Page 45 of Threadbound

“Aye.”

“Are you safe? At home?”

Bran wasn’t sure how to answer that one—honestly, anyway. While he was confident thegeàrdwould be hesitant to attack either of them within a populated area, he wasn’t certain they wouldn’t try to kill him in the attic he’d been calling home for the past few months. “I do not think they know where I live,” he answered, a little hesitantly.

“You should go to the police,” Jamie told him, his expression clouded.

“And tell them what?” Bran asked.

“That you were attacked!”

“By people I canna identify?”

Jamie frowned. Because of course he couldn’t have provided any useful details about the appearance of Bran’s attackers, either, even though they hadn’t been wearing masks. One woman, two men, all tall and fairly thin, fair skinned. One guy with teeth that seemed oddly sharper than they should have been.

Jamie sighed. “It still might help. If these people are dangerous.”

“It willna,” Bran answered, shaking his head, then taking another bite, his fork scraping the bottom of the bowl.

Jamie didn’t like it. He didn’t like the idea that Bran might be in danger if he went home, and he didn’t like the idea that he himself might be in danger, and he really didn’t like the idea that nobody was going to do anything about it. “You can’t just donothing,” Jamie grumbled irritably. “And pretend everything is fine.”

Bran put the last bite of casserole from his bowl into his mouth and studied Jamie while he chewed. “I canna do anything about it, either,” he replied, his voice surprisingly calm. “Your police canna help me, and I canna hide away and never go outside again. So what would you have me do?”

“Go to the police!” Jamie repeated, getting agitated. “File a report so that if they do come back?—”

“If they do, then what?” Bran asked him, letting his bowl rest in his lap. “Ask them not to kill me while I go to the police again?”

Jamie sighed. It was the same argument he’d had with his mother all over again, every time he’d begged her to call the police on Bill Eckel. She’d remind him that the police wouldn’t do anything, and that then they’d be left in the house with an even angrier man who had already proven more than definitively that he had no compunctions about using his fists to make his points.

Besides, Nell had explained, Bill didn’t mean it. Not really. It was the alcohol. Or he was tired and stressed from work.

A thousand excuses for a thousand bruises.

“Fine,” is what Jamie said out loud, standing up and carrying his mostly full bowl and Bran’s empty one back to the tiny kitchen. “Do you want more?” he asked, not turning around to look at the fragile-seeming form in his recliner.

“Aye, please,” came the answer.

Jamie left his own bowl on the counter, his stomach too tied up in knots to actually eat, but he scooped out more for Bran and brought the bowl—still steaming, because Jamie owned a decent casserole dish that retained heat—back.

Bran took it with a small smile. “It is good,” he said, twirling another forkful of noodles.

“It’s nothing special,” Jamie replied, now thoroughly cranky as well as hungry, although the nausea from anxiety was keeping him from being interested in food. Maybe he’d eat later.

Or maybe he’d end up lying in bed, staring up at the pattern of shifting light on his apartment ceiling made by streetlight filtering through the leaves of the tree outside.

Bran had fallen asleep in the recliner, and Jamie hadn’t had the heart to wake him again. Also, his own back ached from spending too much time in his office chair, so he’d taken the bed and tried not to think about the faint scent that still clung to the fibers of his sheets. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant—there was sweat, yes, but mostly an odd, earthy-salty smell that Jamie found he sort of liked.

Which he had no business thinking about, given Bran’s physical condition and circumstances. Because if he wasn’t lying, then he was trouble. And if he was lying, he was still trouble, just of a very different variety.

Jamie shouldn’t want anything to do with either.

He took a deep breath, intending to calm himself to try to go to sleep. Instead, he inhaled a lungful of Bran’s earthy-salty scent, which made his heart beat faster and his mind spin.

A few hours afterthat, Jamie finally got up and made himself a cup of chamomile tea dosed with milk and honey. On a whim—because he hadn’t done it in years, decades, probably, he left out a tiny dish of milk with honey on the ledge of the kitchen window. For the fairies, exactly the way his mother always had.

Maybe he’d just dump out the sour milk in a few days, or maybe it would bring him luck, but, either way, it made him feel a little better.

Chapter

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