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 myparents 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 washappy 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.”
