Davina (Davy Harwood #3)(6)

The door crashed open, and Lucan raced inside. “What was that?”

I frowned. I would’ve expected him to be angry, but as I searched his face, there was no rage. When I felt into him, there was concern, but no anger. I murmured softly, “It was nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me!” He grabbed the cage and lifted it, shaking it.

My eyes grew wide. My cage was big enough to encase an entire bedroom and he lifted it without breaking a sweat. There was no resistance, as if he lifted a bag of books.

Lucan set my cage back down immediately and backed away. His eyes caught and held onto mine.

“You are not a normal human.” I rushed to the end of the cage beside him. “What are you? What have you done?”

He was quiet, staring back at me. Then he left, just as quietly.

When the door closed behind him, I sat back. He wasn’t human. He was more. I didn’t know what that meant, but it meant something. I felt it in my bones. I could use that to help me escape. I just had to figure out how first.





The voice never came back. It seemed like a month had passed. And Lucan stopped taunting me. He stopped coming to sit by me. I didn’t know if they corresponded, but something had happened. Perhaps his magical palace wasn’t so magical after all. Perhaps the enchanted Mori weren’t so impervious. I didn’t know, but after that day, things weren’t the same. Lucan wasn’t so mad crazy. He had stopped enjoying my pain.

The witches continued their chanting spells, and he still insisted the thread could be pulled out of me, but I caught his stares a few times. He was scared, but he wasn’t scared of me. It had to be whatever had happened to me, whoever that voice had been.

Then one day, Lucan sat beside me again.

I tensed and waited as the witches left again. Was this the day he started taunting again?

“I can see why my brother loves you.”

I laughed. “Really?”

He didn’t look at me, but sat beside and stared at the wall ahead of us. It was bleak, made of cement, and the night had fallen. The room had grown dark; soon the cold would come.

“You’re beautiful. You don’t know it so you’re not a high maintenance girl.”

“You can tell that here?”

“I could tell before, and you were Kates’s friend. They both love you—”

I gritted my teeth. My fingernails pressed into the palm of my hand. It wouldn’t be long before blood would start to drip down.

He continued, “—He loves you because you love him. Even now, you see his face every day, but you don’t flinch. You hate me with passion. You should’ve broken by now. You should be pleading with me, begging for your life. You haven’t done any of it.”

I clenched my jaw. Blood splattered onto my legs now. It made its way slowly down to the floor.

“Lucas was the quiet one when we grew up. Did he tell you that? Mmmm. I suppose not. I was the outspoken one, the leader. We had a group of friends and they did whatever I told them to do. Lucas didn’t like it. He said that I didn’t think ahead at times. He might’ve been right. I know he thought he was, but I never cared. I could’ve thought ahead, but there was no fun with that. There was no adventure. We weren’t tested then. We couldn’t rally and see who we could really be.” He laughed softly. “Our friends were weak. I never cared about them, but I loved watching my brother. Every time we’d get in trouble, Lucas would make everything okay. He always stepped in and got us out of trouble. He grew and grew every day. He became who he is today because of me. I made him. I created him.”

“A Roane vampire sired him.”

He sighed and stretched out his legs. “He has their blood. He became a vampire because of them, but he’s the man he is because of me.”

“Because he fixed your problems?”

“Because I tested him. Every time he didn’t think we could come back from whatever trouble we were in, but we did. He always found a way. I did that. I raised him.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I love my brother. He’s the only one I love.”

“And he’s going to kill you.” I looked over.

He did, too. Our gazes met.

I finished on a harsh note, “Because he loves me. He doesn’t love you.”

I waited. He’d become the enraged vampire again, but it never came. Instead, he smiled at me. “I would be honored if he was the one to kill me, but it won’t happen. He’s not coming, Davy.”

I looked away.

He leaned closer. His voice whispered to me, it teased over my skin. “He would’ve been here by now if he was coming. On the night I came for you, the Roane Army was at Benshire. They attacked the town when we were leaving. My brother is dead.”

This was a new torture. It had to be. “What are you doing?”

He stood and looked down at me.

I couldn’t look away. He wasn’t telling the truth. He couldn’t have been. Roane was alive . . . I felt it. I felt him.

Lucan smirked. “You can be with him. Just give me the thread.” He squatted at my head. “You see, I’ve started to think that maybe you’re the one holding onto the thread. I thought before that it was attached to you, but it’s the other way around. Isn’t it? You won’t let go of it, because of my brother. You think he only loves you because of the thread, don’t you?”