Raw, unfettered hostility surged through me at Graysen’s touch. I twisted away, shaking free of the hand he’d splayed across the small of my back. Stepping into the room he’d guided me toward, my bare feet made little sound on the cool stone floor.

Menacing shadows rippled along the walls, striking out at the undulating light cast by candles in candelabras and spilling from the chandelier. Ferne sat in a high-backed chair. A Heriz rug with a bold, geometric pattern was nestled beneath the long table. Graysen stepped flush with me where I’d slowly drawn to a halt.

There were large-scale maps on one wall, pinned with mismatched tacks, as well as images of Horned Gods I recognized from time spent raking through my family library on a hunt for any creature that could reveal what I was. My gaze glanced over racks of weapons, swords and daggers, war scythes, battle axes, and crossbows. A low glow of several computer monitors emitting dull blue light over documents and files strewn upon a shared desk, along with a nest of wires and half-formed devices from House Simonis, deconstructed by the Crowthers, I assumed, to be made into something new.

I raised a brow in curiosity, tilting my head up to Graysen. At my silent question, he answered, “This is our family room.”

My face slackened in surprise. “It looks more like a War Room.”

Black eyes flared wide, then narrowed as he glanced about, taking in how I might see the space. Thick, inky brows slashed over an equally dark gaze a moment before he grunted. And I suppose that was his way of agreeing.

But there were remnants of what I supposed the room might have looked like without those brutal additions. In the opposite corner was a comfy couch with matching armchairs. Paintings and family photographs surrounded the maps that showed territories crossed out with slashes of red ink. And someone had proudly placed little clay things—lopsided animals and wobbly cars—perhaps made clumsily by a child, along the fireplace mantel. On the bookcases lining two adjacent walls, I spied a collection of children’s books, obviously much-loved judging by their ratty spines.

Graysen gestured behind me. I took it as a silent request to move, and I did, walking away from where the Crowther women had gathered at the table. As I moved past the wall lined from ceiling to floor with books, I realized the photographs propped up along a single shelf were of the same young woman.

I barely remembered her from my childhood, and it stupidly took me a long moment to realize who she was, even though I was standing in her home. Captured in a moment of pure, joyous laughter, she stared back at me, beaming with green eyes sparkling in a heart-shaped face, a sheen of golden hair curling over her shoulders.

Oh my gods…

Tabitha Crowther.

My footing stumbled as coarse currents of guilt washed through me.

The Horned Gods had stolen Tabitha in place of me, for whatever purpose they had in mind for her, 12 long years ago.

Both of us alive.

Both of us trapped.

Would the Crowthers make me suffer like she suffered?

But that was a question to which I already knew the answer. I was the Crowthers’ way into the Witches Ball, where I’d stand on the auction block and be bid on by those reclusive Horned Gods whose dark power came from an ancient language. I’d be nothing more than an object, reduced down to body parts, the bits of me that could be used in their wicked potions and curses.

Graysen herded me to a far corner where the bookshelves met one another, and the smell of paper and ink greeted me. When I turned to face him, our gazes connected. For a moment, I saw the turmoil raging inside, the guilt and remorse. Fury too. My heart pounded wildly at the wintry blast of feelings lashing out at where I stood, chilling the blood in my veins, turning my bones brittle.

He blinked slowly and, when he next looked at me, his gaze was blank and unfeeling. “Stand here and do not say a word,” he ordered, his voice low and gravelly.

A spike of anger flared—Like hells I will!

My mouth parted, but he pressed a calloused finger across my lips.

I went to bite him when his sharp tsk stopped me. “Not a single word,” he whispered. “For your own good, be silent.”

Without waiting for a response, he twisted away to stride further into the room. Only then did I realize he’d positioned me as far from his aunt as possible.

Despite the modern lighting set into ceiling recesses, candlelight was the only source of illumination. The shadows lingered in the room like another presence. I welcomed the shadows, pressed myself deeper into them, welcoming the dull ache as the bookshelves at my back dug into my spine, desperately trying to ignore the photographs of Tabitha.

Graysen placed himself between his aunt and me, forcing me to lean sideways to peer around his tall body.

Valarie stood at the head of the dark wooden table while Ferne sat stiffly, her hands threaded together, rubbing her thumb back and forth, pulling the skin taut over the knuckle and turning it white with pressure.

Silver threads ran through Valarie’s midnight hair, woven into a simple bun. Her features were as sharp as her gaze. Coldness radiated from her—I could feel it nipping at my flesh like hoarfrost. She was curious, wanting to know what I was, what lurked beneath my skin, and how it might be turned to her advantage. Information her twin brother, Varen, and her nephews had discovered less than an hour ago.

Her pitiless eyes glowed otherworldly in the shadows. And I fought the urge to shrink away. To keep myself from trembling. To remind myself who I was and what it felt like to have wrath burning through my veins.

I was a Wychthorn of the Great House.

I would bow to no one.

And I would never let them see me break.

Tipping up my chin, I met her icy gaze with my own.

Graysen squared his shoulders as if bracing himself for pain. His deep voice rumbled through the room. “Wychthorn’s a wyrm.”

Ferne’s mouth fell open.

Her shock was almost palpable, a sudden chill that rippled outward and raised goosebumps along my arms. Hearing it spoken out loud, a name given to the power, to the thing that lived inside me…

So much had happened in the space of an hour, a day, a weekend. Only to learn the truth, meet my wyrm and have the creature that had been with me since birth leave me. No…not gone, just hidden from me in a way I hadn’t had time to work out in my mind.

A wyrm.

I was a wyrm.

I caught the flash of confusion sweeping across Valarie’s features. “A wyrm?” she repeated. Her brows nudged together as her gaze turned to her nephew. “How can that be? They are beasts.”

Graysen had his back to me. His armor clung to his tall body, broad but streamlined. He adjusted his stance minutely, running his fingers through his ash-streaked hair, then dropped his hand to brace it on his hip. I watched those powerful shoulders lift as he shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”

It was Ferne who put it together. She rose, her chair scraping along stone, before angling her face toward us both. The strip of lace across her eyes appeared a darker shade of blue in the dimly lit room. “You’re a Tamer,” she said to Graysen in that low, raspy voice of hers, an incredulous note in her tone. “That’s why I could feel what was between you two. Why there was that strange connection you both shared.”

Valarie’s calculating gaze crawled all over Graysen. He’d shifted sideways and angled himself slightly so I could see his profile. He looked cold and unaffected, but I knew him…at least I thought I had. The thumb digging into the tip of his middle finger gave him away. He, like me, was trying to come to grips with the knowledge, what it meant for both of us, to finally understand why there had always been that hyperawareness that sparked and shimmered between the two of us.

“It’s not corporeal. Not-quite-living. She can’t shift into the beast. I guess it’s more appropriate to say she’s part-wyrm. For some godsforsaken reason, it’s as if the spirit or essence of a wyrm has attached itself to her.” The reason no one, not even the Crowthers, could ever have anticipated, nor guessed what lurked beneath my skin.

Our world had never seen such a thing before.

Graysen turned fully to face me. A shiver rippled down my spine at the sight of how empty his expression had become. A cold mask he hid behind, I reminded myself. His gaze resembled his aunt’s as he raked it from the top of my head to the tips of my dirt-encrusted toes, sweeping back up again as he assessed me clinically, like a thing. “The wyrm hasn’t reached maturity. It’s still adolescent.”

I blinked in shock. The wyrm had been massive. How much bigger was it going to grow? How much more powerful? Those beasts could bring mountains to their knees, and the Crowthers’ fortress would have been reduced to rubble if it had reached maturity.

But it also made sense why my emotions were so closely entwined with the wyrm’s. Adolescent, the wyrm was temperamental, full of fire and anger. The reason it was kept in burrows deep beneath the earth until it gained control of its emotions.

“She saved your life,” I heard someone say above the sudden noise of the door opening and heavy boots clunking on the stone floor. Caidan entered the room, his arm slung around Jett, supporting the youngest Crowther brother as he limped beside him.

I had. My wyrm lashed out when Graysen approached, drawn to me like a moth unmindful of a flame. Reacting instinctively to protect me, my wyrm breathed flames of sunshine and moonlight to obliterate him. But… I’d saved Graysen’s life by casting a tempest of cool air to drive the fire aside.

“You would have been barbecue,” Caidan added with taunting amusement.

Less than barbecue. He would have been incinerated into nothing. Not a speck of cinder or ash would have remained.

I slid my gaze to Graysen. A muscle feathered in his jaw as he stared back at me.

Even now, with Zrenyth’s rope collaring me, I didn’t regret saving his life. But he couldn’t learn my weakness, so I bared my teeth at him.

And because I was watching for it, I saw a sharp glint of guilt flash through his eyes before he turned his gaze aside.

Caidan led Jett to a couch and eased him down. Jett stretched his long legs out and tipped his head against the headrest, wincing and turning away from the light. Sweat plastered loose strands of hair to his temples. Though his muscles were locked and tense, a faint shiver ran through his limbs.

Valarie crossed the room to a small table next to the couch. She picked up a candelabra, its radiance casting a brief golden glow over Jett. Fat molten wax dripped as she moved it away, allowing the gloom to settle around him. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said to him as she set it on the fireplace mantel.

“Nothing better to do. Besides, I wouldn’t want to miss this,” he gritted out between clenched teeth as those eyes, shining bright in the darkness, met mine.

As Caidan turned—the breath whooshed from my lungs.

“You’re hurt…” Ferne cried, spinning around. How she knew, I didn’t know.

“I’m fine,” but his voice scraped out, raw and uneven, as he flopped onto the couch beside Jett. The side of his face I hadn’t seen when he entered the family room showed melted, puckered flesh pulled out of shape and his scalp exposed in scorched streaks.

In fascination, I watched the warped skin slowly heal, the vicious third-degree burns smoothing and becoming less angry and inflamed. He gingerly flexed his jaw and winced.

Ferne hurried toward the filing cabinet, her hands spread before her, guided by the awareness that came with her bloodline.

Metal clunked and grated as she dragged open the bottom drawer and pulled out a soft leather bag. She moved to the couch, and the bag thumped softly at her feet as she knelt beside Caidan. Tilting her head, she rummaged around inside, feeling the shape of the vials and roots and glass containers, I imagined, and fished out several syringes, offering them to her older brother.

Caidan picked a mossy-green potion, a mixture of medicine and magic melded together by House Simonis.

He half-shrugged out of his jacket, drawing a shoulder out far enough so that he could stab the needle into his upper arm and pump in the painkiller. As the medication worked its way through his system, his eyelids lowered as he let out a sigh, his form relaxing and curving into the cushions behind him.

Ferne offered the same handful of syringes to Jett.

But he grunted out a no.

Ferne huffed out a breath, and her mouth was a bitter line as if she’d expected his answer and it still annoyed the hells out of her.

Fatigue limned my body, and my knees wobbled, threatening to buckle. I’d reached near-exhaustion fighting for freedom. I steadied a hand against a shelf. The leather-bound books pushed back against my fingertips as I dug deep, drawing on what little energy remained.

Graysen cast a swift glance at me, worry almost indiscernible, but it had flickered through his gaze.

Anger burned brightly. What right did he have!

The sudden sound of the door shoving open, unhurried footfall, and whispering leather sliced my thoughts apart and had all our attention swinging toward the room’s entrance. Valarie’s twin brother, Varen, and the Crowthers’ father strode in. Kenton was close behind him, a large hand clasped at the side of his neck as he rolled it from side to side. Sweat, dirt, and soot covered each of them. Ash coated their unruly black locks. And blood… Blood was smeared all over their armor, into the dirty creases of their fingers and calloused palms, splattered along their cheeks.

They brought with them the stench of smoke and death. But hadn’t that been me? Wasn’t it me who had wielded that, inflicted it upon them?

It was deathly quiet.

Kenton leaned his thigh against the lip of the table, folding his arms across his massive chest, his chilling focus solely on me. And my fingers inched for my adamere bracelet…only to scrape against the naked flesh of my inner wrist. The beads that kept me in check and comforted me when I needed them the most were gone. Lost somewhere in that nightmare I’d survived only yesterday.

Graysen paced back and forth in front of me. His footfall didn’t seem agitated, nor was the way he carried himself, but there was something territorial about his actions. I realized no one could get past him to me, and I wondered if he was aware of it.

I caught the perplexed look that passed between Jett and Kenton.

Varen, the Crowther family’s patriarch, was the tallest of them all, and there was a brutal beauty in his weathered features. He braced his hands on the back of a chair. His roughly hewn voice split the silence apart. “We lost good men and women today.”

And those eyes, those violet eyes, shifted my way. All of them. All the Crowthers stared at me with angered grief brimming right below the surface, but there was also an unease as if it were a rocky truce between us. As if they thought I might suddenly strike out and unleash the wyrm.

But of course, I couldn’t, because the magic encircling my neck cut me off from the power that resided within me.

“The wounded are in the infirmary. Some won’t make it through the night.” Varen dropped his gaze down to his fingers, clenched tightly around the wooden chair before pushing off to straighten. He wiped a hand down his face, shooting a decisive look at his sister. “We’ll bury the dead tonight.”

Caidan propped his elbows on his knees, bowed his head, and hid behind bloodied hands that kneaded his temples and hairline.

“Collens? Hollis?” Jett asked, his fingers balling into fists on his thighs.

Varen swallowed thickly, then nodded, and rattled off a series of names. My fractured mind took in only a few. Gretchen, Liam, Hollis. But the fallen were named. Named, they became people. People fatally harmed.

I’d killed them.

Me.

My stomach clenched, and the acidic taste of bile burned its way up my throat.

I may not have taken a life, punching back with dark power and wicked howling wind, but I hadn’t reigned the wyrm in. I’d allowed it to maim and kill. It had torn through the Crowther ranks, slicing and dicing and crushing them beneath its might. Incinerating them with its wyrmfire threaded with moonlight and sunlight, a mixture I’d never heard or read about in my quest to learn more about wyrms in my childhood.

Sickly abhorrence sluiced through my veins. My hands shook and my bottom lip quivered. I didn’t understand how I was still standing with the way my burning legs trembled. After everything that had happened this evening, it was too much, what I’d been part of, what I had done.

A wrathful gaze clashed with my own. Jett’s features twisted in fury. “Collens, Hollis… Cousins of mine,” he snarled, shoving to his feet, surging for me in a blur of flesh and rage.

I jerked back. Stumbling against the bookshelves.

Varen’s rough voice boomed. “Jett!”

Graysen lunged—

Grabbed Jett by the throat—

His momentum spun them both around, and he slammed his brother into a bookcase. The vicious move shook the pictures of Tabitha, and books thumped onto the floor.

Ferne cried out.

Kenton and Caidan moved fast to flank Graysen.

Graysen pitted his entire weight against Jett, letting go of his throat to cross a forearm over his chest. They were locked in a death glare, breathing hard, as Jett struggled to free himself. The other brothers hovered close, ready to intercede.

“She killed them! They’re dead because of her!” Jett roared.

“And if the roles were reversed?” A voice cut through the room. Varen surprised me by saying, “What would you do if you found yourself cornered?”