BLOOD BOND SEALS AN INESCAPABLE FATE
EPISODE 2
The Unbreakable Thread
Before Rose opened her eyes, she felt something drawing gently at her left wrist. The sensation lay too deep for her to rub away, a pressure threaded through the place where her pulse beat beneath the skin. Pain would have woken her more cleanly. This seemed almost patient, as though it had been waiting while she slept and could afford to wait a little longer.
She opened her eyes to unfamiliar wooden beams and the gray light of a narrow window. Rain trembled against the glass. For several seconds she lay still, trying to place the height of the ceiling, the curtains, the strange heaviness of the bedding across her legs. Then she remembered Blackthorn Manor, and Noah, and the knife. Lucien's hand closing over hers came back so vividly that she sat up before she remembered she had been wounded.
Pain caught beneath her ribs. She bent around it, pressing cold fingers to the bandage at her side while the room slowly stopped tilting. The wound was still deep enough to make each breath a consideration, but she remembered how the knife had entered her. She should have been in far worse condition. Beneath the fresh dressing, someone had cleaned and carefully stitched the injury; someone had also taken away her clothes and put her in a white nightdress, with a dark robe about her shoulders.
She drew the robe closer. There might have been a necessary explanation for all of it, but she had been unconscious, and no explanation could give her back the choice of whose hands had touched her. She swung her feet to the floor, needing at least to decide for herself whether she would stay in the bed.
The room was larger than her apartment. Two upholstered chairs faced a cold fireplace, their dark fabric embroidered with a cord wound around a drop of blood. She had seen that emblem on the masked men's collars. Even here, among furnishings intended for comfort, it reminded her whose house this was. Yet the windows had no bars, and there were no chains fastened to the bed. When she looked toward the door, she could see no sign that it had been locked. Whoever had put her here seemed remarkably certain she would remain.
Her knees shook as she stood. She waited for them to hold, refusing to lower herself to the mattress, and pushed back her sleeve. The red line began at the cut in her palm, circled her wrist, then disappeared beneath the skin. It had lost the raw appearance of a wound. In the dim light it resembled a fine vein illuminated from within, moving faintly with her heartbeat.
The moment she touched it, something stirred beneath her fingertip. She snatched her hand away, but the pressure tightened, and a second rhythm made itself felt inside her chest. It was slower than her own, steady where hers had begun to race. She knew whose it was before she could persuade herself that she was imagining it.
Lucien. Even alone in this room, she could not get away from him.
She closed her eyes and saw their joined hands in the chamber beneath the manor. He had made her speak the words herself. With Noah's life held before her, with her own blood leaving her body, he had waited for an agreement and treated its utterance as if it settled everything.
I agree. She could still remember shaping the words. Their bitterness lingered as she crossed the room and opened the door.
A guard stood immediately outside, his hands folded in front of his black uniform. Without a mask, his face was no more revealing than the faces of the men in the forest. Rose looked past him into the corridor.
“Where is my brother?”
“Mr. Draeven is waiting for you.” The man remained where he was, obliging her to address him rather than the space beyond his shoulder.
“I didn’t ask for Mr. Draeven.”
“You are to remain in this room until he comes.”
Rose stepped across the threshold. When he reached for her arm, she struck his hand aside hard enough to make her wound throb.
“Touch me again and you’ll lose it.”
His gaze dropped briefly to the place where she had carried her gun. She felt its absence as sharply as if he had reminded her aloud.
“You should not make this difficult.”
“Take me to Noah.”
“I have no authority to do that.”
“Then find someone who does.”
“He already knows you are awake.”
Beyond him, the manor's silence was less complete than it had first seemed. Rose could distinguish distant footsteps and the muted movement of doors, the small sounds of people going about their business while she tried to establish whether her brother was still alive. She advanced another step. The guard moved with her, and she turned on him.
“Are you following me?”
“I was instructed to prevent you from leaving the east wing.”
“I’m leaving the east wing.”
He kept his hands to himself this time, using his body to block her way. Rose measured the breadth of his shoulders and the space beside him. Under other circumstances, she might have tried it. Even now, she thought she could get past him, but her side hurt, she was unarmed, and there could be a dozen more men beyond the next door. Fighting this one would give her no better idea of where Noah was. The thought of him made her step back when everything else in her wanted to strike.
“Tell Lucien I want to see my brother.”
The guard inclined his head. “He is already on his way.”
Footsteps sounded beneath the far archway, and Lucien appeared before she could answer. He had changed out of his suit into a dark shirt, its sleeves rolled to his forearms. The bandage she remembered beneath his collar was hidden now. She knew what the bullet had done to his shoulder, yet there was nothing disordered about him, nothing to suggest that he had spent the night paying for any of it. He looked rested. Rose resented that with a force she had no intention of examining.
“You have a strange habit of appearing when people are discussing you,” she said.
“Most people do not discuss me in the corridor.”
“Most people are not being held prisoner in your house.”
His attention settled on the hand she was pressing to her side. “You should be resting.”
“You should be answering questions.”
“Then ask.”
“Where is Noah?”
“Safe.”
“I want to see him.”
“You will.”
“Now.” She held his gaze, unwilling to let the promise become another reason to send her back to bed.
Lucien allowed the silence to lengthen. Rose was beginning to recognize this about him: he did not need to refuse immediately when he could wait for someone else to explain, to plead, to expose how much an answer mattered. Knowing it did not make her need him any less.
“I need to know what happened to him,” she said. “I need to know why he was here.”
“You will learn everything when you are ready.”
“I am ready now.”
“No. You are frightened, injured, and angry. Those things make people mistake the first answer they receive for the truth.”
She moved closer, furious that he could describe her condition so accurately and use it to deny her. The thread tightened before she had finished the step. A pulse of pain passed through her chest, and she caught herself just short of stumbling. Lucien's eyes went at once to her wrist.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“You touched the bond.”
“I touched my own skin.”
“Your skin is no longer entirely yours.”
Rose stared at him. She had woken in unfamiliar clothes with his heartbeat inside her; now he spoke as if her body had become a property whose terms she had neglected to read.
“That is the most disturbing thing you’ve said so far.”
“It is also the truth.”
Questions crowded behind her teeth, but asking them would keep her here, and somewhere in this house Noah was waiting. She had heard his voice. For the moment, that was the only certainty she could afford to follow.
“Take me to him.”
Lucien glanced at the guard. “Leave us.”
The man bowed and went down the corridor. Rose watched him until he was out of earshot.
“You trust him to leave us alone?”
“He is not the one I am concerned about.”
“You should be.”
“I am.”
He turned without explaining and began to walk. Rose followed, cautious for the first few steps, expecting the pressure at her wrist to sharpen again. It remained a manageable pull. The air seemed warmer as they passed a line of tall windows, although rain still blurred the grounds and hid the forest beyond the glass.
From the drive, the manor had looked enormous; inside, its proportions were harder to understand. Corridors opened off corridors, all portraits and closed doors, with no signs or clocks to offer Rose anything familiar. She counted the turns instead: three left, one right, then a staircase and another hall. Lucien moved ahead without looking back, negotiating every change in the passage as if he knew the darkness as well as the rooms. Rose kept the route in her mind. Following him was necessary now. Remembering the way might be necessary later.
⁂
The room at the rear of the manor was enclosed in tall glass panels held within black metal frames. A hanging lamp lit a narrow table and two chairs. Noah sat on one of them with his hands free, but a guard waited outside the door, and there was a keypad beside it. The glass offered him a view of everything he could not reach.
He raised his head when he saw her. Rose stopped, caught by the simple fact of being able to look at him in the light, without blood loss clouding her vision or a weapon dictating how close she could go. Then he stood.
“Rose.”
His voice was softer than it had been on the phone. She crossed to the glass door and had to wait for Lucien to enter the code. The delay was only a moment, but she felt every second of it. As soon as the door opened, she went straight to Noah and drew him into her arms.
He was so thin that her hands tightened involuntarily against his back. She had tried to imagine what twelve years would have done to him, how tall he would be, how much of the child she remembered would remain. She had not imagined feeling the bones of his spine through a shirt. His arms closed around her awkwardly, as though he no longer trusted himself to hold someone, and she pressed her face against his hair before he could see what that did to her.
“You’re alive.”
“I told you not to come.”
“I know.”
“You should have listened.”
“I know.” She held him more firmly, because neither admission meant she could have obeyed.
For a little while she let herself remember him as he had been before the missing years: the boy who slipped into bed beside her during thunderstorms, who had clung to her when she carried him out of the smoke filling their mother's basement. The body in her arms had grown beyond those memories, but he was warm and breathing, and she had spent so long with nothing to hold that she could not bring herself to release him.
Noah eased away first. His eyes were red around the rims, though he had not cried. He leaned close enough that his next words were almost lost between them.
“You have to leave.”
“I’m taking you with me.”
“You can’t.”
“I can.”
“No, Rose.” His gaze slipped toward Lucien. “You don’t understand what you’ve done.”
She turned. Lucien had remained near the door, resting a hand on the back of a chair, apparently unmoved by the reunion he had made her wait for.
“What did I do?” she asked.
“You let him bind you.” Noah was watching her again.
Her fingers went instinctively to her wrist. The movement drew his attention to the red mark, and she saw his expression change before he spoke.
“No.”
“Tell me what it is.”
“Rose, you need to get away from him.”
“I can’t.” The admission escaped before she could soften it. She had meant to give Noah reassurance, something solid after everything that had been done to him, and instead she had brought him a problem she could not solve.
He looked at Lucien, who had not moved. “Why can’t you?”
“Because of the bond.”
The remaining color left Noah's face. “You don’t know what that means.”
“Then tell me.”
“It means he can feel everything you feel. It means you can’t leave him. It means if he dies…”
“Enough,” Lucien said.
He had scarcely raised his voice, but Noah flinched. Rose saw it with the same painful clarity with which she had felt his bones beneath her hands. Whatever existed between these two men had begun long before she walked into the manor. She stepped into the space between them, although it did nothing to make Noah stop looking past her.
“Finish the sentence.”
“If he dies, you die with him.”
Rose turned slowly toward Lucien. His silence left her nothing to misunderstand. She curled her fingers into her palms, finding the edge of the cut there, and wondered how he had stood before her all this time knowing what he had withheld.
“You left that part out.”
“You did not ask.”
“You told me the bond would keep me alive.”
“It will.”
“You told me I wouldn’t be able to live without you.”
“It was not a metaphor.”
“And if you die?” She needed to hear him say it himself, without a qualification she could cling to.
“You die.”
The air in the glass room seemed suddenly insufficient. Rose felt the thread running through her body with an awareness that made her afraid to take a deeper breath. She had understood captivity. She had understood that he could prevent her from leaving. This reached beyond the walls of the manor, beyond anything she might eventually learn to evade. Her life had been fastened to a man she had already tried to kill.
Noah took her hand, drawing her attention back to the pressure of ordinary fingers against her own.
“Rose, listen to me. There are ways to break it.”
Lucien looked at him. “Not here.”
“Then we have to get out.”
“I’m not leaving without you,” Rose said.
Noah tightened his grip. “You have to.”
“No.”
“Rose, please.”
His desperation unsettled her more than Lucien's certainty had. Noah was alive, he was within reach, and he was asking her to do the one thing twelve years of searching had taught her she could not do. She searched his face for an explanation that would let her help him.
“What happened to you?”
He glanced at the guard beyond the glass. Reflections layered the room around them, multiplying their faces until Rose could see four versions of herself standing close to four versions of her brother. Lucien remained a dark shape near the door. There was nowhere for Noah to turn that did not seem watched.
“I saw something,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Try.”
“No.”
“Try.” This time she said it more gently, keeping hold of his hand.
He swallowed. “There is someone under the house.”
The mark at her wrist pulsed. She felt it before she noticed how still Lucien had become, and Noah hurried on as if hesitation might cost him the rest.
“It isn’t a person. It wears faces. Sometimes it looks like Mom. Sometimes it looks like me. Last night it looked like you.”
A coldness spread through Rose. She wanted to understand exactly what he meant by her face, whether he had seen her before she arrived or afterward, but the questions tangled with the memory of their mother beneath the manor.
“What did you see?”
“A woman in a black dress.”
“That is enough.” Lucien's voice cut across the room.
Noah turned toward him. “You knew she would come back.”
For the first time, Lucien's control failed visibly. Rose could not name the emotion that crossed his face, but its force was unmistakable. She had mistaken the stillness for an absence of feeling; now she saw how much effort might be required to maintain it.
“Be careful,” he said.
Noah gave a short, humorless laugh. “You’ve been careful for twelve years. Look where it brought us.”
Rose looked from her brother to Lucien. The years she had spent following scraps of information belonged to a history these two shared, and she was still being made to listen from outside it.
“What is he talking about?”
Lucien stepped away from the door. “Your brother needs rest.”
“Noah needs to tell me the truth.”
“He will tell you what he remembers. Nothing more.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means his memory has been altered.”
Noah's face tightened. “I remember enough.”
“Do you?”
Lucien crossed to the glass wall. He did not touch Noah, but her brother lowered his eyes all the same. Rose moved closer to him, resisting the urge to demand who had altered his memory and how. Lucien had already found one way to dismiss what Noah said. She would not give him another opportunity to turn the conversation away from the disappearance.
“Lucien, if you know what happened to him, tell me.”
“I know what happened the night he disappeared.”
“Then tell me.”
“Noah was taken because he saw the ritual.”
Her chest tightened. “What ritual?”
Lucien looked at her wrist. “The one that has just begun again.”
The pain struck before she could ask him what he meant. Rose doubled over as the red thread burned beneath her skin, and Noah caught her by the shoulders.
“Rose!”
Across the room, Lucien staggered and seized the edge of the table. His face had gone pale. Through the noise gathering in her ears, Rose heard his breath catch almost in time with hers.
“What is happening?” Noah asked.
She could not answer him. Something seemed to be pulling inside her chest, drawing the bond tight enough to crush the breath from her lungs. Her vision blurred. Lucien's heartbeat crowded against her own, faster now, and with it came a terrible sense of the distance between them, as though the few feet of floor were a strain her body could no longer bear.
He moved first, leaving the table and catching her arm. The pain did not vanish at once, but it loosened enough for her to draw a breath. She hated the instinct that made her lean toward his hand. Her body had accepted relief before she could refuse its source.
Noah stared at their wrists. “It’s already reacting.”
“Get out,” Lucien told him.
“No.”
“Now.”
“You can’t keep her here.”
“I am not keeping her here.”
Noah pointed at the marks. “You chained her to yourself.”
Rose pulled away. Pain closed over the space where Lucien's fingers had been, and she reached blindly for the table. He caught her again before she could steady herself. Over his arm she saw Noah's expression crumple, and she understood how this must look to him: she had come to take him home, yet she could not even stand beyond another man's reach. After twelve years of captivity, he was watching her lose the freedom she had brought into the house.
“Rose,” he said quietly, “don’t stay here.”
“I’m trying to get you out.”
“You can’t save me by becoming one of them.”
She knew he was afraid. Even so, the words hurt in a place the bond had not touched. She wrenched her arm free once more and forced herself upright, unwilling for either man to mistake her need to breathe for acceptance.
“I am not one of them.”
The burning returned. Lucien's fingers closed around her elbow, and this time she could not prevent the relief from showing in her face.
“Do not provoke it.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Then stop fighting something you do not understand.”
“I understand enough.” She looked directly at him. “You used my brother to force me into this.”
“Yes.”
He answered without hesitation. For a moment she found herself waiting for the explanation that usually followed such an admission, the effort to make it sound less deliberate. None came. His willingness to acknowledge it did nothing to restore what he had taken from her.
“And now you’re telling me I can’t leave.”
“I’m telling you what the bond does.”
“You could have warned me before the ritual.”
“You would not have agreed.”
“No. I wouldn’t have.”
“Then Noah would be dead.”
She stared at him, searching for an apology he did not offer. Perhaps he had learned to consider survival a sufficient answer to everything. Perhaps he had never expected to be forgiven. She could make neither possibility matter while her brother stood beside her, alive because she had spoken the words Lucien demanded. Given that same terrible choice, she knew she would reach for Noah again. The knowledge made her feel cornered in a way that anger alone could not relieve.
⁂
A guard came through the door before Rose could speak.
“Mr. Draeven, the council has arrived.”
Lucien turned his head. “Who?”
“Lady Isolde is waiting in the west hall.”
The bond tightened. Lucien looked down at the mark an instant before Rose felt the change, and she could not tell whether the sensation had begun in her or traveled from him.
“No,” he said.
The guard hesitated. “Mr. Draeven…”
“No one lets her into this wing.”
“She said she would not be refused.”
A muscle shifted in Lucien's jaw. Rose watched the brief alteration in his expression and thought she recognized fear. It did not seem directed toward his own safety. His attention kept returning to her, and the possibility that he was afraid for her offered less reassurance than she might once have expected. She knew too little about what he called protection.
“Take Noah back to the east room,” he said.
Noah moved toward her. “I’m not going anywhere with them.”
“You will if you want Rose to survive.”
Her brother looked at her, and she could scarcely bear it. They had only just been allowed to touch. She had imagined their reunion so often that some part of her still expected it to lead naturally to leaving together, to a door opening onto a life they could recognize. Instead, men were waiting to take him away while she remained dependent on Lucien's hand around her arm.
“I’ll come back,” she told Noah.
He shook his head. “Don’t promise things you can’t control.”
When the guards came for him, Rose reached out. Lucien held her back, and she fought him before she remembered the cost. Pain went through them both; she felt it in her own chest and heard it in the sharp breath beside her. By the time she could move again, Noah was being led through the door. The glass closed between them.
She stared at the place where he had stood. Her fingers still remembered his grip. There were people in the room, but without him it felt abruptly emptied of everything she had come for.
“You let them take him.”
“He is safer there.”
“You keep saying that as if repeating it will make it true.”
“It is true.”
“You don’t know anything about keeping people safe.”
Lucien looked toward the closed door. “I know more than you think.”
Rose turned fully toward him. “Did you keep my mother safe?”
He did not answer, and the silence encouraged the questions she had been carrying for years.
“Did you keep my father safe?”
Still he said nothing.
“Did you keep Noah safe?”
His gaze returned to hers. “I kept him alive.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“No.”
The quiet admission surprised her. For the first time he looked tired in a way a night's sleep could not have repaired. Rose found herself wondering how long he had been living with distinctions like that one, what had taught him to accept them. She resented the thought almost as soon as it came. Understanding his exhaustion would not undo Noah's suffering, and she needed to keep sight of that while he stood close enough for her to feel his pulse.
She moved toward the door. Lucien stepped into her path.
“I want to leave this room.”
“You can.”
“Then move.”
“I mean the room.”
Rose glanced past him into the corridor. He was granting her a few feet of freedom as though the boundary were reasonable, as though she ought to be grateful for having it explained.
“I want to see the manor.”
“Why?”
“Because you keep telling me the truth is here.”
“Some truths are safer to approach slowly.”
“I didn’t come here for safety.”
“No. You came here because your brother called you.”
“And now you’re keeping me from him.”
“I am keeping you from walking into a room you do not understand.”
“Everything in this house is a room I don’t understand.”
“That is why you need to listen to me.”
She looked at him for a moment, too angry to answer immediately. Every uncertainty became, in his hands, an argument for obedience. He could withhold what she needed to know and then use her ignorance to keep her beside him.
“You’ve had twelve years to tell me the truth. Instead, you waited until you could put a knife in my hand and call it a choice.”
Something moved in his eyes. “You think I wanted you here?”
“I think you arranged for me to come.”
He took too long to answer. Rose felt her suspicion settle into place, fitting the phone call to the waiting house, the warning to the trap she had walked into anyway.
“Your call to me,” she said. “It was not Noah who called.”
His silence seemed to confirm her worst interpretation. The anger in her cooled, becoming easier to hold and harder to dismiss.
“You used his voice.”
“Noah made the call.”
“But you allowed it.”
“I needed you to come.”
“You needed my blood.”
“I needed to keep you alive.”
“Stop saying that.”
“You would not have come for yourself.”
“And you knew I would come for him.”
“Yes.”
Rose stepped toward him. The thread tightened in warning, catching her attention before the pain could take hold. Even this conversation was subject to it. She could not move in anger without being reminded of the place he now occupied inside her body.
“Do you ever hear yourself?”
“Every word.”
“Then how do you live with it?”
His expression closed. “By understanding that there are worse things than being hated.”
She had wanted an answer she could reject. Instead, he left her thinking about what those worse things might be, and whether Noah's account of the thing beneath the house belonged among them. Before she could reply, she heard a soft scrape outside, like fabric brushing stone.
Lucien turned toward the door. The guard who had been stationed beyond it was gone. At the far end of the corridor, an older woman in a black dress was approaching, her silver hair gathered at the nape of her neck. A red stone rested at her throat. She walked without haste, so certain of reaching them that no hurried step seemed necessary.
Rose recognized her from the memory. Isolde Draeven looked older in the corridor's dim light, but recognition brought back the same cold certainty Rose had felt beneath the manor. She could not separate the woman coming toward her from what she had seen happen to her mother.
Isolde stopped outside the glass room. Her eyes moved from Lucien to Rose, then lowered to their wrists. A small smile softened her mouth, almost tenderly, and the bond grew cold against Rose's skin.
“Lucien,” she said. “You finally brought her home.”
He moved between them. “You were told not to enter this wing.”
“I was told many things when I was younger. I learned early that most instructions are only invitations to disobey.” Her gaze returned to Rose, passing over Lucien as if he had not obstructed it. “Come closer, child. Let me look at you.”
Rose stayed where she was. She would not cross the room simply because this woman expected her to.
Isolde tilted her head. “You have your mother’s eyes.”
“Don’t talk about my mother.”
“I knew her well.”
“You killed her.”
The smile left Isolde's face. For a single breath she looked at Lucien, and Rose saw that the accusation had reached something beneath the easy manner. Then the older woman gave a low laugh.
“How quickly the dead rewrite their own stories.”
“Leave,” Lucien said, his voice cold.
“Not yet.”
Isolde laid her hand on the glass. The stone at her throat caught a wavering light that reminded Rose of a candle flame, although there were no candles burning in the corridor. She found herself looking for its source before she could stop, unwilling to give the woman the satisfaction of seeing how closely she watched.
“You should show her the portrait gallery,” Isolde said. “She has been away from home for too long.”
Rose looked at Lucien. “What does she mean?”
“Nothing.”
Isolde smiled again. “She has always been difficult to control, Lucien. Your father used to say that was why Eveline feared her.”
Her mother's name caught Rose unprepared. She had braced herself for cruelty, but not for the casual suggestion that Eveline had been afraid of her. It brought an immediate, helpless need to defend a relationship Isolde was speaking about as though she had owned some part of it.
“What did she fear?”
Pleasure sharpened the older woman's eyes. “You should ask Lucien.”
He moved toward the door. “Go back to the west hall.”
“And if I don’t?”
Neither spoke for several seconds. The mark at Rose's wrist pulsed once, and Lucien reached toward the panel beside the door. Isolde's expression shifted slightly. As Rose watched, a shadow passed behind her, though the corridor was empty.
In the glass, the reflection showed the woman from behind. Then, for an instant, the face looking out of it belonged to Rose. She saw her own dark eyes, her own features, and the silver bracelet around the reflected woman's left wrist. Her breath stopped. She blinked, trying to make the image resolve into something possible, and it was gone.
Isolde stood exactly where she had been, watching her. Rose could still hear Noah saying that the thing beneath the house wore faces. She wanted to look at the glass again and could not quite bring herself to do it.
“What did you see?” Lucien asked.
“Nothing.”
The answer came quickly. She did not want to describe it in front of Isolde, to let the woman hear how precisely she had frightened her. Yet the returning smile suggested that Isolde needed no description.
“Take her to the gallery, Lucien.”
“I said leave.”
“You can hide the truth from her for another night if you wish. But the house has already recognized her.”
Lucien went still. Rose felt that stillness beside her as keenly as she had felt his pain. Isolde turned away, apparently satisfied with what she had left between them.
“Come when you are ready, Rose.”
The hem of her dress brushed the floor as she walked back down the corridor. Rose watched until she disappeared around the turn, then kept looking at the empty space, waiting for her breathing to settle.
“What did she mean?”
Lucien did not answer.
“Lucien.”
He stepped away from the glass door. “Do not speak to her again.”
“I’ll speak to anyone I want.”
“You do not understand what she is.”
“Then explain.”
“She wants you afraid.”
“She doesn’t need to try very hard.”
“That is not what I mean.”
Rose looked toward the corridor. Isolde had known exactly how to draw her attention to the gallery, and she did not trust the invitation. But distrusting Isolde did not make Lucien's silence easier to accept. If the room contained something about her mother, about the face she had just seen in the glass, she could not go back to bed and wait for him to decide she deserved to know.
“Take me to the gallery.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you are not ready.”
“Everyone in this house keeps saying that.”
“Because it is true.”
“Then you should have thought of that before you brought me here.”
She pushed past him. The thread drew at her wrist, but its warning was weaker now. Perhaps the ritual was settling into her body; perhaps the house itself was permitting her to move. She disliked both possibilities and had no means of choosing between them. For as long as she could keep walking, she intended to use it. Behind her, Lucien followed.
⁂
They crossed the east wing without speaking. As they went deeper into the manor, the passages seemed older, the stone walls darker and the portraits larger within frames blackened by age. Rose felt the cold increase at each doorway. The sensation at her wrist changed with it, until the thread seemed chilled beneath her skin rather than merely drawn tight.
At the end of the corridor stood a pair of carved wooden doors. Lucien stopped before them, and Rose turned toward him. He had allowed her this far; she could not tell whether he meant to let her go farther.
“What is inside?”
“The portrait gallery.”
“Why don’t you want me to see it?”
“I want you to see it when you understand what you are looking at.”
“That may take years.”
“Then you have time.”
“Do I?”
He met her gaze. Rose thought of Noah being led away, of the years during which she had believed that finding him would answer everything. She had been given no reason to trust that time was something this house would let her keep. When Lucien offered nothing more, she placed her palm against the wood.
Light flared beneath the red line at her wrist. A low vibration traveled through the door and into her hand, so distinct that she felt it in her fingers. Lucien caught her hand.
“Don’t.”
The doors opened before she could withdraw it.
Cold air spilled over them. Beyond the threshold, tall windows lit a long, narrow gallery overlooking the forest. Portraits covered the walls in rows that climbed toward the ceiling: men and women of the Draeven family, children posed with a solemnity that made them seem older than their faces. Under each painting were a name and a date. Rose stepped inside, and this time Lucien let her.
She moved slowly enough to read the plaques. Some names reached back more than a century. Others had no date of death, the empty spaces catching her attention as much as the inscriptions. Black cloth covered several of the portraits. She wondered what determined which faces were displayed and which were hidden, but the question slipped from her mind when she saw the painting at the far end.
It was larger than the others. A woman stood beside a stone altar with one hand resting over her heart, dark hair falling across her shoulder. Her pale face was finely boned, her eyes lowered. Rose stopped before she had properly understood why. Something about the angle of the jaw was familiar enough to make her feel exposed, as if she had walked into a room and found someone studying her while she slept.
She approached the painting. The mouth was hers. So were the eyes, even beneath those lowered lids, and the faint mark below the left eyebrow. She tried to find a difference that would turn the likeness into coincidence, some alteration in the features that would let her think of an ancestor instead of herself. The closer she looked, the less distance she could put between the painted face and her own.
Then she saw the bracelet on the woman's left wrist. Silver, familiar, exactly the one her mother had left her. Rose looked down toward the brass plaque beneath the frame, needing the name to explain what her eyes would not.
ELARA VEYNE
THE LAST BLOOD VESSEL
1847
She read the inscription again. The date remained the same. Behind her stood a man whose pulse she could feel, and before her was a face that should not have existed in the year recorded beneath it. Isolde had called this place her home. Rose could not yet make herself consider what that might mean.
Her hand rose toward the canvas.
“Rose,” Lucien said quietly behind her.
His voice did not reach her through the concentration of looking. The red line around her wrist began to glow, throwing a faint light against the frame. She was still trying to understand the bracelet, the date, the mark beneath the painted eyebrow, when a thin thread of blood slowly appeared in the woman's eyes.