Page 90 of When Roses Burn

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think I’ll be able to read them all?”

“If you have a few hundred years.”

I laughed as I bounced up and down while clapping my hands. “I can’t wait!”

For the first time since seeing him again, there was a twinkle in his eyes. It faded quickly, but while it shouldn’t, it gave me some hope that maybe he wasn’t as far gone as I’d come to believe.

That’s a treacherous way to think.

And it was. He’d made it repeatedly clear that the man I loved was dead—however, a tiny bubble of hope formed in my chest.

Maybe, if I could fully convince him that I hadn’t revealed our secrets to my mother, he could forgive me and love me again.

But can you love him as he is now?

That question stole some of my joy. I didn’t know the answer to it. Knox showed some signs of kindness, but it wasn’t his default mode, like it was with Seth. This man was so different than the one I’d yearned for; was it possible to love him?

I didn’t know, and trying to find the answer might prove lethal to my heart.

I’d never expected Seth to be the same man he was before entering the harem, but I also hadn’t anticipated this big of a change. I couldn’t have known that not only had he endured the degradation of the harem, but he’d also had his animal twisted into something else and told that his mate betrayed him. Then, when he finally escaped, it was to discover his entire kingdom was nothing but rosebushes, gray sky, and sorrow.

Who wouldn’t be changed by all that? It would have destroyed me.

When he frowned at me, I smiled before dancing down the rest of the stairs. I was faking it now and suspected he knew it.

“This way,” he said.

He strode behind the stairs, pushing the ivy out of the way as he went. When he held it back for me, I ducked under the plant that rustled back into place when he released it.

We strode down a hall lined with lanterns hanging from silver hooks. I could lift one of the lanterns and take it with me, but I didn’t touch them as we passed numerous closed doors. I didn’t ask about the closed rooms; I only cared about one.

This was the darkest section of the castle I’d been in. I hadn’t expected it after all the windows and airiness of the rest of the castle. The wooden walls and scarlet carpet felt almost claustrophobic.

Knox stepped over a rosebush in the middle of the hall, but my legs weren’t long enough to do so. I skirted around the drooping plant with scattered petals beneath it.

Unable to resist wanting to care for the dying plant, I brushed my fingers across its blackening petals. A wave of sorrow hit me, but so did a pulse of power that sucked my breath away. Before my Needing, as an unbound sorceress, my abilities were charged by nature, but this was far more forceful than I’d experienced. I’d also never felt sadness from touching a plant, and while it sounded insane, I was sure it was the rose’s distress I’d experienced.

Tingles raced up and down my arm before spreading out through the rest of my body. The hair on my nape rose as my skin came alive, and my throat went dry.

“Briar?”

I jerked my hand away from the rose to discover Knox at the end of the hall, standing outside a set of closed double doors. I tried to form words, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.” And that was the truth. While this was entirely new, it was far from wrong. “I’m coming.”

Trying not to lose that surge of power, I closed my hand and hurried toward him. Was the extra power I’d received from the rosebush because it was once a shifter?

Going through the Needing made all sorceresses and sorcerers stronger, but they gained strength from the moon or the sun, depending on which side they chose. Did they also experience more power from nature afterward?

No one had said anything like that to me, and from what I’d seen, the night casters turned their worship to the moon. They lived beneath its rays, absorbed as much of it as they could, and bound themselves to its god and goddess. I assumed the day casters were the same.

“What were you doing?” Knox asked.

“That rosebush is dying.”