Page 100 of Taste of Death

I ran a finger along the lidded edge of one container, circling all the way around, and found nothing suspicious. Gripping one edge, I lifted to find the tote surprisingly heavy.

“What the hell are you?” I checked the lids and weights of the other two to find them similarly heavy and most likely not sprung with booby traps.

The safest option was to wait for Tavia or Cyan to come home, but my curiosity was too great. I popped the lid off of one container and held my breath while I peered inside.

It was full of books, all stacked neatly with care. Not just any books, but romance paperbacks. The kinds I’d been obsessed with and would read cover to cover late into the night. Some of the titles looked familiar, but I had never read most of these. They definitely weren’t my old collection from Sapien.

I picked up one pristine paperback and opened it to the title page.Fire of a Lady’s Dragonby M.J. Nance,but the title wasn’t the most interesting part. There was some kind of mark or seal embossed into the paper. I brought the book directly under a lamp and angled the page to see better.

The embossed seal was of three intersecting swords circled with the words,From the library of Dienna, Rathka’s Order.

I almost dropped the book with how hard the realization struck me. This had belonged to Novak’s mother. It was from the glass case in the library at his house.

I ran to the opened tote and pulled out another book, which had the same embossing on the title page. My hands were a shaking blur, grabbing paperback after paperback to find the same thing on every single title page. I ripped the lids off of the other two totes and handled the books as carefully as I could to confirm what I already knew.

Novak had sent me his mother’s entire romance collection.

But why? Was this his cruel way of mocking me? I wanted to believe he had kinder intentions, perhaps an apology, but his callous, uncaring words at the very end remained stuck in me like splinters.

While flipping through one of the books, I spotted one of those sticky, colored annotation tabs and paused to read the marked sentence.

Her laughter is the sweetest music, her smile the force that drives my icy heart to beat.

It was from the hero’s point of view in a passage of him expressing his feelings for the heroine. Flipping through more pages, I found another sentence marked with a tab.

She cannot be caged, nor reduced to a mere accessory on my arm. Her beauty shines brightest when she is free and wild.

I picked up another novel and found similar excerpts marked with the same tabs. Every single one was of the hero confessing his love, or thinking of the heroine in an admiring way, whether about her beauty, her spirit, or whatever it was that drew him to her and made her unique.

After going through no less than twenty books and finding multiple tabbed sections in all of them, I sat abruptly on the floor and tried to make sense of it all.

There was no way Novak read through all of these books and marked all of these passages for me to find, was there?

His mother could have tabbed the books. She embossed her collection, after all. Marking her favorite parts with colored flags wasn’t that far-fetched. But Novak had said she died a long time ago, when he was still a juvenile. Had sticky tabs even been invented at that point?

I grabbed a novel at random and opened it, flipping to the closest tab between the pages.

To be loved by her would be the greatest privilege of my life.

With a frustrated groan, I slammed the paperback closed and let it drop to the floor.

“What the fuck do you want?” I asked the empty totes and stacks of books, fresh tears brimming my eyes.

Hours later,there was a gentle knock at my bedroom door, almost whisper-quiet. I wiped the tears from my cheeks and said, “Yes?” in the most normal voice I could muster.

“Hey Amy, it’s Cy,” came the voice from the other side. “Tavi’s doing something in the kitchen and she wants you as a taster.”

Oh, there had been alotof wine tasting over the past few days. Tavia was certainly letting me indulge in drowning my sorrows.

If I was being honest, it was getting to be too much. I craved the emotional numbing from a full bottle after flipping through all those books, but stopped myself. It would only make me feel worse later.

“Thanks, Cy, but can you let her know I’m not feeling up to it today?”

A long pause preceded his answer. “It’s not wine this time. She’s… cooking. And she really wants your opinion. It won’t take long, promise.”

I heaved out a sigh. It really didn’t take much for me to cave to Tavia. Especially when I knew she was trying to get me out of my room and eat something. To live life and stop wallowing.

Being alive isn’t the same as living.Novak’s words when we first met came back to me in a cruel sense of irony. I hated that, even now, he wasn’t wrong.

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