Bonds of Blood: The Complete Series by Cate Corvin

Author:Cate Corvin [Corvin, Cate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vivia Press
Published: 2022-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

15

Will

I felt like a stranger in my own home.

It was almost a relief.

I wandered around like a ghost. Father barely talked to me, barely acknowledged my presence in his life. He had what he wanted. She’d walked right into his grasp without a backward glance.

I left Father, Tori, and Constance in the massive living room, where they were playing a board game over wine. It was a little ridiculous; Connie was a thin, pale woman who seemed vaguely unaware of her surroundings, and I knew when Tori’s smile was fake. There was no brightness in it.

It was like they were both filling in roles they felt obligated to play to keep Father happy, in a huge mansion where the flawless white sofas were so far from the crackling massive fireplace the warmth barely touched them.

A cardboard cut-out caricature of happiness. I wish I could say they were welcome to it, but all I saw was Father looming over them, his smile a little too wide, raking Tori and Constance under his shadow.

If I burst in there now, she’d just write me off as a raving lunatic. Fuck, she might even be right.

Godalming Manor was all white and pristine, touched with gilt at the edges. It seemed like a building painted with snow, so big and cold that every word echoed and came bouncing back. I shivered as I left them to their games and strode through the foyer, past the mounted heads of snow leopards and pale ermines. All the animals here were the same shade as the walls: unblemished white.

Nobody stopped me. Father’s hired staff rarely spoke to me, but as far as I knew, they never reported my movements to him, either. That suited me just fine.

I hadn’t brought a coat. The lawn was already coated with a layer of winter’s first frost, sparkling like diamonds under the rising moon. My breath puffed out in a cloud, the interior of my nose prickling from the chill.

I walked around the edges, stepping into a paved bed of pebbles as I worked my way past the manicured gardens towards the wilder forest. Even at a fast pace, it took me almost ten minutes to reach my destination.

A tangle of trees opened to reveal an overgrown footpath, paved with the stark white pebbles of the gardens around the manor, but nobody tended the flowers out here unless Percival demanded it. Since this summer, when they’d been trimmed for the wedding, they’d gone to thistles and weeds again.

Frost and stone crunched underfoot as I followed the path. If buildings could be ghosts, that was the chapel hidden in a forest clearing, looming up from the darkness like a specter.

Slayers usually kept their family chapels consecrated against Shadowed World influence, a last bastion of safety if all other strongholds failed. Ours was not. It had been desecrated in the most heinous way, a fact Father had decided to keep hidden from Tori and her mother.

I pushed open one of the heavy wooden doors and stepped into the chill silence of the chapel.

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