Page 23 of Married By Treachery

Never sunrises. He was usually still sleeping off drink from the night before.

And you… you have so much time and all the resources in the world, yet you whittle it away on drink andgamesthat cause the rest of us pain and suffering.

He looked back at Raquel unconscious and bleeding in his bed. Sienne’s expression wrenched with pain, the fire in the hearth flickered and dimmed, and Sienne gasped.

Something was wrong.

Jake was already walking forward as Sienne’s eyes snapped open and found his.

“How can I help?” Jake asked.

“I need to borrow some of your strength,” Sienne said. Her voice rattled, and she held out a trembling hand.

“Do you plan on giving it back?” Jake said with a smile, but there was no mirth in it. He was attempting to make light of a situation that was not light at all. Sienne knew it too, and she looked as though she were about to rebuke him for it, but then he held out his hand in offering.

Sienne closed her lips and took his hand.

And she pulled.

Jake dropped to his knees with a gasp. “Maybe ease into it…next time…” he managed, feeling his own life force draining from his body. Fates, how many years was she taking? Five? Ten?

Does it matter?You waste it all away anyway… He heard a small voice in his mind that sounded irritatingly like Raquel’s.

Jake’s head began to pound, his chest constricted, and just when he was about to yank his hand from Sienne’s, she let go.

Jake sagged forward and caught himself on the edge of the bed. Sienne was similarly slumped over, skin pale and eyes closed, but Jake’s attention slid to Raquel, her wound.

The oily black poison was gone, and the bleeding had stopped.

Jake breathed in fully for perhaps the first time since he’d first laid eyes on her holding Lightbringer outside the gates. He watched Raquel’s soft and rounded bosom rise and fall, slow but steady. And then he wondered if staring was still considered bad manners when the subject wasn’t entirely conscious.

Raquel would say yes.

The thought made him smile.

“How many years did you take?” Jake asked.

Sienne lifted her head and wiped her brow. “Near fifty.”

Jake turned his head and looked at his cousin.

Sienne returned his gaze.

Jake’s eyes narrowed.

“I gave her fifty of mine, too,” Sienne said to his surprise, and then she returned her attention to Raquel. “Do not fail us, Jake. We’ve all invested our future in you.”

Jake was still reeling from the fact that Raquel had needed onehundredkith years to pull out of that with her life. “I know. I still intend to leave at dawn.”

“That could be a problem. It might take her a few days to wake.”

Jake frowned. “How many days?”

“Two days. One week. It all depends on her.”

They didn’t have a week. “I’ll have a cart prepared.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sienne replied. “Any disruption to her present stasis could plunge her deeper into sleep, and neither of us have the years to spare for that. I’m sorry, Jake. I’ve done all I can, but she is still mortal, and her body needs time to heal.”

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