Page 35 of Wicked Court

I scowl. “Before you came along, I was making her see sense.”

Wilder scoffs. “You call that sense?”

He turns to me, eyes burning with something that makes my skin crawl. “Cav’s hoping you haven’t undermined the deal by claiming her as your own.”

“Deal?” Elara halts her step and frowns. “I didn’t agree to any deal.”

I watch her.

There it is: that concoction of confusion and fear. Good.

“She’s ours now,” Wilder says darkly to me. “Not yours alone. Any touching has to be approved by us all.”

I scoff, then snarl, “You’re one to talk?—”

He stalks off without allowing me to finish—the only man who can and not gain a lasting scar from doing so.

He leaves Elara standing there, stunned. She fumbles with her bag strap.

“You’re welcome for the interruption,” he says to her mockingly over his shoulder.

As Wilder’s contemptuous words fade into the distance, Elara’s gaze finally lifts to meet mine, a storm of emotions swirling in those depths.

For a fleeting moment, there’s an unspoken question, a plea for answers as to why her.

I don’t give her the relief of an answer, but I find myself bound to her, our fates intertwined in the search for redemption, for truth.

She’s afraid of our touch. Elara doesn’t like the rules involved in our claiming of her and didn’t agree to any of our attentions.

And yet, I’m clinging to something far more dangerous than she is—her touch.

I liked it far too much.

Chapter 13

Elara

I click through endless search results on my laptop, my eyes glazing over the endless strings of text and images on the screen.

Nothing.

Hours of searching, and still not a shred of evidence linking my family to Sarah Anderton.

Only my mentally fragile mother’s word, and Gram isn’t answering her phone.

Sasha isn’t in our shared room tonight, choosing to go to a party at Meath House. She pulled out every magic trick she had trying to convince me to come, but my unexpected heritage kept my butt firmly planted in my desk chair.

First Wilder, then Cav, now Kaspian. All three possess toxic and addictive pheromones that my sex-deprived body refuses to ignore. Luckily, my brain is doing much better against them and keeping focus, which is to figure out why a necklace could be so important to them and how it relates to a long-dead accused witch from the 1700s and her possible hidden treasure.

Not difficult at all, right?

And where the hell I fit in to all of it.

I rub my temples, exhaustion and frustration mounting. There must be something, some breadcrumb I’m missing in this digital haystack.

Because I’m desperate for another avenue other than relentlessly searching the online TFU library and the internet for information on Sarah, I move to clicking around for details about her daughter. Although they never found her body, people presume she was killed at the same time as her mother, even though official records never proved it.

As I expected, there’s nothing online about her other than what I already know. Not her name, nothing about her involvement in the witch trial against her mother.

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