Page 7 of An Oath at Midnight

The anger she carried now, it started then, the kind of anger born from hopelessness, but it had grown into something more. Something she struggled to contain every single day, and I didn’t know how to help her.

What the fuck would have become of me if we’d never found each other? My entire life, something had been missing, there’d been this feeling, this gaping nothingness inside me. It’d gotten worse after my parents’ deaths—then I found my Magnolia, and I was whole for the first time. She’d been my world since.

You know, don’t you? What we are to each other? That we belong together?

Her words filled my head, the ones a fifteen-year-old Mags had said to me that day. Yes, I’d known. After I found her, it was all I knew. I’d been sixteen, nearly seventeen, and maybe, if I’d been younger when we met, the truth of what we were to each other would have grown more gradually. But I hadn’t been, and along with a deep knowing that Magnolia was my witch and I was her familiar, came the undeniable truth—that she was also my mate.

Something I never imagined would happen for me, and definitely not when I was so young. It wasn’t something I’d ever wanted. I’d seen what loss and pain looked like when my father died, when my mother died soon after of a broken heart. I’d wanted none of it.

Then I’d seen Mags. She’d been at her family’s cemetery. I’d been drawn there, pulled to that spot by a force deep inside me, unable to resist. I’d seen her hair first, black and thick and wavy—then she’d tilted her face up to the moonlight.

I’d stopped breathing.

She’d been perfect to me in every way. Everything my secret teenage heart had dreamed up had been sitting right there. She’d been too young for me then, and I’d been prepared to wait, for as long as she needed. To wait for her to come to the same realization as me.

It never happened, though.

My best friend, my mate, didn’t want me the way I wanted her. She didn’t recognize that part of the bond between us and thought of me only as family—maybe even a brother.

She was my everything, and being by her side the last six years had been a privilege and an honor, it was what I’d been born to do, but the last couple of years, after someone tried to take her from me during her sister Willow’s trial, everything had changed.

I’d changed.

And so had Mags.

My gaze slid lower. While she slept, her shirt had slipped off one of her shoulders, revealing more silvery scars. She hated them. I hated how they got there, and how that day, and the ones leading up to it, irrevocably altered everything between us.

I looked at her face again. Her lips were full and deep crimson. Her dark lashes rested on her pink cheeks, her beautiful amber eyes locked behind closed lids. My crow’s song built in my chest, like it often did at times like this, but I swallowed it back down and willed her eyes to open. I craved the way she looked at me, the same way I craved the wind on my feathers. Those eyes, they’d never hidden anything from me. The day we met, there’d been no lies when she’d looked at me, only truth.

We’ll be together forever and nothing will ever tear us apart.

She’d said it and meant it. I’d believed it with everything in me.

I wasn’t so sure anymore.

When she looked at me now, there were secrets.

She blinked, waking, and immediately gave me a sleepy smile, cracking my heart right down the fucking middle—because I had secrets of my own. Secrets I was forbidden to share. Secrets, that even if she did want me the way I did her, made it impossible for us to ever be anything more than we were.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

Rolling into me automatically, she curled her arm around my middle. I lay back and she rested her head against my chest.

She yawned. “So what’re we doing today.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but the thud of boots hitting the deck outside reached us.

A throaty caw followed. Rook. He liked talking even less than me.

Mags pulled away from me, sitting up, her gaze instantly growing distant. “I guess that answers that.”

The peace between us shattered. “Mags…”

She climbed out of bed, shoved on her boots, and walked out of the room.

I tugged on my jeans and followed her out as Rook walked in.