Page 71 of Wild Thorns

Playing house, sweetheart?

And then, a second message:

They can't watch you every second. And I'm very, very patient.

I stared at the screen until it went dark.

Marcus hadn't just found me. He'd been watching the watchers. He'd been close enough to photograph me through a window, in a house full of people who'd promised he wouldn't get near.

And none of them had noticed.

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay in the dark and listened to the howling from the preserve, and I wondered if the brothers' resources were as powerful as they believed.

Or if Marcus was something they hadn't accounted for.

Chapter nineteen

The Hidden Door

"Iwant to show you something," Eli said.

We were in the kitchen. I'd come down for coffee and found him at the table with an ancient book and a very focused expression. He looked up when I walked in and said it without preamble.

He was wearing a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and I found myself staring at his forearms: the lean muscle, the delicate bones of his wrists, the way his fingers moved when he turned pages. There was something unexpectedly sensual about his precision, his careful attention.

Stop it, I told myself. You rolled around like a madwoman with his brother two days ago.

But my body didn't seem to care about guilt, loyalty, or logic. My body noticed Eli much as it did Jasper, and fuck me... goddamn Callum. The way Eli's collar was open at the throat, the shadow of stubble along his jaw, the focused intensity in his dark eyes. I was not immune to the charms of any of Rowena's 'boys.'

"What kind of something?" I managed.

"The archive." He closed the book, his long fingers splaying across the leather cover. "The family archive. You asked about it once. I thought you might like to see it."

I had asked. Weeks ago, offhandedly, when I'd noticed him carrying a box of old documents up from somewhere I couldn't identify. He'd given me that careful, measured look and said another time. I'd assumed that meant never.

"Why now?"

His expression morphed into something not quite vulnerability, but close. "Because you've been here long enough to understand that this family has secrets. And because..." He paused. "I trust you."

Three words. They shouldn't have hit me as hard as they did.

The archive turned out to be a room in the basement.

A hidden door behind a bookshelf. Eli triggered the mechanism casually, pressing a specific sequence of carved rosettes along the shelf's frame, and the whole structure swung inward on silent hinges to reveal stone stairs leading down.

"This is very dramatic," I said.

"Wait until you see the rest."

The stairwell was narrow, lit by sconces that flickered to life as we descended. I could smell old paper, leather, beeswax, and stone—the smell of centuries.

The room below was smaller than I'd expected, more study than library, but every wall was covered in shelves, and every shelf was full. Books, some leather-bound and ancient, their spines cracked with age. Boxes of documents, yellowed and fragile. Maps that looked hand-drawn, marked with symbols I didn't recognize. Journals, dozens of them, in handwriting that varied from era to era.

Candles burned in iron sconces, their flames steady despite no visible ventilation.

Everywhere, that same symbol I'd seen around town: the Thornwood crest, with its strange, protective marks. Here, though, I could see variations. The crest evolved through the generations, the protective sigils shifting like a language adapting to new threats.