Page 29 of Thorn Season
Garret’s hand enclosed my wrist. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t touch me,” I snarled, trying to yank away. But he caught my other arm. Leaned over me.
“Don’t do this,” he murmured. “Not in front of them.”
I barely understood him. I only knew that my specter was wringing me from the inside out, and this Hunterwas still touching me—
“You want to get back to your father?” The words lashed me, drawing me taut in his hold. He said slowly, with a look so dark that my stomach clenched, “Thenlet’s go.”
My pulse hammered in my throat, a wild drumbeat urging me in split directions. I glanced toward my kidnappers, who watched Garret with barely restrained fury; toward Keil, whose particular gaze had darkened on Garret’s grip around my arm; and finally, toward the wagon.
Toward the Wielders who’d been imprisoned for the crime I committed every day.
Sorrow gnawed at me, my specter squirming to the point of pain. But I tightened my internal fist around it. Garret knew me better than he had the right to.
He knew I would always choose my father.
In the midst of the thick, heaving hostility, Garret retrieved his weapons and I mounted his steed, the crunch and rustle of my gown obscenely loud. Before I could adjust the puff of satin, Garret mountedbehind me, trapping my skirts under him.
The motion tugged me back against his body, and we both tensed at the abrupt closeness. His holsters bracketed my ribs, knife hilts skimming me with every movement. I heard his tight swallow as he encircled me, arms hovering awkwardly to avoid leaning on my thighs. Then he snapped the reins.
My hands trembled as we moved off, and I looked over Garret’s arm for a last glance of the only Wielders I would ever meet. Keil was already reaching for the wagon doors—for the prisoner he’d so desperately wanted to retrieve from Capewell Manor.
My chest panged with the next lurch of the steed.
Keil’s hands were trembling, too.
9
The noise woke me.
Firewood popped and embers spattered and footsteps clicked, each sound a hammer strike against my temples. I opened one eye to a smear of stark color—white walls and an orange blaze from the fire. The world throbbed around me, squeezing too tight. I groaned.
“You’re awake,” Garret said from beyond my hazy eyeline. “Good.”
“What did you do to me?” I mumbled, easing myself up. I was lying on a hard sofa, the miserable heap of my skirts puddling off the edge. Gods, whoever designed a dress with this much fabric wanted courtiers to die painful deaths.
I touched my forehead, and my arm grazed the open side of a blazer.Garret’sblazer, draped like a stiff blanket around my shoulders.
I frowned.
“Other than rescue you from a group of brutes despite your own efforts to thwart me?” he asked. “Nothing. You fell asleep during the ride. Your body’s still working off that nightmilk, so you’ll feel bleary for a while.” A pause. “The food should help.”
My vision blinked into clarity. A teapot piped on the low table before me, alongside hot buttered scones and an herbed pie, steam ribboning through its lattice holes. Two pink sugar cubes had beenprepared inside a teacup, the way I’d always liked.
And beside the food, reflecting the flames, sat Garret’s unholstered knives.
I whipped my head around, suddenly over-alert. Cold memory crashed into me. It was all here—the white sofas under flat-weave rugs, the glass ornaments on the bookcase, the orange blossoms sweetening the air—as if Wray Capewell’s office had been preserved in wax for a decade.
They say this will be mine someday, a young Garret had told me minutes before Briar had caught us here.But they’re wrong. I’ll have run away by then.
You can’t just leave, I’d said.Where will you go?
With you, obviously. Where else would I go?
The past swirled away, leaving the bitter dregs of the present. Garret had brought me to Capewell Manor.
Into the Hunters’ territory.
