Page 64 of Taste of Thorns
“Let’s go then,” I say and soon we’re all descending the staircase together and I have a feeling things between the four of us are fixed.
At least for now.
Chapter Twenty
Briony
Things maybe be right again between me and Beaufort and me and Thorne, but I still struggle to sleep that night. Even snuggled up against the strong body of the man I am falling for, safe in his strong arms, arms painted with the fated mate marks, my mind continues buzzing with the death of Esme Jones.
I can’t shake it from my head. Nor this suspicion that, just like my sister’s death, something isn’t right about it. It makes my insides uneasy.
In the end, I decide to go in search of something to settle my churning stomach.
Carefully, I lift dead-weight limbs and sneak out of the bed, wrapping myself in a silk robe I find hanging on the back of the door, and padding down the staircase and into the kitchen. I’m halfway across the room, when a voice says my name and I leap ten feet off the ground.
Thorne.
He’s sitting on a stool in the corner in the pitch blackness.
“You scared me,” I say, pressing my hand to my suddenly racing heart.
“Sorry,” he says. “Can’t sleep?”
“Yeah,” I say, coming to sit on the stool a few feet away from him. “You neither?”
“Too much on my mind.”
I spin my gaze around the darkened room. It looks a lot less spectacular in the gloom, ghostly and haunting even with its shining cupboards and gleaming utensils.
“Yeah,” I say, shivering slightly and tugging my robe more tightly around me.
His gaze drops to my hands, lingering at the place where the tie holds the robe closed across my body and then gliding slowly down my bare legs.
“Are you cold?” he asks.
I shake my head.
We sit in silence. But it’s not the friendly silence of before, it’s filled with unspoken words and the newly gained knowledge I have about his past. It’s painful and I close my eyes and whisper into the darkness.
“I meant what I said earlier, Thorne.” He doesn’t answer and when I open my eyes, I find agony spread right across his usually blank face. I used to think that void expression was one of arrogance – it never occurred to me that a powerful, privileged man like Thorne could be suffering in the same way as me. “I care about you. You are important to me. Stars, I think it’s the reason the lumomancy happened.”
“It never happened before?”
“No, not until that moment. And I think it happened because of you. Because I couldn’t bear to see you hurt like that. Because I couldn’t bear to lose you. I was so desperate in that moment to save you and then it just … happened.”
He stares at me and I can’t read if he’s happy about this confession or damn disturbed by it.
Finally, I can’t take the silence anymore.
“Stars, Thorne, please say something.”
“You couldn’t bear to lose me?” he whispers.
“No, I couldn’t. It would break my heart.”
“I will never leave you, Briony. I’ll be by your side for as long as you need me. For as long as you want me. For as long as you’ll have me near.”
My eyes prickle with tears but I smile at him. “Just be prepared then, because I’m going to want you by my side forever.”
