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)
“No, thank you,” Shannon said stiffly.
Isolde smiled kindly at them. Her eyes shifted to the girl, which Kierse still struggled to remember was herself. “No biscuits for the little one?” She held up a thin sugar cookie, and young Kierse’s eyes lit up. But Shannon shook her head.
“Of course.” Isolde curtsied and disappeared from the room.
No one said anything. Her parents exchanged hardened, worried glances. The girl eyed the cookies and bit her inner cheek, puckering her face as she restrained herself.
They waited a few minutes, and then the doors opened and Graves appeared. Kierse’s breath caught at the sight of him. So much the same and somehow more withdrawn, more threatening, more deliciously broody. His sharp cheekbones were cut in the shadows of his library. The perfectly pouty mouth a flat line at the appearance of his guests, those thunderstorm eyes sparking lightning in displeasure. He was pain and pleasure and destruction. Kierse wanted him like this in her memory forever.
“You may call me Graves,” he said as he strode across the room in his fancy suit and black leather gloves. He poured himself a drink without offering to anyone else. “Why are you here?”
Just like that. For some reason she’d thought he’d have more finesse in negotiations. This was his job, after all. Knowledge above all else. Perhaps it was just her parents that sent him straight to business. She wouldn’t put it past him to already know who and what they were.
“Do you not already know?” Adair asked gruffly.
Graves’s eyes slid over Adair and straight to her mother. “I recognize a wisp when they’re in my home.”
He said the words like a threat, and Kierse realized, in the shape of his shoulders and careful nonchalance, that he saw them as such.
Wisps could kill warlocks. She hadn’t found out how exactly in her research, but most of the information on her kind had been destroyed. If Graves saw them as a threat, they were.
“I’m not here to kill you,” Shannon said bluntly.
Graves arched an eyebrow. “I’m impressed that you think you could inside my own library.”
Shannon huffed, but Adair cut in, “We’re here about our daughter.”
Graves’s eyes didn’t shift to Kierse’s younger self. In fact, he hadn’t so much as looked at the child in his inner sanctum. The one who had ignored the cookies for the menacing man before her, watching him like a mouse would a hawk circling overhead.
“She’s in danger,” Shannon said. “The Fae Killer is onto us. I don’t know how he knows where we’re going, but we need to hide her.”
“How like good parents to have her best interest at heart.” The words were bitter, though Kierse could only hear it now that she knew his history.
Shannon bristled as he clearly knew she would. “You may be a monster, warlock, but even you cannot be immune to a child’s safety.”
“Don’t presume to know anything about me,” he snarled.
“Enough,” Adair said, putting himself between Graves and Shannon before his wife could do something drastic. “We are not here to fight.”
“He can do nothing else,” Shannon spat.
“Darling,” Adair said, low and sweet.
Her shoulders remained tense, but she retreated, sitting back slightly. Kierse’s younger self hadn’t moved an inch. Just stared up at the threat before her with keen eyes. She took her mom’s hand when it was offered, a lifeline in the tension.
“Did you bring something to barter with?” Graves asked.
“Yes,” Shannon said stiffly.
Adair grunted and retrieved a handled hunting knife from a sheath. He dropped it onto the table. It wasn’t anything special aside from being long and sharp and deadly. The leather was worn in the pattern of Adair’s own fingers. The smallest symbol was burned into the edge—a stag’s antler inside a Trinity Knot.
“Is this sufficient?” he asked. “It was blessed by the Fae.”
Graves took the knife in his hand, and his magic played over the surface of the blade for a moment before he set it aside as if he were bored. “This will do for the information.”
Finally, Graves’s eyes dropped to the girl. She watched him take in the Fae features: the angelic hair, faintly pointed ears, and unmistakable delicacy. But it was the hardness in her eyes, the straight shoulders, and the fearlessness in the tilt of her jaw, almost a challenge, that made him pause.
“Leave her here with me,” Graves said.
“What?” Shannon gasped at the same time Adair proclaimed, “Never!”
Her parents loved her. They loved her more than anything. In the glow of their love, she could stand up to a nightmare incarnate.
“She would be safe here. That is what you wanted,” he reminded them.
“There is no guarantee of her safety here,” Shannon snarled. “She is a child. She is a wisp. We need to keep her safe long enough for her magic to come in so she can protect herself.”