Page 54 of Owned

“Keep your promise,” she said. She pushed away from the table and walked on unsteady legs toward the library door without looking back at us. Bastian rubbed a hand through his hair and chuckled.

“We’ve created a monster.”

He didn’t sound too upset.

But he was right…

Maybe we had.

“You offered herwhat,exactly?”

Bastian’s tone was full of mockery, but also disbelief.

Valen didn’t look up from the motorcycle he was pretending to work on.

“She’s given up enough,” he said.

Bastian laughed. “So you’re going to help her run away? Of all the stupid fucking ideas—” Bastian threw a wrench into a pile of gears and metal, and the crash echoed through the garage. Valen finally looked up, his features twisted in irritation.

“She’ll never leave,” Bastian snarled. “Our little bird can’t fly too far away. Besides, Lucian would never let her go. Not now. Especially since she’s used the grimoire.”

Bastian’s laugh was cruel. “Imagine what Lucian would do to her— Imagine what he’d do to you,brother.”

Our father didn’t understand the word mercy. Bastian wasn’t wrong about that.

“She won’t risk it,” I said. “She might be naïve, but she’s not stupid.”

“And what did you offer her?” Valen countered. “She came to me for help— The blood bond we made holds us to her— We can’t just stand aside and let Lucian take her. You know what he’s going to do.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and stared down at him. “Do we?”

Valen’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t reply.

“She’s not powerful enough to stand against Lucian,” Bastian said. “If she wants to survive this, she has to be stronger— She might have taken that girl’s magic, but it’s not enough. If we try anything, Lucian will wipe us out. All of us.”

It was rare to see Bastian lose his sarcastic edge, and the sincerity in his voice surprised me. If we hoped to stand against our father, Avril would need to be stronger.She would have to give more of herself to the grimoire.

It was a brittle silence that fell over the garage and Valen bent his head back to his work, but the crank of the torque wrench against the motorcycle’s guts had an angry urgency to it.

I imagined how Lucian would twist Avril’s innocence—he’d been watching her for years, and even though I didn’t know my father’s plans, it was clear enough that she was integral to them.

But how?

She wasn’t strong like my mother—and she was nowhere near as powerful.

If Lucian sought an equal—it wasn’t Avril.

Not by a long shot.

Then why her?

The fact that Valen was willing to risk it all for her filled me with unease—sentiment was dangerous.

She might be bound to us by blood, but he was the one truly tethered.

Bastian broke the quiet first. “If we want this to work, we have to make her stronger,” he said. “Lucian hasn’t detected the blood bond— If he had, he would have come down on us already.”

A thought seared through my mind. Something that hadn’t occurred to me before.

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