Page 51 of Wicked Bonds
The statement hangs between us, and for a moment, his mask falls away, then it’s back again.
“Soren feeds on you. Drake needs you to complete his revenge. The Coven wants to drain you. But me? I gain nothing from keeping you alive except complications I don’t need.”
“Then why bother?”
He looks at me for a long moment, and I think he might actually answer honestly. But then his face closes off again, returning to that perfect composure that makes me want to throw things.
“You’ll get yourself killed,” he says instead. “The moment you start actively investigating the Accord, looking for weaknesses, the Coven will know. They have ways of detecting that kind of curiosity. Why do you think Drake died? It was because he started looking.”
“He told me he was betrayed. Someone he trusted turned him in.”
“There was a girl.” Lucien stares off into space. “A witch.”
He doesn’t say anything more.
“And?” I prompt.
“It’s not my story to tell, Rose. Suffice to say, things did not turn out well for Drake Winstead.”
The look on Lucien’s face says he’s not going to give me more. Probably can’t, if the contract binds his tongue as tightly as he claims.
“Fine,” I say, letting it drop for now. “But I’m not just sitting here waiting to die. I’m going to find out what Drake knew, and if there’s even a one percent chance I can break the Accord, I’m taking it.”
“If you do, you’ll be painting a target on your back.”
“Pretty sure I was born with one.”
He sighs, the world’s oldest and weariest sound, and for a second I almost feel bad for him.
Almost.
Twenty-Four
Drake
I forget myself sometimes.
The thing about being dead is that you lose track. You drift, you wait, you watch the world turn, the seasons change, the people come and go, year after year. But now and then, you find yourself standing somewhere you don’t remember going, with no idea how long you’ve been there, and nothing to mark the time except the way the dust has settled on the windowsills.
The fourth floor is off limits to living students. If you ask the staff why it’s forbidden, they’ll tell you it’s about safety or regulations. But the real reason is that the fourth floor is haunted. And not just by me.
I’m in the west corridor. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. How long I’ve been gone.
Then there are footsteps, light, hurried. I don’t need to look up to know it’s her. I can feel her approaching in the same way I imagine other people feel migraines coming on that areimpossible to ignore. Rose walks with her chin up and her hands shoved in her jacket pockets like the world owes her an apology. I don’t know about the world, but everyone here certainly does, including me.
She rounds the corner, stops dead when she sees me.
“There you are,” she says.
“In the flesh,” I joke. The fourth floor isn’t heated and I can see her breath come out in little puffs.
“I’ve been looking for you.” She twists her head to glance over her shoulder. “Where the hell have you been?”
I turn to face her fully, not bothering to make my form more solid. “Time doesn’t work the same for me,” I say. “Sometimes I lose bits.”
“So you weren’t ghosting me.” She snickers. “Ba dum dum.”
“Not just a witch, ladies and gentlemen, this one’s a stand-up comedian too.” I might have been born before World War I but I pick up on the slang each new generation uses. Least favorite era? The eighties. It’s been four decades since I’ve had to hear the word ‘grody’, thank God.
