Page 65 of Raisa's Cursed Ravens
For a second, I see her, a beautiful woman with skin like porcelain and hair the color of frost, her arms wrapped around a ring of grubby boys, her laugh the loudest in the room.
And then I gasp, realization striking right to the core of me. These men—these seven beautiful, wild men who have fucked me apart and poured themselves into every crack—are my brothers. Perhaps not blood, but my brothers, all the same.
“You’re my brothers.”
“Yes,” Grim says.
I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to process. But I don’t even know where to start, not when they feel more like the only things in the world that have ever belonged to me.
“It changes nothing,” Shade says, his voice firm.
I open my eyes, meeting his, as black as midnight, as unyielding as steel.
“It changes nothing,” he says again.
I nod, slowly. Perhaps he’s right. I have knowledge now that I didn’t have yesterday, but it doesn’t change the wild pulse of my heart or the hot rush of hunger through my veins. It doesn’t change the way they still feel like mine.
“What happened next?” I ask.
“It went wrong,” Grim says, his voice low and hard. “It always does.”
Shade stops pacing. “The queen got pregnant. Nobody knew how. Not the healers, not even her. It was…a miracle.” He spits the word like it’s poison.
“It changed everything,” Bran says. “The King went from desperate to obsessive. He locked her up, wouldn’t let anyone near her except his own guards.”
I swallow, my mouth sour. “What happened?”
For a moment, nobody wants to answer.
Then Sable laughs, a hollow, awful sound. “We happened.”
Shade’s voice is quiet, almost a whisper. “When she was a few months along, she wanted to see us, so she snuck us into her chambers for a midnight feast. We were careful, at first.”
Talon’s hands shake so badly that he clenches them in his lap. “We weren’t careful enough. We started roughhousing, and one thing led to another. Someone got shoved, someone else slipped–”
“She fell down the stairs,” Bran says, his face gray. “We heard the scream, saw her bounce down every step.”
I flinch as if I can hear it too.
Shade’s voice cracks. “We tried to stop the bleeding. We did everything we could, but it was too much. The King found us with our hands covered in blood, her barely breathing.”
I can’t look at them. I stare at my knees, my fingers digging into my skin.
“He blamed us when she died,” Onyx says. “He was right to.”
Grim looks up at me, his eyes rimmed with red. “He said he wanted the world to see us for the wicked things we were, wanted to make sure we never forgot what we stole.”
“What…” I lick my lips. “What did he do?”
“He cursed us,” Sable answers. “No peace, no rest, just wing and feather and pain. He turned us into death.”
I want to scream, but the sound sticks in my throat, horror blooming inside me. I see it playing out before me, seven innocent boys watching their mother bleed out, the King’s hate radiating like a second sun, black magic carving through flesh and memory and hope.
And then I frown. My whole life, my father told me that she died giving birth to me. But that isn’t possible, not if she died when she was just a few months along.
“If she died, how did…?” I can’t bring myself to ask how I survived when she didn’t. I’m not sure I’m ready for that answer.
Shade stares straight ahead, looking at nothing. “He kept her body alive with magic. Old, dark magic.” He swallows. “He kept feeding it into her long enough to deliver you.”
