Page 58 of Ravished By the Revenant

I roll my eyes. “Shocking. Unprecedented. Nobody saw it coming.”

He throws a clump of soil in my general direction. I blow him a kiss and take the forest path toward our lake.

It’s a gorgeous day. Giant firs surround me, my footsteps gently crunch against the path, and once I get to the lake, it looks like liquid glass under the cloudless blue sky.

I pull out my phone. It has one proud bar of signal out here, and the battery is full, because we live in the future now—Blackthorn Keep has outlets. I’ve seen Aldric flip the light switch when he thinks no one’s watching, on-off-on-off, a seven-hundred-year-old man practically giggling at electricity.

The lavender at the lake’s edge is mobbed with butterflies—big orange ones, and also little blue ones the color of a certain glowing heart. I crouch and start taking pictures, creeping closer, doing the wildlife-photographer breath-hold, and I get one shot so good I actually gasp—a swallowtail, wings like stained glass spread as he clings to a purple stalk.

“Shmoo, you’re missing your namesakes,” I murmur, snapping another. “Butterflies everywhere and the Schmetterling is upstairs drooling on my pillow.”

I take a dozen more. I can’t wait to show it to Aldric, who will hold the phone at arm’s length like it might bite him and then secretly ask it questions at two in the morning—I’ve heard him whispering things like what is a podcast.

That’s when I hear the footsteps.

Across the lake, on the far side where the old forest comes right down to the waterline, branches crack. Something big is moving through the underbrush, casual, unhurried.

My heart clenches once, but then I roll my eyes at myself, because it’s him. Obviously it’s him. The mole surrendered, the trout can wait, and the enormous romantic disaster missed me after forty-five minutes and came to walk me home.

“You’re not sneaky!” I shout across the water, grinning. I stand up. “I can hear you, you gothic⁠—”

Three men come out of the trees.

None of them are tall enough.

None of them have glowing chests.

The grin dies on my face so fast it hurts.

Charcoal coat. Neck tattoo. The quiet one. A hundred meters of shoreline between us. Marco stops when he sees me, and even from here, I watch him tuck his phone into his breast pocket with a satisfied smirk.

My self-preservation instincts are screaming at me to run. Run now.

But I feel like my feet are trapped in wet concrete, and the shoreline is open ground. They’re already moving, splitting up, the goons swinging wide like they’ve done this before, like herding a woman along a lake is just another Tuesday, and by the time my body finally gets the memo, the quiet one has cut the path behind me. Marco is strolling along the water’s edge toward me, unhurried, because I have nowhere to go except the lake itself.

“Clara.” His tone is insufferably smug. “You look well. The country air agrees with you.”

“How?” My voice sounds hollow. “How did you find me?”

Marco smiles and taps his breast pocket.

“Who bought that phone you’re using, bambola? Whose plan does it bill to?” He tilts his head. “Every photo you take saves itself to the cloud. Every photo remembers where it was taken. You went quiet for weeks, and then three days ago, you started photographing vegetables.” He clicks his tongue. “A greenhouse. A cat. Today, butterflies. All in the same square kilometer of forest. I just followed the pictures.”

The phone is still in my hand. Warm. Fully charged. A leash.

Clara, you absolute idiot.

“Okay.” I make my voice work. “You found me. Congratulations. Now what? You drag me back and we get married and everyone pretends I didn’t go out a bathroom window? That’s the plan? That’s insane, Marco, even for⁠—”

“The plan,” he says, all warmth suddenly gone from his voice, “is that you stop making me look like a fool.”

“Then stop being one.” It’s out before I can stop it. “Go home. Tell everyone you dumped me. Tell them I died. Tell them whatever keeps your mustache friends impressed. I’m not coming back.”

“Take her,” he snaps, ignoring my words.

Neck Tattoo reaches for my arm, and I twist away from him. Then Marco’s hand clamps on my wrist, and I just snap.

I drive my elbow into his stomach as hard as I can, putting all my weight into it. The air goes out of him in a beautiful ugly grunt, and his grip is gone. He’s bent over, staring at me like I’m a lapdog he didn’t expect to bite.