Page 27 of Snag
Just like the trinkets— the treasures, perhaps— that were sitting on my bedroom windowsill. The jar of notes, the handmade wooden box holding the broken bracelet and spent protection stone. I have no idea where I got them, why I kept them, or really, who —
“How the fuck is this library organized?” a voice grumbles quietly behind me, the speaker talking to himself, not me. “It’s fucking ridiculous.Shifter MythologybesideA Book of Charms, Vol. 21. Where are the other volumes? Andthat’s next toAn Abridged History of the Awry in the Sixteenth Century.Which is next to … Zaya …?”
I blink.
My back is pressed against the bookshelf next to the window, hands clenching the shelf on either side of my hips. I’m frozen there. Stuck. Trapped …
Rath fills the space at the top of the stairs. He’s made it almost all the way up without me sensing him. A frown etches across his face, aimed directly at me. But he’s not angry. He’s … concerned?
“Zaya!” he says sharply, dropping the half-dozen books he’s carrying onto the desk and crossing to me. “Zaya?” He’s so big that he blocks out the rest of the office, including the armoire that keeps triggering these panic attacks.
He’s so big that all I can see is him.
He touches my cheek, just the lightest brush of his fingers. Essence … energy shifts between us. And now all I can sense is him.
My heart kicks against my ribs, as if it had ceased beating and suddenly started again.
I draw air into my lungs … so much air that they might have been completely depleted. Had I stopped breathing? Was this another of those moments, though inside my head this time, where I somehow moved into that pocket of suffocating, inexplicable numbness? As when I’d first seen the objects on the windowsill of my bedroom, or when crossing up the path toward Rath on the front patio of the beach house.
“I was looking for Disa’s journals,” I say, my voice surprisingly steady though everything else still feels numb.
“Right,” Rath says quietly. His hand falls to his side.
Then, before I even realize he’s doing it, he somehowherds me back into the desk chair without actually touching me. As if he can move me on an essence level, but in a completely noninvasive way.
I sit down, and he crouches before me. Even with him crouched, he’s so huge, we’re practically eye-to-eye.
“I didn’t know this library existed,” he says, his gaze running over me as if searching for a mortal wound.
“Disa’s office,” I say. “This is where she spent most of her time.” I frown. “Didn’t she?”
Rath chuckles quietly, though it sounds a bit forced. “I avoided Aunt Disa, so I’m not the one to ask.”
“Did I … did I like reading?” I’m still feeling shaky inside and not at all certain why it matters to me, matters enough to ask Rath.
He swallows, dropping my gaze and running a hand over his head. “I … I always liked reading.”
I frown. That wasn’t an answer. “You don’t know?”
He huffs. “You read. We read. Together. Yes.”
“Do you still have the tattoo?” Okay, that was random. And way too intimate a question. And not specific at all, because Rath clearly has a lot of tattoos, though I’ve only seen hints of them on his wrists and collarbone.
But he knows exactly what I’m asking. Tension runs through his jaw. “Yes.”
“You kept it.”
“Why would I get rid of it? I thought you were dead. Not that you’d just …”
“Just what? Forgot you?”
He doesn’t answer.
That silence stretches between us, thick and tension-filled.
“You knew me,” I say, anger slowly igniting through the residual nothingness that had me pinned in place by thewindow. And anger is so much better than that fucking numb shit. Anger gets things done. The numbness is fucking useless. So I embrace the anger. Eagerly.
“You knew me.”
