Page 38 of Branded By Shadow
Her nest was still there, in the corner, but it lay abandoned. Untouched. It was yet another reminder of everything my utter stupidity had cost me.
I watched her movements as she picked up the fork and took a careful bite of the food I’d brought. The conservatory felt smaller with both of us inside, the air charged with unspoken tension. I couldn’t seem to stand still, moving between the workbenches while she ate, my body refusing to settle.
“Any progress?” I managed to ask.
Cora glanced up from her plate, and I caught her studying my face with a slight frown. “Not particularly. If anything, it feels like I’m going around in circles.”
The utter frustration in her voice made my heart sink. We badly needed answers, but at this point, I’d settle on anything that would get Cora to rest. But forcing her wouldn’t work. The only thing I could do right now was support her and hope for the best. “How so?”
She swallowed the last bite and pushed the empty plate away. “I’ve done countless tests at Evergreen before, but I thought that maybe I made a mistake, or I overlooked something. I checked again now… And I had an epiphany.”
Based on her tone, it wasn’t a particularly good one. “What do you mean?”
“My suppressant is efficient for regular Omegas. It worked for me, too, for years. But at the conference, it failed."
That was putting it lightly. Cora’s formula had failed so spectacularly it had almost driven her to madness. It might have, if I hadn’t given her what she needed. And it had all been Stormwright's fault.
“It failed because of Alexander.”
Simply speaking his name sent a surge of aggressive heat through my chest. Fortunately, Cora was too distracted by her own confusion to notice.
“Maybe,” Cora said, stabbing a hand through her hair. “But something about our theory is wrong.”
I crossed my arms, the fabric of my shirt straining over my chest. The low, insistent ache in my bones sharpened. “It seems simple enough to me. He’s a predator. He wanted to weaken his prey.”
“Would he?” she countered, her gaze turning inward, analyzing the man, not just the crime. “Or would he do thesmartestthing? Forcing a heat is a messy, violent tactic. It’s an act of war. Alexander is a snake, but he’s a politician. He uses influence, money, charm... like he did with Theo.” Her voice trembled slightly when she mentioned her friend’s name, but she didn’t let it stop her. “He plays the ally. He doesn’t use a club when a scalpel will do.”
The description was infuriatingly accurate. I preferred a direct assault, but the Stormwrights had always reveled in their political poison.
A new certainty settled in her eyes. “Alexander’s reaction at the lab... I think he wasn’t angry because he got caught. He was genuinely offended at being accused of using such a crude method. He didn’t trigger my heat. The suppressant failed on its own. Just because of my Olympian blood.”
“But that makes no sense either, Cora. If that’s the case, why would he push so hard to claim you? Why would he want the suppressant in the first place?” Alexander had jumped through a lot of hoops to get to Cora. There had to be a reason.
Cora bit her lower lip. “Could he… Could he not be aware that it’s useless? Maybe—”
I shook my head, immediately cutting her off. “The moment I smelled you at the conference, I knew what was happening. Alexander is an Olympian Alpha, too. Even if he wasn’t the one to trigger the problem, he couldn’t have missed it.”
The full weight of the implication settled over her. “He knew the suppressant was useless for an Olympian, but he still tried to corner me. He still wanted something.”
The vicious beast inside me reared its ugly head. “Maybe it wasn’t about the suppressant at all. You were the one he was after.”
Cora snorted. “I’m not that special, Damon. Not as a person.”
I disagreed, but I couldn’t get a word in. She went very still, her eyes losing focus as she continued to speak. “At the conference… his questions. He barely asked about the formula’s efficacy. He kept asking about the plant. ‘Is it natural, or did you accelerate the cycle?’ ‘You’re certain it’s authentic?’ He wasn’t asking about the biochemistry.”
Her gaze traveled toward the cluster of isolated plants across the conservatory. “It’s not the formula he wants, and it’s not me,” she said, her voice dropping, filled with a new kind of dread. “It’s the silphium.”
The plant. The miraculous, extinct herb she’d successfully cultivated through her Demeter abilities. “But why?” I moved closer, and she glanced at me again, that small frown returning. “What could he want with it?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled out older research notes, spreading them across her workspace with hands that seemed steadier than mine felt. “The historical texts I studied mention silphium extensively. It was valuable enough that it went extinct from overharvesting.”
She looked up at me, intensity burning through her exhaustion. “House Hades keeps older records. Do any of them mention silphium?”
I searched my memory for the stories my father had told me, trying to focus through the restless energy crawling under myskin. “There are mentions of sacred plants used in ancient rituals. Old stories left behind by Orpheus and Eurydice. Offerings they made to the gods. But I’d need to access the actual records to see specifics.”
“I only ever looked at the contraceptive aspects of the silphium.” Her hands trembled as she organized her notes. “But there was something more… I can’t quite remember. There was another reason why it was so popular.”
It was the only thing that made sense, and in hindsight, we should have both realized it much sooner. I'd been too blinded by my hatred toward Alexander to see the truth.
