Page 32 of The Dragon and the Dove

‘Hale and his shadows.’

She hummed. ‘I mean the whole… eerie silence thing. I hate this whole damn place.’

Born and bred in the mountains of Halbracht, Paola was as wild as the horses that roamed there. She hated the capital. Narrow streets thronged with people and houses packed tight like sardines.

House Armand was beautiful in its austerity, but it was not for the likes of someone who named their barn spiders and ran barefoot in winter. Theo knew what she meant by silence. Not the absence of people but creatures. No crickets chirping at dusk, field mice squeaking in the gardens or roosters heralding the dawn.

‘I used to feel like that too. Back when Papa and I first came here,’ he admitted. After Mama died, and his world pitched sideways, Theo didn’t feel at home anywhere. After settling in House Armand, he refused to return to Halbracht at all. He didn’t want to stand on the earth where she was buried, or sit in the same room as his aunt, who looked so much like her – only younger, more vibrant, with a whole life yet to lead. It had been too painful for Theo.

After Papa died, he’d surrendered himself entirely to House Armand, made a home there. Found a family.

But Paola, like Tobias, was his blood. His heart. A living chain to his mother. He was glad now to have them both under the same roof, even if it made her grouse and guzzle cheap spirits.

‘I suppose you’ll say the place will grow on me,’ she remarked.

‘Only if you decide to stay.’

‘Where else would I be on the brink of war but with my boys?’

Theo smiled. ‘We’re hoping it won’t come to that.’

‘That’s a lot of hope to hang on a blade made of Lightfire.’

And the unhinged saint who wanted to wield it.

But as much as Theo despised Hale, he trusted him on one matter; Ransom would go to the ends of Arthos to protect Seraphine. He didn’t need magic to kill for her. He would rip apart anyone who even looked at her sideways.

Paola’s gaze turned hawkish. ‘You’re troubled.’

‘I’m thirsty.’

She ordered him a whiskey.

It went down like a bonfire.

‘Better?’

He hovered on the cusp of a lie.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t bother.’

‘Fine.’ He looked into his glass. ‘I’m not all right, Paola.’

‘It’s the ritual, isn’t it? The making.’

He looked up.

‘Tobias told me about it. He said it failed. That you’re beating yourself up over it.’ Her slender brows knitted, her frown so familiar that for a moment Theo saw his mother sitting across from him.

A crack fissured through his heart.

‘Tobias is right. I have been unsettled.’ He traced the rim of his glass. She waited, as shrewd as ever, and he realized that if he didn’t give voice to his demons now they might devour him. ‘Not because the making failed. It’s because it worked, Paola.’

Of course it had worked.

It had worked, and Theo wished to all hell it hadn’t. And, worse than that, he was too afraid to tell Sera. To admit to the darkness that had taken root inside him, and to concede that Ransom had been right. That Theo was rotten to the core, that he had twisted her blessing and somehow hurt her in the process.

Sera might love Ransom in spite of his shadows, but what would she make of the cloying hunger he sensed in his own magic?