Page 83 of Claimed

I felt that flicker of panic he couldn’t hide quickly enough, that violent strain of protectiveness sharpened by something older than language. It was in his blood, in the thread and in whatever impossible thing has been opening between us bite by bite.

Now look where certainty has brought me.

A cage. A warded hole in the earth and silence so complete it suffocates.

Maybe I imagined the fear, conflated it with the instinctive recoil of a creature watching his blood disappear into the wrong mouth and dressed it up as tenderness because I wanted to.

And that wanting may be the most dangerous lie of all.

Fuck. My stomach turns then as another name rises, and this one burns just a fucking shade harder.

Selphine.

The fury comes so fast I stop pacing.

The fucking witch who saved me, then locked my own name behind my teeth and sent me into Valentin’s orbit with a potion that may have poisoned him through me.

I don’t know what hurts worse: the possibility that she meant to do it, or the suspicion that she would call it protection if I put the accusation to her face.

Bride’s Mercy.

What a pretty name for a gag. What an elegant name for a trap. My throat tightens as if the potion is offended by my thoughts.

My laugh this time sounds unhinged even to me.

Poison. Really?

What the fuck did you do to me, Selphine?

The question explodes through my head hard enough to make me dizzy.

What was in that vial? And did she want to hide me from him or shove me straight into his path? And why poison Valentin?

Because that’s the other stench rising off this now, the one I don’t want to touch because it says too much about how carefully she was manoeuvring all of us.

At the time I thought she was mapping the tether between us. Now I think she may have been looking for a conduit into him through me.

The realisation skids ice-cold through me.

Poisoning Valentin directly would be difficult. Nearly impossible. Poisoning him through blood, through the one person he had already let dangerously close? That’s another thing entirely. A cleverer thing. A crueller thing. Witches love doors hidden inside bodies. They adore thresholds no one else can see.

She moved pieces.

I knew something was off. That I was missing something. And I was right.

The fury that follows is almost clean in its force. And I cling to it simply because it’s better than the confusion. Than the ache and the humiliating churn in my chest every time I think of Valentin’s face when he realised what I’d inadvertently done to him. It’s way better than the possibility that what I felt from him by the lake was real and that I shattered it anyway.

My pulse pounds at my throat.

Selphine manipulated me. Now Valentin has caged me. Rowan knows too much. The bond is mutating into something I can no longer pretend is manageable.

And if she knew enough to do this, then she knew enough to know what would happen when everything came apart.

‘Don’t start,’ I mutter to my own mouth. ‘I’m not in the fucking mood.’

Footsteps approach and my heart betrays me before my mind can stop it.

Valentin.