[THIS STORY WILL BE TAKEN DOWN ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2024]
He had hunted me, captured me, and locked me in a tower.
Season 3 'Of Crows and Thorns'
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While in RISING, Tabitha discovers something peculiar that may assist Nelle in her plan to escape the...
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On the opposite page to Zrenyth's Mites was information relating to the Tears of the Brokenhearted. My gaze wandered over the words, not really seeing them as I thought on, planning and scheming.
A heartbeat later my gaze sharpened on something I'd not detected before. The ink was smudged as if something wet had splashed on the parchment, making the midnight-inked words warp and smear. I traced the splatters with a fingertip. Tears, I realized. Someone had cried while reading this very page in the old dusty tome.
A pang of sympathy speared through my heart as I wondered what awfulness had befallen the reader that they'd wept over this particular page.
My attention was torn away by the sound of muffled footsteps behind the closed bedroom door and a short burst of exhilarated yaps from Sage. Drumming my fingertips on the parchment, I called out, "Who were you with when you were at the Purveyor of Rarities?" If Graysen had been a child at the time, surely he'd have accompanied an adult.
From behind the closed door, Graysen answered me. "My mother."
A jolt of surprise snapped my spine ramrod straight.
"From what I remember of the moment, she seemed to be his friend," he added.
My mouth fell open. "Your mother was friends with a Horned God?"
"It would seem so. I don't even think my Dad knows about her friendship with him. That's why I want to find Florin," he called back.
Tabitha Crowther had secrets she kept from her family?
As reluctant as I was to admit this, Tabitha was becoming more and more fascinating to me.
My gaze dropped to the book splayed open on my lap, and as I retraced the smudged ink with a fingertip, I wondered yet again whose tears had warped the words.
Closing the dusty old tome, I rose and put it away with the other novels sitting beside the reading lamp on the bedside table. Striding toward the bedroom door, I pulled it open and lingered at the threshold. My gaze had inadvertently been tugged toward Graysen's bed with the black lacquered woodwork glistening with sunshine. The wyrm burrow had been dismantled. Graysen had remade his bed, and neatly folded all the blankets and sheets I'd pulled from my own bed. He'd placed them on the leather couch, along with my messenger bag, which he'd retrieved from where I'd dumped it on the floor inside our residences before I'd ordered him to undress last night.
The tips of my toes curled into the carpet as an echo of the sway swept through me. I'd lost myself somewhere along the way after I'd wrapped my limbs around Graysen's trembling, clammy body to soothe and untangle him from the cruel nightmare he'd been ensnared within. As I'd confessed earlier, the sway wasn't awful at all. It had been a peaceful, dreamlike state. Harmonious. I'd distantly felt his commands, the intrinsic pull to please him, please myself too.
