Page 85 of Twisted Ties

He takes another long drag, his eyelids closing as he does. “You think she was worth saving?”

“She’s my fated mate.”

“That stuff, though, Az, it’s fairytales, isn’t it? Just because the lines of magic are there pulling you together, doesn’t mean it’s right, that you belong together. If she’s a little bitch–”

“She’s not a bitch.” A brat maybe, but not a bitch. A brat who has spilled some color into a world that was looking desolate and gray. “She’s special.”

“I hope so,” he says, cutting through the bullshit and sounding earnest for once. “Because my father …”

“Where is she, Tristan?” Maybe I should have resorted to the fists after all.

“Don’t know,” he says, leaning over the couch to flick ash into a marble tray. I take a menacing step towards him. “She wouldn’t say.”

“So help me, Tristan! If you don’t start talking some goddamn sense in the next ten sec–”

“I saw her leave the campus. In a car. With her roommate and the pig.”

“Were you watching her?” I ask, sinisterly.

“I was walking to the mansion to get these injuries seen to.” He points to his cheek and his chest. “She was waiting for her friend on the path. I asked where she was going. She refused to say.”

“She had her bag with her?”

He nods.

I go to turn, then hesitate. “Anything else?”

He takes one last drag, then wets his fingers and extinguishes the joint with a sizzle.

“The car was … different. Modified, I’m guessing.”

“Modified?” Where the hell did she get a modified car?

“Where do you think she went?” he asks, interest flickering behind his eyes before the mask of indifference falls back down.

“She has nowhere to go.”

“Her home?”

“There are people looking for her.”

“People?” He tugs at the bandage on his cheek, ripping it away from his skin. Underneath faint tram-lines run across his flesh.

“The Wolves of Night,” I say.

He curses under his breath, that flicker returning to his eyes.

“She killed Marcus Lowsky’s brother.”

He stands to his feet. “Rhi? Rhianna Blackwaters? Why?”

“To save my life.”

He stands there dumbfounded, shock written all overhis face. It’s not an expression I’ve ever seen drawn across my cousin’s features before.

“How?”

“Does it matter?”