Page 18 of Thorn Season
I understood now: They were toying with me before the true torment began. Goren would use his axe. The woman would delight in finer torture, cutting off pieces of me until my specter poured out, hot and thick as blood.
Vermin, Briar had said—because she’d made me a rat in these tunnels, scrambling for escape.
She would make sure I never saw my father again.
I was beginning to shake when I rounded a corner and smacked into something smooth and solid and distinctly human.
I skidded back—almost fell—when strong hands steadied me at the waist, gathering me against an armored chest. I gaped up into an unmasked face. Into brown eyes so light they were almost golden.
Those eyes dipped over me and widened. The man’s grip went loose.
I lurched off his chest, a scream rising in my throat. My heels caught the back of my skirts. I sucked a sharp breath; my world tipped.
And I felt it. An embrace of power molding behind me, cushioning my fall.
Aspecter.
It thrummed against my skin with a steady heartbeat, familiar and foreign all at once. I didn’t move—didn’tbreathe—as the embrace scooped me upright and my feet found solid ground.
A last graze of pressure, and the specter broke like a wave around my shoulders. The man inhaled deeply, smiling as if it filled him up.
“You’re a Wielder,” I breathed. Tears burned my throat.
His laughter was low and melodic. “Don’t worry, my lady. We aren’t half as terrible as the rumors claim.” He winked. “Not all of us, at least.”
My specter trembled, hands twitching to reach for his honey-bright skin—to grab his broad shoulders andshake, just to prove he was real.
He leaned back, a charming smile still playing around his mouth. “I could’ve sworn I locked that door.”
The words doused me like cold water.
The absent dullroot, my captors’ rugged attire, their unfamiliar names.Don’t show them, Garret had said, because he’d known in the parlor what I hadn’t yet understood. That my greatest fear had been warping reality. These people didn’t know what I was...
Because they weren’t the Hunters.
The realization crashed into me, and for one mortifying second, I thought I would collapse from relief—
Then the man’s meaning sank in. If I hadn’t been Hunted, I’d been kidnapped—and I could easily guess why kidnappers would target a ruling lord’s daughter. This man—thisWielder—had brought me here as ransom. And he’d locked the door behind me.
A Wholeborn would not have gotten out.
I gulped, my mind racing as the silence stretched taut. “I picked the lock.”
The man lifted an eyebrow.
“With my hairpins,” I added, hoping the lie was half-credible.
He slanted his head, gold-brown hair almost tickling the curved ceiling. “I don’t know many nobles who can pick locks.”
My eyes narrowed. “I don’t know many Wielders who kidnap nobles.”
“Do you know many Wielders?”
“Doyou?”
His smile deepened. “A few.”
Before I could digest those words, footsteps pounded behind me. I whirled to find Goren storming through the passage, torch flames juddering in his wake. I staggered back toward the Wielder, my specter rising inside me.
