Page 129 of Twisted Ties

I thud again. I don’t even know if he’s home or off on one of his assignments. But then I hear the heavy thud of his boots, the swivel of the eye hole and the door swings back.

“Tristan.” He sounds neither surprised nor happy to see me.

“We need to talk,” I say sternly.

“Have you come to deliver another of your riddles?” He frowns at me.

“You found her, didn’t you?” I say, pushing past him and into the house. I want to ask him where she was. What she had been doing. But I’m done with her. Done with this obsession. She’s his now. “In one piece, unfortunately.”

He slams the door shut hard behind me.

“I’ve no time for petty insults, Tristan. Spit out whatever you have come here to say. But,” he lowers his voice to a sinister growl, “know if you speak like that about her again, I’ll snap your neck in two.”

I scoff at him. It’s been a long time since we battled out in the forest behind my father’s house. I was much younger then, he far stronger. He may think he could break my neck, but I’d snap his before the idea even crossed his mind.

“You really are fucked, aren’t you?” I say.

“Being a part of this family means I always was. With or without Rhianna.”

The way he says her name, so familiarly, has jealousy rolling through my stomach. It’s hard to imagine them together. My cousin has worn this mask of stone on his face for a long time, concealing the softer side I know lurks beneath. The mask is so effective, I’d begun to wonder if the man I’d known before – the one who made me laugh, who carried me on his shoulders, who turned leaves into butterflies just to see my wonderment – had gone forever. But does that man reappear for her? Is he all butterflies and fucking giggles?

“My father sent for me this evening.” I walk through into his kitchen, trying not to search for signs of her here. Signs of domesticity. The thought making me sick. “He’s heard about the werebeast. Knows it attacked Rhianna.”

“You told him?”

“He already knew.”

“You told him anything else?”

I spin around to face him. “No.” We may no longer be allies but we both know the less my father knows the better. Every piece of information he’d only use against us anyway. “But he has his suspicions about the girl.”

“What suspicions?”

I shrug. “Believes there must be something special about her.” I stare at my cousin’s face. I wait for him to tell me there isn’t.

But there is. There is something special about her – and it isn’t the hole she blasted in Spencer’s stomach. It isn’t the way her magic matched mine pace for pace out there in the meadow.

No, it’s something more.

The way my magic wanted to combine with hers.

The way I’m pulled towards her by that hook in my stomach.

The way she’s captured my goddamn attention. The way she’s invaded my mind. The way I’m here telling him all this when I shouldn’t be.

Azlan is silent. If he thinks there is something special about the girl, if he knows about the crimson magic, he’s not telling me.

“He’s asked me to watch her. To report back to him with any information.”

“I see.” He holds my gaze. “And will you?”

“I have better things to do with my time.” Which probably sounds fucking unconvincing considering I’m standing in his house telling him all this.

“You’ll have to tell him something.”

“I know,” I say with irritation, as if I don’t know my father better than anyone, better even than my mother. “I just thought you should know. He’s watching.”

“I … I appreciate it.”