning before it. The twenty-nine-year-old heir had never given an interview, never appeared at society parties. The first image the public had seen of him came after his father's death: a man in a black suit standing before the gates of Blackthorn, holding the family ring, still stained with blood.
After that, rumors multiplied around Lucien. He had killed his father to take control. He was not a Draeven by birth. He had entered the ritual chamber beneath the manor and emerged as something else. Rose had never had proof enough to believe any of it, but neither had she found anything about the family that reassured her enough to dismiss it. She had repeated their name in her mind so often, bound it so tightly to the fire and everything she had lost, that the prospect of meeting Lucien felt almost like entering a story that had been waiting for her for years.
"Don't go there," Mara said one last time.
Rose watched the road stretch ahead beneath the rain.
"Too late."
She ended the call. Silence returned to the car with the sound of the wipers, and for the first time since leaving the apartment, there was no one left to whom she could insist she was certain.
⁂
Blackthorn Forest began at the end of the northern road. Beyond an old stone wall, the trees gradually closed over the car, hiding the sky and turning the daylight a cold green. The rain grew heavier. Rose leaned forward to study the road in the headlights, trying not to let the trunks passing on either side draw her into a familiarity she could not yet name.
She had come here once, when she was eight. Her mother had brought her and Noah through the forest in an old horse-drawn carriage, never saying where they were going, only checking the bracelet on Rose's wrist again and again. Noah had sat beside her with his stuffed rabbit. Rose remembered him clutching it whenever the wheels jolted, then asking with the solemnity of a child trying to understand what the adults were hiding:
"Are we going to the monsters' house?"
Her mother had not answered. The rest of the journey survived only in fragments: fire in the forest, her mother's tight grip, a man's voice outside the carriage.
That child cannot live here.
Then her mother's voice, clearer than any image Rose still possessed:
She will never belong to you.
Rose braked. The car stopped on the deserted road, her heart beating so fast that she had to keep both hands on the wheel and wait for it to slow. A vague pain passed through her temples. A memory, or something I've invented from twelve years of turning the same day over and over until it stopped being reliable, she thought, unable to decide which frightened her more. The harder she tried to see the man's face, the more fire and darkness blurred together.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Noah had called. That had just happened; it was not an old dream she was trying to explain. Rose held on to that thought and drove on.
The gates of Blackthorn appeared through the rain, taller than she had imagined, two black iron leaves set between weatherworn stone angels. Above each angel, a stone raven spread its wings. Rose switched off the engine and watched for a while. No guards, no cameras, no sign of life. She had prepared to be stopped at the gates. This apparent lack of defenses made those preparations useless and unsettled her more than a line of armed men would have.
She took her lock picks from the glove compartment and got out. Water soaked through her hair and ran inside her collar as she knelt before the lock. A few seconds later, the gates sprang open. Rose rose, holding the picks longer than she needed to. For somewhere like Blackthorn, that was far too easy, she thought, and made herself walk through anyway.
The drive passed beneath an arch of interwoven branches. Damp earth and rotting leaves mingled with a faint metallic tang, like rusted iron. She had barely stepped through when the gates began closing behind her, so slowly that at first there was only the sound of iron moving. Rose turned. There was no wind, no one pushing, but the two halves continued inward until they met with a hard clack.
It let me in, she thought, and the thought sat cold and certain in her chest, worse than any lock could have been. It didn't need to stop me at all.
She slipped a hand inside her coat, touched the gun, and turned toward the manor. Each step carried the sound of the gates farther away in her mind, but the feeling that she had been let in remained.
About fifty meters farther on, Rose found footprints in the mud. At least three people had walked toward the house; between the tracks ran a long, uneven furrow, as though something heavy had been dragged along. She bent to look closer. A red drop struck the back of her hand.
Rose looked up, then stepped back. A man hung from the branch directly overhead, both wrists bound, his head bowed. Blood dripped from a deep cut in his arm, mingling with the rain before it fell. She was trying to see whether he was alive when his body stirred faintly.
"Help..."
The plea was so weak that she could not tell whether she had heard it or read it on his lips. Rose glanced toward the manor, then back at him. He might be a warning, she thought. Or bait. Or both, and the house doesn't see a difference between the two. She had not worked out how to help him without turning her back on the drive when a dry branch snapped behind her.
She spun and drew the gun. Three figures in long black coats stepped out into the rain, their faces hidden behind plain masks. On their collars, an embroidered cord curled around a drop of blood. Rose recognized it even through her rain-blurred vision. The bracelet beneath her sleeve suddenly felt heavier.
"Miss Veyne. The master is expecting you."
She kept the gun trained on the speaker. "I'm here to take my brother home."
"The master will speak with you."
"I have nothing to say to him."
"You don't have a choice."
Rose pulled the trigger before he could take another step. The shot cracked through the forest. The man in front went down, and the other two rushed her. She retreated and fired again, but only grazed one man's shoulder. He kept coming, caught her gun wrist, and twisted hard. Pain clenched her jaw. She drove a knee into his stomach, then struck the back of his neck with the gun as he doubled over.
The sound of a knife leaving its sheath came from behind. Rose could not turn in time. The blade slashed her shoulder, sending a hot line of pain down her arm as she drove her elbow into her attacker's face. He staggered, giving her enough space to draw her folding knife, drive it into his hand, and wrench it free. His roar followed her as she turned and ran.
Rain lashed her eyes. Blood soaked through her coat at the shoulder and slid down her arm, while the manor swam in and out of focus through the water. Rose did not stop to look back. The front door stood open on a darkness deeper than the forest's. She crossed the threshold, bringing the rain and her ragged breathing with her.
The door slammed shut behind her.
⁂
Rose stood still in the entrance hall, listening to water drip from her coat onto the stone floor. The small sound was strangely distinct. Beyond the door, the rain must still be falling, but here she could hear no wind, no wood creaking in the damp, no ticking clock. The manor did not feel abandoned. Its silence was too closely guarded, making every sound she had brought inside seem unwelcome.
The chandelier overhead was dark. Candles lined the corridor, illuminating portraits of the Draevens, their wavering flames making the faces seem to move as she passed. Men in black cloaks, women wearing red stones, children with the same cold eyes. Rose tried to watch the doorways instead of the paintings, but those gazes remained at the edges of her vision.
Metal sounded at the end of the corridor. She turned toward it and was raising the gun when a voice spoke behind her.
"You need go no farther."
Lucien Draeven stood at the foot of the stairs. He wore no mask and carried no weapon. His black suit fitted neatly over a white shirt buttoned to the throat. Dark hair, swept back, exposed a face so composed that Rose, in her wet clothes and with blood on her hands, felt like the only person to whom anything unusual had happened.
I imagined someone the rumors would actually fit, she thought, some small, unwelcome part of her cataloguing the stillness of him even through the fear and the pain in her shoulder. Not this. Not someone I'd have to look at twice to believe was dangerous at all.
She had imagined a face better suited to the rumors. But there was no visible madness or brutality in Lucien for her to recognize. He simply stood there, cuffs straight, a silver ring on his right hand, every part of him suggesting that he had no need to hurry. He looked at the gun, then at the blood on her shoulder.
"You're hurt."
Rose raised the gun higher. "Where's my brother?"
Before he answered, she saw a figure beyond the glass door at the end of the corridor. Rose looked closer, and everything around Lucien ceased to matter. Noah stood there, hands bound behind his back, his face thin, long hair falling across his forehead, a bruise at the corner of his mouth. He was so much older than the child she had kept in her memory. She recognized him at once, and it hurt: the recognition itself, and the twelve years written on his face that she had never been allowed to see.
She stepped forward. Lucien blocked her path.
"Move."
"You should not have come here."
"You took my brother."
"I protected your brother."
Rose looked past his shoulder to where Noah was still held behind the glass.
"By tying him up?"
"Noah saw something he should not have seen."
"Then ask me your questions. Leave him alone."
Lucien looked at the people behind her. "No one leaves this house without my permission."
Rose gave a humorless laugh. Her shoulder throbbed with each breath, but she would not let herself lower the gun.
"You sound like a kidnapper."
"You may call me whatever you wish."
"Then I'll call you a murderer."
Something shifted in his eyes. Only for an instant, not enough to call anger, but enough to open a crack in the rumors of a man no one could shake. Rose seized on it. She had come too far to accept another composed answer about the people she had lost.
"My father died because of your family. My mother died because of your family. My brother disappeared because of your family. Did you think I'd walk in here and calmly negotiate with you?"
"Your father did not die because of my family."
"He was arrested on a false charge."
"Yes."
Rose faltered. He said it so easily, as though the thing she had spent years trying to prove had never been in doubt for him.
"He did not kill a member of the Draeven family."
Her grip tightened on the gun. The admission should have given her something, but the man making it was standing between her and her bound brother. Rose did not know whether it was the truth or another way of making her hesitate.
"What are you saying?"
"I am saying your father was framed."
"Then who framed him?"
"That question would be better put to your mother."
Rose pulled the trigger. Anger moved faster than thought; by the time the shot echoed through the hall, she saw Lucien lean aside. The bullet grazed his shoulder and shattered the face of a woman in the portrait behind him. A fist struck glass at the end of the corridor.
"Rose!"
She lunged toward Noah, but Lucien caught her wrist before she could reach him. He seemed to make no effort, yet she could not pull free however hard she tried, and some treacherous corner of her noted, even through the fury, how warm his hand was against her rain-cold skin, a detail she had no business having room to notice.
"Let go."
"You cannot take him."
"Try stopping me."
She swung her free hand at his face. Lucien dodged, but her next kick, aimed at his knee, forced him back and loosened his grip for a moment. Rose turned toward the glass door. A dark figure rushed her from the side, and something drove into her flank, so deep and sudden that at first she felt only that she had been stopped.
The guard withdrew his knife. Pain followed the steel out of her body, flaring as she stumbled back and pressed a hand to the wound. Blood welled between her fingers. Rose stared at her hand, unable to understand why the distance to Noah was still so great.
Lucien turned to the man with the knife.
"I told you to take her alive."
"She fired a gun in the house."
"I said alive."
His voice remained calm, but the guard bowed his head. Rose saw the movement through a thickening haze. Her knees struck the floor; her legs could no longer hold her. Behind the glass, Noah called out.
"Rose!"
She tried to stand, still pressing her side. "I'm getting you out..."
She could barely hear herself. Lucien knelt in front of her, blocking part of the corridor she was still trying to see past him.
"You're bleeding to death."
Rose knocked away the hand he reached out to support her.
"Don't touch me."
"You have no choice."
"I always have a choice."
"Not tonight."
She looked up, close enough now to see his eyes clearly. Ash gray, dark and drained of light. She hated having to search them for something she could trust. Hated the feeling that her own body was forcing her to accept help from the man she had just tried to shoot, and hated, more than either of those, the small, treacherous part of her that registered the warmth of his hands as something other than a threat even now.
"What do you want?"
"I want you alive."
"What for?"
"To finish what your mother began."
Rose wanted to ask what he knew about her mother, but she could not draw enough breath for the next question. The hall darkened. Candle flames stretched into streaks, then vanished from her sight. Noah was still pounding on the door, the sound receding beneath Lucien's final order.
"Take her downstairs."
⁂
When Rose opened her eyes, it took her a moment to realize the cold beneath her back came from a stone table. Candles burned around the room, their pale light falling on walls she could not yet make out. The smell of antiseptic mixed with metal brought back the blood on her hand before the pain in her side returned. The wound had been dressed, but each breath still drew a sharp line of pain inward.
She braced her hands to sit up.
"Don't move."
Lucien stood at another stone table, washing his hands in a copper basin. The water turned pink around his fingers. Rose looked at it, then at her bandages, trying to work out how long she had been unconscious and what he had been free to do to her in that time.
"What have you done to me?"
"Stopped the bleeding."
"That isn't what I'm asking."
"Do you know where you are?"
"In your basement."
"This is the Draeven family's ritual chamber."
Rose looked around again. Symbols covered all four walls, some resembling letters, others branching like blood vessels from a single point. A large circle on the floor enclosed two cords twined together. She felt the familiarity before she reached for her left wrist. The bracelet was still there, its silver face bearing the design she had thought of for years as simply part of something her mother had left her.
"What ritual are you planning?"
Lucien dried his hands on a white cloth. "I am not planning one."
"Then why bring me down here?"
"Because the ritual began before you entered this house."
She gave a quiet laugh. It hurt her side and died at once, leaving the bitter taste of helplessness.
"I've been stabbed, lost blood, and been dragged into a basement. You expect me to believe in some ritual?"
"You are free not to believe."
He moved closer to the circle, never taking his eyes off her.
"But your body already knows."
Rose tried to push herself upright. She did not want to think about the symbols, or let Lucien lead her deeper into things only he was allowed to explain. Noah was upstairs. She had seen him, and that had to matter more than anything in this chamber.
"Take me to Noah."
"Once the ritual is complete."
"No."
"You are in no position to refuse."
She looked at him through the dizziness. Every protest returned to the same place: she was wounded, she had no control over the door, and none over Noah. Rose hated having to change her question, but she needed to know what he wanted to take before she could think how to hold on to it.
"What do you want me to do?"
Lucien took a black wooden box from the table and opened it. Inside lay a small knife with a silver handle; the lines engraved on the blade matched the symbols on the floor. Rose looked at its edge, her body instinctively contracting around the wound.
"You want to kill me?"
"If I wanted you dead, I would have left you to die in the hall."
"Then say what you mean."
"Your blood is the final key."
"The key to what?"
"To the curse."
She fell silent, waiting for him to hear how absurd he sounded. But Lucien only came closer. The bullet had left a furrow in his shoulder, with blood dried around its edges. For a moment, Rose clung to that ordinary fact: he bleeds too. Whatever else he is, that much of him is exactly as breakable as I am, and hated how much steadier the thought made her, given who it belonged to.
"The Veynes and the Draevens once made a pact."
"My family made no pact with yours."
"Your mother did."
"You're lying."
"You can discover the truth for yourself once you survive tonight."
Rose stared at him, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. "And if I don't agree?"
Lucien was silent so long that she began to hear her own breathing clearly.
"Then you will die."
She turned toward the chamber door. "And Noah?"
"He will die after you."
Anger rose with nowhere to go. She wanted to close her hands around his throat, scream into that composed face, destroy the symbols turning the room into a prison that needed no restraints. But merely sitting upright pulled painfully at her wound. Rose had to swallow every impulse with a shallow breath, and that effort made her feel smaller than any threat he could have made.
Noah is alive. I can't die here yet.
"What is this pact?"
"A blood bond."
"Between whom?"
"The last bearer of Veyne blood and the Draeven heir."
Rose met his eyes. "You."
"Me."
"And afterward?"
"Afterward, you will live."
"With you?"
"You will not be able to live without me."
She felt the cold travel from her back to the nape of her neck. Lucien set the knife in the center of the circle, as though placing an object where it had always belonged, while she was still trying to understand what she was being asked to surrender.
"You may hate me. You may try to kill me. But from now until the curse is broken, you cannot stay away from me for long."
"Never."
"You'll see."
Rose looked at the twisting lines on the walls to avoid looking at him. She did not know whether her mother had ever made a pact, what her blood had to do with this chamber, or whether Lucien was telling the truth or using her desperation to make her step into another trap. All she knew was that Noah's voice was still in her head, that he had called her name after twelve years. If Lucien meant to turn that into something to bargain with, she would at least force him to state his part plainly.
"Once the ritual is complete," she said, each word dragging through her dry throat, "you let Noah go."
"I promise."
"I don't trust your word."
"You need not trust it. Only remember that a Draeven promise is bound in blood."
"That doesn't sound like a promise."
"Because it isn't one."
Lucien lifted the knife.
"It is a term of the pact."
She watched his hand, hating the way Noah's life had become part of a bargain spoken of so coldly. But she had nothing else to put between Lucien and her brother. The pain still pulsed in her side, reminding her that time was not on her side, however long she prolonged the conversation.
"Do it."
Lucien paused. "Are you certain?"
"You just told me I had no choice."
"I want you to say it yourself."
Rose looked up. His need to hear the words from her own mouth made it crueler: he had taken away every way out, yet still waited for her to call what remained consent. He wants me to own this, she thought, something in the observation both infuriating and, in some small buried way, unexpected from a man she had already decided was without conscience. She thought of Noah behind the glass, then kept her eyes on Lucien so he would see she understood exactly whom she was speaking to.
"I agree."
He cut his palm, letting the blood run, then handed her the knife. Rose took it. Her hand trembled, less because of the blade than because the chamber had suddenly touched an old image: a dark room, a circle on stone, her mother kneeling before a man as blood fell drop by drop. She closed her eyes to drive it away. Fragments of memory had returned too often that day, each opening another question she had no time to pursue.
Rose cut her palm. The pain was sharp and cold, unlike the deep wound in her side, and kept her conscious as their blood met.
Every candle in the chamber went out at once. In the darkness, something tightened with a faint sound like a bowstring being drawn. Then the stone beneath her shook. Rose looked down at her hand. A glowing red line ran from her palm to her wrist, slipping beneath the skin and creeping up her arm like a living thread.
She tried to pull away. Lucien held her.
"Don't fight it."
"Let go!"
"The harder you resist, the tighter it pulls."
The red cord drew taut between them. Pain tore through Rose's chest, folding her forward, her mouth open in search of air. Each time she tried to breathe, what entered her lungs felt as sharp as broken glass; the more she needed it, the less she could bear it. Lucien's hand was still there. She hated its grip, but through the pain she began to hear a heartbeat that was not her own.
It did not reach her through her ears. It beat inside her chest, slipping between her own frantic pulses, sometimes so close that the two merged, sometimes distant, as though a space had opened inside her body. Rose tried to tell them apart, clinging to the thought that she must still be able to recognize her own heart. But the longer she listened, the less she knew which beat had hurt her.
The chamber disappeared around her.
⁂
Fire filled the corridor. Black smoke rolled beneath the ceiling; portraits shriveled in the flames, their painted faces twisting in the red light. The smells of wood, blood, and burning hair tangled together, making Rose want to turn away. But a boy stood at the end of the corridor, perhaps thirteen, pale-faced and holding a silver knife. She recognized Lucien before she understood how she could know him in that form.
He stood in front of her mother, barring the way to her.
Eveline Veyne held a small child. Rose looked at her face, then at the child in her arms, and her thoughts stopped at something she could not accept: it was her. She wanted to run to them, but her legs would not move. The distance remained while her mother's voice reached her as though from somewhere farther away than the burning corridor.
"Take her away."
Lucien turned his head. "I can't."
"You have to take her away."
"They'll kill you."
"They'll kill all of us if she stays."
Rose watched her mother's lips move, desperate to hear more even as every word brought her closer to something Rose did not want to see. She had missed that voice for so many years. Now her mother was right before her, and all she could do was watch another child being forced to make a choice for the adults.
A woman in a black dress stepped through the flames. Isolde looked at Lucien with a tenderness that made Rose cold amid the heat.
"You always make things harder than they need to be."
The boy's fingers tightened around the knife. "Stay away from her."
"Do you think you can protect everyone?"
Isolde came closer. Eveline pushed the child toward Lucien.
"Run."
"No!"
The scream rose as a silver blade pierced Eveline's body. Rose saw her mother fall and opened her mouth, but no sound came. She did not know whether she was trying to call to her or stop what had already happened. She only saw Lucien catch her, blood soaking his small hands. Nothing in the boy's face resembled the composure she had seen in the entrance hall. The fire exposed a despair he could not hide.
Isolde bent to his ear.
"This is the price of defying fate."
The image shattered before Rose could look at her mother's face again. She returned to the chamber with a gasp and fell onto the stone floor, her whole body still trying to escape a fire that was not there. Beside her, Lucien sank to one knee, clutching his chest, his face white.
The red cord still joined their wrists. It was so fine it looked as though it might snap, but each time she unconsciously drew her hand back, its hold made itself felt beneath her skin.
Rose looked at Lucien. His lips had lost their color, his breathing was heavy, and his gray eyes could no longer keep everything hidden. There was pain in them. What unsettled her most was that she had just seen it on a boy's face, and that some part of her, against every reason she had to hate him, ached at the sight of it now.
"You..." She had to stop for breath. "What did you see?"
"You saw it, too."
"You knew my mother."
"I did."
"You were there."
"I was there."
Rose looked at his hands, a grown man's hands now, though in her mind they were still covered in Eveline's blood.
"You tried to save her?"
Lucien did not answer. She waited, afraid he would deny it and unsure what she would do if he confirmed it. In the end, that silence was the closest thing to an answer she received.
She still had every reason to hate him: Noah bound, the knife in the hall, the chamber and the threats that had just forced her to agree. Nothing she had seen erased any of it. But for twelve years, Rose had believed she only needed to find the face of the person who had destroyed her family to know where to direct her hatred. She had never imagined that the person at the end of her search had once been a child who could not keep her mother alive, and she had certainly never imagined that discovering it would feel less like victory and more like losing somewhere new to put twelve years of certainty.
A sound on the stairs made her turn.
"Noah?"
"Rose!"
Rose pushed herself to her feet. Her brother was just above them, so close that every question about Lucien fell away. She took one step, and pain stabbed through her chest, a spasm dragging her to her knees. Lucien caught her arm before she fell all the way to the stone.
"Don't go."
"Let go of me."
"You cannot leave me."
"That's my brother!"
"I know."
"Then let me see him!"
"You will."
"When?"
"Once your body has adjusted to the bond."
She looked at him with all the fury she still had the strength to hold. What he had said before the ritual had now taken shape: the stairs were right there, Noah's voice was right there, but her body would fight every step she took away. She had thought she was bargaining with her life. Only now did she begin to understand that what had been taken was also the right to go where she needed to go.
"You've made me a prisoner."
Lucien did not deny it. "You were bound long before you knew the truth."
"Don't talk as though you're saving me."
"I'm not saving you."
"Then what are you doing?"
He looked at the red cord between their wrists.
"Keeping you alive long enough to learn who killed your mother."
On the stairs, Noah called again. "Rose!"
Rose pulled her hand away from Lucien. Pain clenched around her heart at once, and she fell against him before she could take another step. In the arms of the man she wanted to escape, she felt that other heartbeat inside her again, steadily threading itself through her own. She closed her eyes and bit her lip to hold back a sob, from the pain and from the unbearable fact that she had found her brother and still could not touch him.
Lucien looked down at her.
"Welcome home, Rose Veyne."
Thunder rolled through Blackthorn Forest. Beneath the earth, Rose heard it dimly beyond the heartbeats holding her there. She had come to take Noah home, carrying a gun and the belief that her search had finally found an ending. Now he was at the top of the stairs, and every time she tried to reach him, the blood cord tightened between her and Lucien.
She kept her eyes turned toward Noah's voice while leaning against the most dangerous man in the city to breathe. At their wrists, the red line slowly drew tighter, binding two unfamiliar lives to go on together, even though neither of them could ever return to what they had been.