Total pages in book: 194
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
“But you’re not upset with me for…trying.”
She realized that she wasn’t. She knew who he was. She knew what he did for a living. She knew how he’d lived the last five hundred years of his life. She’d accepted that and decided to choose him anyway.
“You saved me,” she reminded him. “You heard me and answered my call.”
“Always.”
“Then let me ask you a few questions.”
He straightened as if anticipating a showdown.
“Did you alter the soulmate bond?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you make me more loyal to you?”
He tensed at the question. “Not you.”
She would look at that sidestep to the question some other time. “Did you compel me to fall in love with you?”
“No,” he said darkly.
She almost laughed at how mad he looked at the line of questioning. As if the mind thief was offended at the suggestion that he would ever try to steal her affections. If he could even do that.
“I wanted to change your mind,” Graves said after a moment. “I wanted to compel your loyalty as I had so many others. I wanted to force your hand to come back to me. I wanted to make you want me.”
She stilled at the words. “But?”
“But I didn’t. When we first met, I couldn’t read you at all. It took all my effort to learn you as you were, without the shortcuts I’d learned over the years. I could only change your mind about me the hard way.” His eyes were windows as he spoke. “When we started working on your memories, I wanted to do it. I could have.” He clenched his fists. “I was so tempted to just let loose when you were so furious with me. And then something changed. When I didn’t do it and I showed you how I felt, you turned to me like a flower in bloom.”
Her throat closed up at the words. “I did?”
“Each earned step was more rewarding than every stolen one could have possibly been. I became determined to not do it. To cease using my powers. Not just on you, but on others as well.”
“On others?”
“Do you not think I could have brought Ethan back to you the first day we were home?” he scoffed.
“Oh. I hadn’t considered that. Did you…do it when you saw him at the engagement party?”
“I wanted to see if I could win him the way I’d won you. I…told him the truth,” Graves said. “And look, he came here when you were in trouble, all on his own.”
“Look at you,” Kierse said, a teasing smile on her face. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to start looking like a hero.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I’m almost embarrassed for you. Are you losing your nerve? You can’t even compel me to love you?” she joked. “For my friends’ loyalty? Are you going to be a good guy now?”
Graves snorted, a small smile appearing on his face. “Hardly. If you’re expecting me to give up my work…”
“I know the monster that lurks under your skin. I’m not afraid of who you are. Jagged edges and all.”
Graves’s hand slid up her arm, leaving goose bumps in their wake as it came to settle on the middle of her chest where she could feel the thrum of the binding. “This doesn’t change anything for me,” he told her.
It did. It changed everything. But she didn’t know how to say that. How to explain that having Lorcan between them made her want to run.
“We’ll find a way to undo this.”
It was a promise he couldn’t make. A promise she couldn’t even get her hopes up for.
“If not with my magic, then we’ll try the cauldron,” he said. “Okay?”
The cauldron. In all the chaos, she hadn’t even considered the cauldron. Could the cauldron fix what Lorcan had done? It seemed impossible.
“Okay,” she agreed. “We’ll try it tomorrow.”
Her hope flickered like a fragile butterfly in her chest. This couldn’t be the end. She refused for her story to end with some man choosing her fate.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Her wrist was bruised.
She stared down at the places where braided rope had dug into her skin. Where she’d clawed against it to try to get it off. Tugged and pulled and wrenched until it tightened to a vise around her skin. Now the dark marks were a brand, a reminder of what she’d endured.
Gen offered to heal them, but Kierse refused. No one could see the internal marks that Lorcan had left behind. She didn’t want to hide the physical ones.
“What the fuck happened?” Nate asked, arriving while she was still eating breakfast with Graves, Gen, and Ethan the next morning. He reached for her wrists, and she let him take them in his large hands reverently.
“Lorcan,” she said solemnly.
“Fucking hell, Kierse.” His eyes lifted to hers. A glint of gold in them that said he was a second away from shifting into his wolf form and going to rip out Lorcan’s throat. “I’ll kill him.”