Page 110 of The Unweaver

Theodora Walcott.Felix Rabinowitz. The names of ghosts. No one had called her Dora in a lifetime. Not since she’d ended Felix’s.

Even after all these years, the Rabinowitz’s, a middle-class Jewish family in Birmingham, still had a reward out for information on their youngest son’s murderer. No one in Felix’s squat had known Dora’s full or last name. But one tipoff to the coppers and Cora’s manufactured life would be as over as Felix’s.

I have only to makeonecall, my pet.

“That’s what Edwina was blackmailing you over, wasn’t it? Rabinowitz’s murder. In the unlikely event you were ever connected with his death, you have a valid self-defense case, and I have an excellent solicitor. O’Leary can bury Felix under a mountain of paperwork.”

A sound escaped her lips, part laugh, part sob. The blackmail hanging like a sword over her head for years, disarmed with paperwork. It was too good to be true. The relief that stole over her—the unclenching of a decade’s worth of strain—was premature. False hope was worse than none at all.

Cora didn’t know how to respond. Leaning against the headboard, she squeezed her eyes shut and dragged her hands through her hair, fighting to harness her down-spiraling thoughts.

The coolness of the room ghosted over her breasts. Her eyes flew open. And downward. The covers had fallen, revealing thelow neckline of her chemise. Whisper thin silk was the only barrier between her pebbling skin and Bane’s flashing eyes.

Gasping, she yanked the covers up and he ripped his gaze away. His eyes landed on the nightstand, then narrowed into slits. The lips she’d been craving hardened in displeasure. She followed the line of his vision.

Shit.

They lunged for the book at the same time. His half-naked body pinned hers to the bed, skin sliding against skin in a bewildering eruption of sensations, hard muscle crushing her into the forgiving softness of the mattress. He snatched the proof of her flagrant disobedience from her hands. The Demonomicon glowed eerily in the moonlight.

“Some bedtime reading?” he ground out.

Her stomach knotted. Curiosity would kill the Necromancer. What little she’d gleaned from the forbidden book from the forbidden room seemed unworthwhile now she was under the full brunt of his accusatory stare.

“How did you get this?”

“You mentioned demons existed before and I was… Curious?” She winced, feeling herself slow roasted over the spit of his anger. “Can you blame me?”

“Yes. Absolutely. I told you multiple times not to go in that fuckin’ room.”

Worse than his harsh words was the excruciating silence that followed. Any burgeoning intimacy withered in the wordless desert. She’d rather he throttle her with his hands than his silence.

“I can’t even read Greek.”

“It’s not Greek.” His hand disappeared with the book and reappeared empty. “It’s Phoenician.”

“Ah. That explains a lot.” She felt compelled to fill the hostile quiet. “Listen. As a bootlegger, you should know that nothing fosters action like prohibition.”

“Your lack of impulse control is my fault?”

“I’m not going to tell anyone about your naughty books. Need I remind you of our Binding Agreement?”

He contemplated her, intrigued in spite of himself. “How’d you get in the room?”

Guilt and pride battled for dominance. “I figured out it was an Intentions Lock, set my intentions and, well. You know.”

“Cora, you are…” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Maddening.”

Memories of his dishonesty—all the half-truths and secrets not locked away in the forbidden room—sobered her. “And you’ve been keeping secrets. I was looking up Master Ghose and—”

His gaze sharpened to knife points. She stiffened at accidentally confessing to not only disobeying his direct orders but eavesdropping.

She plowed onward in the grave she was digging for herself. “All right. I may have overheard some things whilst you and Lazlo were discussing a certain prophecy. One that seems very relevant to me. Twin mages born of, er, something?”

Looking like a man who wanted to be anywhere but here, his throat worked on a swallow. “Twin mages born of death shall bring your death to life.”

Words that shattered her lifelong illusion of choice while she was led by threads unseen to Malachy Bane. Being an Oneiromancer’s puppet now seemed much less disturbing.

Cora exhaled a pent-up breath. Both her unconscious privacy and free will, lost in a single week. She understood so little, and his selective truths weren’t helping. “For someone so adamantabout honesty, Bane, you are certainly full of shit. Half-truths aren’t truths. They’re lies by omission.”

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