Page 68 of Tethered In Blood

A sharp chill crawled up my spine.

On the surface.

I stared at the half-eaten loaf in my hand with unease. The wheat thrived. The grain grew thick and tall while everything else around it struggled to survive, its roots starved of whatever life remained in the soil. That’s why the villagers muttered about the wheat feeding on something. Because whatever it was…

It was buried.

20

Oberon

MYBOOTSDRAGGEDagainstthe aged wooden floor while I paced the length of my room. My thoughts should have been on the creature in the fields, the rot, the decay, and the strange symbols carved into every damned door in this rancid village. But my mind circled back, drawn to her instead.

The pained whimpers. Her fingers clawed at her back as desperation twisted her features, making her appear unguarded. She had gasped awake, drenched in sweat, as if she had surfaced from drowning. Her choked sobs were half-swallowed, and my name slipped past her lips in breathless panic before she even realized where she was.

I had sat there in hesitation.

Why did she call for me?

‘I am not afraid of you, Oberon Sinclaire.’

She should have been. She knew what I was. What I was capable of. Yet she had looked me dead in the eye and said it without a flicker of doubt. But whatever haunted her nights terrified her. Enough that in that moment of blind, gut-wrenching terror, she had called forme.

I had never been good with things that required comfort or softness. My hands knew how to wield a blade, break bone, and silence a threat.But what did you do when the battle wasn’t before you? When the enemy had already seeped into her being?

She flinched when I shook her awake in Silverfel before her eyes focused. Then she had brushed it off, thrown up her walls as if I hadn’t watched her unravel. Her composure slid back into place like armor, though her hands trembled as she suppressed her emotions. And I had let her.

I should have pressed, should have forced her to talk, but I wanted to see if something would slip. If she would say a name, a place, some sliver of truth to tell me who plagued her sleep, who had carved those invisible wounds into her. Instead, I only received silence.

The way she carried herself when we entered the mansion. The air had shifted the moment she stepped inside. Tension gripped my ribs, and my Fae senses hummed with unease. It was how her shoulders had tensed ever so slightly and her fingers had curled before she forced them to relax. It was how she had smiled when the lord mentioned our separate rooms and how it hadn’t reached her eyes.

That fleeting moment of hesitation. Of discomfort.

Why?

Why had she reacted as though being alone was the more significant threat? What was she so afraid of that sharing a room with me—a man, an assassin, a half-Fae—seemed like the safer option?

I combed through the memories of notes in her journal, searching for a thread to pull, a connection to make sense of it. But there was none.

Groaning, I dropped into the chair by the table, pulled off my gloves, and let my head fall back against the wooden frame. My fingers flexed against my palms. I was restless. My Fae was agitated. It prowled around the fringes of my thoughts, demanding answers. A novel feeling that she alone had pulled from it.

How the hells was I supposed to fight a ghost from her past? A tormentor I couldn’t name?

And now, whatever was in the field had targeted her.

I grit my teeth. My restless fingers flexed in my lap as the memory resurfaced. The strangled noise she made when she stumbled and her boots snagged on the decayed corpse at our feet. The way her breath hitched, her chest rising and falling in shallow, frantic gasps. Her eyes widened, pupils dilated, as the thing before her rose, its grotesque, jagged, unnatural maw splitting open.

The sound it made wasn’t meant for human ears. A high, ear-piercing shriek that sent bile crawling up my throat. Terror froze her. Locked every muscle in place. She was trapped, helpless, as the thing lunged at her. I had moved without thought when my blade cut through its form. The steel met resistance before the creature dissolved into nothing but mist.

It wasn’t just that creature.

I pressed my palms into my thighs to ground myself against the worn fabric of my trousers and the leather of my belts. My gaze fixed on the floorboards, but I only saw Silverfel. The dense, suffocating trees. The thing in the woods. The way it had fixated on her then, too. Not me, the one wielding the sword, the one it recognized and feared.

Her.

That couldn’t be a coincidence.

I sighed and dragged a hand through my hair. My thoughts were tangled as I retraced every detail, every clue. There had to be something that connected them—Silverfel, Vaelwick, the rot that had spread in the villages, the creatures that moved through the dark.Was it because she was an herbalist?

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