Page 57 of Bound By Roses

“She did not want to take the child. I provided her with an alternative, but warned her it was not a guaranteed success.”

“What was the alternative?” Abby asks immediately. She must have figured out what I have. That the Spider will not give us information without a direct question. The problem is, there’s no telling how many questions my revelation bought us.

“I gave her the spell to split a soul and the date to cast it. On the night of the ritual, she was to sleep with Lunae’s king and fall pregnant with his child. Exactly nine months later, both her and Sierra would birth a child. Two daughters, one soul. Twins, in a way. One child would be stronger than the other, but I could not tell her which.”

“Why the king?” Abby asks, and I flinch at the wasted question.

The Spider shrugs. “I do not make the rules. I merely find the answers. Fate required her to bed the king. The events that led to that were Imelda’s doing, not mine.”

I don’t know which events she means until I see it clearly on Abby’s face. Her mother would have had to die in order for theking to remarry. Is it possible that, if none of this happened, her mother might have survived her fate?

“Why did she take Kaylee if she already had Arabella?” I need to know.

“Arabella was the stronger child, but the key to weave rests with your sister. Imelda did not ask, so I did not tell her that her goal was not to have the more gifted child. Now, I have given you all the information I have,” the woman says, suddenly sounding bored. “So unless there’s anything else…”

“Tell me how to save Quinn.” Abby’s words come swiftly. Far too quickly for me to stop her.

“No,” I growl. “You promised.”

“Don’t talk to me about promises. You lied to me. And for the record, I promised you could make the deal, not that I wouldn’t strike one of my own.”

I reach for her, but she takes a step back. The Spider’s laugh has me feeling sick.

“Are you prepared to pay the price, my dear?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ABBY

Am I ready to pay the price? I’d been ready since the moment Quinn told me he was going to die. I can’t believe he kept that from me. After all our talks of being truthful with each other, of being there for each other, of fighting this war together. He’s been carrying the weight of this threat alone instead of letting me in so we could find a way to fix it.

Together.

I swipe the bag of glittering trinkets from his hip and hold it out to the spindly woman. “You can have it all. Just tell me how to save him.”

She laughs again. She’s been doing a lot of that. “What would I do with any of that? I have plenty of gems.” She sips at her cup of suspiciously red tea again, but for the first time, I notice the glistening blue gems in each of the skull’s eye sockets.

“Then what do you want?”

“Abby, don’t,” Quinn says, but I hold up a hand to silence him.

“A finger,” the Spider says so softly that I’m not even sure I heard her right.

“What?”

“No!” Quinn shouts as he tries to position himself between her and I.

The Spider seems unbothered. “You heard me. The finger of a Chosen is a valuable artifact. Such great power. How do you think I’ve survived longer than my cousins? They got greedy. Bled the world dry in their quest for power and then starved. A finger of yours could keep me alive for another hundred years.”

I shift myself so that I can see her around Quinn, who is still annoyingly trying to block her from view. “If I agree, you’ll tell me how to save him?”

“Of course. Unlike your mate, you can trust me.”

I slip around Quinn and lay my left hand as flat as possible on the bone table. “Then do it.”

“No,” Quinn says again. The moment I feel his hands on my waist, I shut the door to our bond entirely, but leave my connection with the wolves open.

‘Get him away from me,’I tell them, and I’m almost surprised when they listen. The wolves snap their teeth at him, and in his surprise, he momentarily releases his grip on me. They push him back, showing their teeth in clear warning that they will do whatever it takes to protect me.

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