Total pages in book: 194
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
“Collecting books and reading books are two different hobbies,” he told her. “Don’t get them mixed up.”
“Noted.”
She tipped back her drink with a flourish. Graves always had the best liquor. His eyes followed the movement, lingering on the bob of her throat as she swallowed.
“And how was your business?” he asked.
She lifted the drink to him and took another gulp.
“That good?”
“Bombed.”
“He wouldn’t let you see Ethan?” Graves asked, still as a statue in his crisp black suit. His gloves were on. His eyes ever watchful.
“Oh no. I saw Ethan. He’s fully brainwashed by the Druids.”
Graves sighed. “You thought he would be otherwise?”
She turned her back on him to refill her drink before saying, “He doesn’t trust me because we’re working together.”
“Ah.”
“It’s stupid. He thinks they’re the good guys.” She put as much disdain as she could into the words. “I don’t know how to disillusion him on that. There are no good guys.”
“It’s the Druid way,” Graves said with a sniff. “It’s not even his fault.”
She turned back to him. “What do you know of Druid training?”
His eyes met hers as he considered. “I went through it.”
“What? When?”
“I was young.” He set his book down and reached for the liquor. “It was before I met Kingston, even.”
“Really? Forgive me, but I simply cannot picture you as a Druid.”
He smirked. “No, I never fit the bill. But I came to Dublin as a teenager, eager to be reunited with my mother’s people after my father had sold me.” He took a drink. “Oisín introduced me to Lorcan.”
“Oisín!” I said in surprise. “You have known him a long time.”
“Indeed.”
“What happened? They let you join?”
“Not exactly,” he said bitterly. “They accepted my mother, my blood, my Druidic magic. They rejected…everything else.” He waved a gloved hand. “I was an anomaly, and military schools, no matter how progressive, don’t like anomalies.”
“But you trained with them.”
“Yes. I spent many years in Dublin and the Irish countryside learning their ways. Always just a bit of an outsider. Except…”
He broke off and took another drink. She wasn’t sure if he was going to finish. She had heard so little of his past, and every bit had been fought for. She was shocked that he was even trusting her with this much information without some huge tug of war. Maybe this was also part of his “prove it.”
“Anyway,” he said, “I know what Ethan is going through. For someone who wants to belong, the bonding is a high like you’ve never experienced. It’s family. Until it isn’t.”
Kierse wanted to ask. Did this have something to do with Lorcan’s sister, Emilie? Lorcan had claimed that Graves had killed Emilie, and Graves hadn’t denied that fact. What had really happened to sever him from the Druids so long ago?
But she knew when he’d hit a subject he wasn’t ready to discuss. She saw it in herself as much as him.
“Lorcan said as much,” Kierse said.
Graves pursed his lips. “What else did he say?”
“He thinks Cillian Ryan is dead. Sometime in the Monster War.”
“Hmm,” he responded skeptically.
“I guess he drained a sacred tree and that’s how he eluded Lorcan all this time. Sansa-something.”
“Sansara?” Graves asked with wide eyes. “Fucking hell.”
“That’s the one.”
“I knew he was pathological, but not that bad. No wonder the spell lasted so long on you, if it was fueled by Sansara.”
“Lorcan said that, too.”
Graves’s face turned dark. He clearly disapproved of the comparison. “Is that all he knew?”
She told him the rest. About his wife and her parents and the triskel. Graves looked unsurprised. He’d known, then, that Lorcan had been part of a triskel. For some reason, that didn’t seem to be what he wanted to discuss.
“Did he ask for anything else?” His voice was pitched low, his body leaning toward her like she was the earth and he her moon.
“Well, he asked me to stay. To move me and Gen onto the property.”
“Of course he did.”
“Which is why you kissed me,” she breathed as he loomed over her. She tipped her chin up to meet him.
“Is that so?”
“You knew he’d ask.”
“I know what he wants,” Graves said with finality. His hands moved to her hips, finding the hem of her black shirt and running it through his fingers.
“He offered me the world,” she teased. “Training and magic and a family and a throne.”
“How could you deny him?” He toed her feet farther apart, spreading her legs wide and settling between them.
“Who says I denied him?” she breathed. She put her hands on his chest. The heat of him rippled through her. Just a breath away from tipping over the edge.
“Well, if I knew all I had to do was offer you the entire world to get you to accept,” he began, his hands slipping to her ass and lifting her effortlessly onto the table, “maybe I would have done so earlier.”