Page 64 of Raisa's Cursed Ravens
I wipe my nose on the back of my wrist. “Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice is hoarse, but I force it out. “Why did you let me get so close if you were just going to keep breaking me?”
Bran opens his mouth, then closes it. He looks like he might cry, too.
At some point during my heartbreak and fury, Talon vanished in the trees, only to reappear now, no longer a raven but naked and trembling. Stricken and pale.
“We don’t want to break you,” he rasps.
“You did!” I cry. “Youdestroyedme.”
Grim finally speaks, his voice sandpaper and smoke. “We thought you’d run if we told you the truth.”
I laugh, the sound bordering on hysterical. “I should.”
“Do you want to?” Shade asks.
My heart knocks against my ribs. “I don’t know.”
The men exchange glances—Shade and Grim and Onyx, all looking to each other for permission to speak, to move, to even breathe.
Sable is the one who breaks the tension. “Better a monster than a coward,” he says, but the words are empty.
I look at them all, really look. The scars on their arms, the way their bodies never seem to fit the space they’re in, the animal restlessness always just under the surface.
It’s always been there.
I drop to my knees, dizzy, my head in my hands. For a long time, nobody says anything. Not a word.
Then, soft as a prayer, Shade says, “You’re still one of us, Raisa. No matter what.”
“I’ve never been one of you,” I spit. “I’ve just been the thing you manipulated to keep me complacent.” I choke on a laugh. “Just like my father.”
Shade flinches. “That isn’t true. We’d die for you.”
I stare at him, blinking back the worst of the tears. “Then tell me what else you’re keeping from me,” I say. “All of it. If you want me to stay, I want the truth, every ugly word of it.”
He nods, and the others gather closer, silent and grave. Bran kneels beside me, not touching, just close enough that I can feel the heat of him.
“It’s the least we owe you,” he says.
I hug my knees, my breath coming in ragged, shallow pants.
“I want to know what I’m running from,” I whisper. “And who I’m running with. And why.”
Shade puts a hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm.
I shrug it off. If I let them touch me, I’ll crack. I’ll break. I’ll let them convince me that their lies don’t matter, and the truth is whatever they want to make it.
I’m tired of secrets and lies. I’ve been suffocating under their weight my entire life. If that’s all they have for me, I’d rather diealone. At least then, I’ll know I’ve made my own choices for once in my life.
“We told you that we knew your father in another life,” Bran says. “That was the truth, Raisa. The Queen couldn’t have children, and the King wanted an heir so badly that it ate him alive. So they filled the castle with orphans. They adopted us, seven boys with nowhere else to go.”
Onyx chimes in, his voice so gentle it almost doesn’t fit his body. “We were a family. A fucked-up one, but a family.”
I picture seven boys—feral, wild-eyed, running riot through the endless halls, their laughter echoing off gold and marble. I see my mother, a woman I know only through photos, pale and perfect, trailing behind them with a soft smile.
“She loved us,” Rune says. “Maybe more than we deserved.”
“We loved her back,” Sable adds, his voice flat. “She was the first person who ever did.”
