Page 62

She’d been remade.

Into what?

“The old Kleos couldn’t levitate a teacup,” she told me. “Which was normal, as a child. Most witches only get their powers at puberty. But after that, my nightmares made the whole house shake.”

“Who knows this?” I asked sharply.

I couldn’t be the only one to see it. This wasn’t a coincidence.

At seven, she was remade by runes, and now, someone was using runes to control her? As far as I was concerned, our list of suspects got a hell of a lot shorter. Unless her condition was general knowledge. Somehow, I doubted it. The founding families would have heard about it, if it was widely known that a child had been blessed by a god. By the sound of it, she only realized it recently.

“Just close family,” she said. “My parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle on my father’s side, and Gideon, of course. My mother was adamant we shouldn’t speak about it to outsiders, not even her own family. There are too many of them, and they like to gossip. Silver knows too, but I think that’s it.”

“Hm,” I said, all the while thinkingfuck.

That made things more complicated. I couldn’t very well tell her the fact that was etched in iron in my mind.

Whoever had cursed Kleos knew that the one sure way to affect her was runes.

Which meant the complete list of potential attackers was every member of her family, and her best friend.

23

KLEOS

Icouldn’t stop looking at my arms. The former marks on my skin had been a source of fear and shame, but those runes? They were…beautiful.

I wasn’t being biased because they happened to have been written by Lucian Regis, though there was an elegance to his clear, confident lines. It was clear he’d written plenty of runes before. These runes spoke to me. They weren’t telling a story as such, but there was a logic and intent to every single one of them.

I felt too giddy about no longer being marked by a dark spell to be a hundred percent certain of it, but I would have sworn they were making me stronger, faster, more awake and alert. More aware of the rest of the world around me.

Every time I looked, I wanted to jump into Lucian’s arms again and squeeze as hard as I could. I would have if he’d been just about anyone else—Gideon, Silver, hells, even smelly Timothee—but poor Lucian was horrified enough the first time I gave in. I needed to restrain myself, or he would stop helping me just to avoid my hugs.

I had to remind myself: not everyone was touchy-feely. I wasn’t even touchy-feely as a general rule. Typically, that was mycousin’s thing. I just couldn’t seem to help myself when it came to the least approachable man in the entire city, apparently.

“All done,” my savior announced, washing his hands.

He’d been checking the various cauldrons brewing on his workstation. Any other day, I would have bugged him about every single one of the mysterious brews, because I didn’t recognize the process, color, smell. In fact, I could identify very few of the many, many potions on display; either the color felt familiar but the consistency was wrong, or the label announced something completely foreign to me. I was a former valedictorian. This quite simply didn’t happen to me.

But my curiosity was nothing compared to my sheer excitement, so not a single question crossed my lips, until Lucian proposed to leave this fascinating room. “Shall we head up?”

“Wait, I wondered about your work here.”

Wiping his hands on yet another monogramed handkerchief—how many did he keep on him?—Lucian smirked, one eyebrow quirking. “Oh? As much as you wondered about my library?”

I was on my feet so fast I almost lost my balance.

I didn’t know how he found his way through the millions of corridors, doors, halls, and the occasional hidden passageway, but soon, the view out of the window showed we were above the light gardens again. The great staircase we took to head downstairs was divided in two on the upper floors, leading to different wings. We turned left.

This was where we’d gone a year ago. I remembered the darker walls, the red tapestries, the general sense of danger and darkness.

“That’s a different vibe,” I said.

I didn’t dislike it. This side felt…sexier.

“It’s my wing of the manor, so to speak. The walls used to be blue when I was younger. They changed to black in my teens. The red showed up a couple of years back.”

“By itself?” I blinked. “You didn’t paint it?”