Chapter 14

Fourteen

There is only the loud thumping of my heart in my ears.

Family .

That’s what Bran said.

The bloody Winter Court dress smells like my family.

Up until this point, having a fae family was just an idea, a story. Now it’s real. And worse than that, it’s carnage right before my eyes. Proof that the fae courts really will do whatever it takes to destroy my line.

Bran snaps his fingers at Ramona and she scurries out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

I’m breathing faster now, my vision blurring on the edges.

They’re going to kill me.

And then they’ll all rejoice over my corpse.

“Sit down, Mouse,” Bran orders, his hand on my arm, guiding me away from the dress. The backs of my legs bump into the settee, and I drop hard to the cushions.

“Mouse,” he says.

I blink over to him.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

I swallow, trying to fill my lungs with oxygen.

He crouches in front of me and takes my face in his hands. “You don’t have to go. We don’t have to go.” There’s concern between his brows. A flicker of worry in his amber eyes.

“Arion already said…” I trail off and suck in another breath.

“He said what?”

If I tell Bran Arion’s exact words, he’ll lose his fucking mind.

I’m insinuating that I can take your blood with very little effort.

“We have to go,” I tell Bran. “We have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

I look past him to the dress, to the dark crimson stain down the front, the tear of fabric at the chest.

Stabbed in the heart.

Someone who shared my blood.

“What would you do?” I ask him.

He rises so he can sit next to me on the cushion. He puts his elbows on his knees and folds his hands in front of him while he thinks. I give him all the time he needs because I want his honest answer, I want him to work his strategic magic.

“If it were me,” he says, and looks over at me, a lock of his dark hair falling over his forehead. “I would go and I would wear the dress.”

“Why?”

My heart rate slows and I can finally take a full breath.

“Arion wants to intimidate you,” Bran says. “The dress symbolizes the carnage that’s already been wrought. If you wear it, you tell him you are not afraid of more spilled blood. If he can’t intimidate you, he can’t control you.”

I link my arm through his and lean my head against his shoulder. His scent soothes me, that amber and musk. Even the coolness of his body helps ground me.

“And if Arion asks me to help him unseal the gate?”

Bran looks over at me. He takes my hand in his. “Better he ask than coerce.”

“True. But I’d rather not do it at all.”

He sighs and closes his eyes. “I wish that was our best option, but Damien…”

“I know.” I unlink our arms and cross the room to stand in front of the dress. It really is gorgeous. Like starlight trapped in a dress form. And in some macabre way, the blood adds to its beauty. Violence with beauty, trapped in time.

“I’ll wear it,” I say.

Bran is suddenly behind me. “If at any moment, you feel uncomfortable, we’ll take it off.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I glance at him over my shoulder.

“I was being serious. But yes.” He smirks.

“Devil.”

His arms wind around my waist, and he pulls me into him. His nose nuzzles at the crook of my neck, drinking in my scent and the pulsing heat of my veins. “When this is all over, little mouse, I will take you to some faraway castle and chain you to my bed and delight in your body again and again. And I will show you just how devilish I can be.”

It takes Bran no time at all to assemble an entire team to get me and him ready. Ramona selects a fae-made suit jacket for him. It’s black, with silver embroidery along the collar and down the lapel, and buttons shaped like orbs that when they catch the light, they almost seem to churn like an ocean.

Once Ramona is finished with him, she returns to me with blue metallic thread and needle and sews delicate knot-work around the stab wound in the chest of my dress, closing up the tear.

Next, my hair is curled, braided, and then pinned into a crown. While my vampire hair stylist finishes up, a tall, lanky woman who introduces herself as Charlie swipes bright red lipstick on my lips, finishing off my makeup.

When Bran and I finally come back together in front of a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, we match so well, it’s hard not to think it was planned weeks ago.

“You are gorgeous,” he says with hungry eyes.

“And you are ridiculously handsome,” I say back.

“How do you feel?”

I turn to my left, then my right, checking the dress on all its angles. If a person didn’t know the story of the dress, it would almost look like a fairytale avant-garde dress with a giant paint splatter.

But no, just dripping with blood.

I finger the stain. The fabric is thicker there, still a little stiff with a life drained from flesh.

My stomach swims. I take a breath.

I will not be disgusted by this dress. I will wear it with honor.

I may know absolutely nothing about my family, but I won’t believe I was born from something evil. My family must have had a story, a reason to do what they did, even if it wasn’t the right one.

“I feel ready,” I finally tell Bran.

His gaze meets my reflection in the mirror, and he gives me a nod. “Then let’s not keep them waiting any longer.”

As Bran and I make our way through Bramwell Park, my heart starts thumping against the back of my throat.

I don’t want to be nervous.

“Can’t you compel the anxiety out of me?” I ask him, my arm tightly woven through the crook of his. He can see much better in the dark than I can. Even though Arion’s invitation said to meet him on the moonlit side of Bramwell Pond, there is barely a moon in sight.

Which means if I survive tonight, tomorrow Rita will finally undo my binding spell on the new moon.

Arion couldn’t have better timing.

“I’m not compelling you,” Bran answers.

“Why not?”

“Because you need every instinct you possess.”

I wrinkle my nose at him. “I could do without the anxiety.”

He pulls me down one of the paved bike paths that eventually hugs close to the shore of Bramwell Pond. I don’t know which side is the moonlit side, but Bran seems to have a destination in mind.

Crickets and frogs chirp and croak in the darkness. The air is warm, with a slight breeze that makes the dry leaves of the underbrush scrape and rattle.

Bran finally comes to a stop where the bike path curves back toward the opposite park entrance.

“Is this it?” I ask.

He looks around. “This is it.”

The night is still. There’s no one around.

“Is it a trap?” My stomach spins and I look down at my dress again, and at the long skirt pooled around my slippered feet. I couldn’t run in this thing if I tried.

Bran’s dark brow furrows, eyes narrowing.

“What?” I ask.

“The air is different. Do you feel it?”

“Different? How?—”

I cut myself off when a faint break of light wavers off to my left. There are two birch trees with trunks that curve away from one another but canopies that curve back, forming what almost looks like a doorway.

I let go of Bran and take a step. He mirrors me, keeping less than a foot between us.

His nearness makes me bold and I reach out, waving my hand through the air.

And suddenly a doorway appears…

…and Arion, Lord of the Summer Court, steps through.