Unbound (The Captive #7)(23)

“Sunglasses?” she asked.

She lifted her head to look at William. Dirt streaked his rugged features, and his auburn hair stood out in a hundred different directions from the wind. He didn’t look much better than she felt, but somehow she knew he appeared far more stable than her right now.

“Your eyes are redder than rubies,” he said and clasped hold of her arm to help her rise. “I have a feeling they won’t be changing back anytime soon either.”

“Me too,” she murmured as he took hold of Tempest’s hand and led them deeper into the cave.

***

Melinda

“We have to be getting close to where we left them,” Melinda whispered as they crept through the trees. They’d left the caves behind almost a half an hour ago.

Even though she was accustomed to moving quietly and undetected through the woods, the forest was not a place she enjoyed being right now. Not with the vampires who had attacked them earlier still out there.

She and her mother had lived in the forest after Atticus had banished them from the palace. After her mother’s death, she’d spent a lot of time trying to remain hidden from Atticus’s troops, until the day Jack discovered her. He’d promised to keep her safe and brought her back to the palace.

Then Ashby had been banished, and she’d often snuck out of the palace and into the woods to see him. She’d spent more of her life hiding within the forest than she’d spent living out of it.

Ashby took hold of her arm and drew her behind him when a twig snapped from somewhere ahead of them. The evergreens in this section of the forest were sparse enough to allow the moonlight to spill around them. The moon’s rays created a pathway of glittering crystals across the snow-covered ground before them. A doe stepped out from behind a tree. Her tail swished, and her ears flicked toward them. The deer stepped carefully over the snow before fleeing into the woods.

“Come,” Ashby said and released her.

She glanced up at him, love swelling her heart as tears burned her eyes. It easily could have been him who had died so many years ago, or again today. She’d never understood why Atticus had banished Ashby from the palace instead of adding him to his trophy room. Ashby always had been known for his refined taste and party lifestyle within the palace. A hundred years ago, he would have looked as out of place amongst these trees as a fawn in a bear den; relegating him to a life of no luxuries had been a harsh punishment for him.

However, that trophy room had been Atticus’s pride and joy, and Ashby would have made a nice edition to it. She shuddered to think Ashby could have ended up seated beside her real father there. Ashby had been married to Atticus’s daughter Natasha at the time of his banishment, but the couple’s intense loathing of one another had been well known within the palace. A worse punishment for Ashby would have been to be locked in a room with Natasha or turned into her slave. Instead, Atticus had exiled him to a treehouse in the forest.

Sometimes Melinda wondered if Atticus had known about her relationship with Ashby and spared his life for her. Before reading his journals, she would have stated without a doubt Atticus had no heart, had been born a monster and would always be one. Now she wondered if there had still been a small sliver of the man he’d once been within him, and he’d taken pity on her and allowed Ashby to live.

She may not have been his daughter, Atticus had known that, but perhaps that’s why he may have shown some kindness to her when he wouldn’t have done so for his own children. He hadn’t been forced to create her in order to keep up appearances as he had with her siblings.

She would never know the answer to the question, but she would never deny that a part of her had come to believe it to be true. Maybe she only hoped there had still been kindness in him, still been a piece of the man who had at one time existed in this world, before it had all been torn away from him. Melinda shivered and rubbed her hands over her arms.

Ashby swung his cloak off, but she waved it away when he went to drape it around her shoulders. “You’re shivering,” he whispered.

“I was thinking,” she replied.

“About Braith.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered him anyway. “Braith and other things.”

She couldn’t resist stepping closer to him. She’d never known it was possible to love someone as much as she loved him. Every day it grew stronger. The idea of losing him—

It was not one she would entertain.

“What other things?” he inquired as he returned his cloak to his shoulders and clasped her elbow.

“Do you ever think maybe Atticus knew about our relationship, and that’s why he sent you away instead of adding you to his trophy room.”

Ashby’s handsome features hardened at the mention of Atticus, and his green eyes swung back to her. “Yes,” he admitted.

“Do you believe it to be true?”

“I don’t know.” He pushed aside a branch for her so she could duck under it. “We will never truly know what he thought. His mind was rotten from years of a driving thirst for vengeance. Perhaps there was still some of the man he once was in there, but there wasn’t much of him.”

Melinda stopped when she came face to face with a massive boulder more than twenty feet tall and fifty feet wide. She frowned at it before beginning to make her way around the rock. “That’s what I think too, but I like to believe he did have some kindness left in him.”