to me. The entry fee turned out to be a bitch.
Juliet left her post by the window to sit on the arm of Kerrigan's chair, putting her arm around Kerrigan's shoulders. “Did they want your blood or something?”
“Or something,” Kerrigan murmured with a shameful flush. “I didn't want to marry some lame human who wanted to be led around on a leash like a dog, but I wasn't strong enough to tell the Silver Wives and my parents ‘no’.
“The man I loved came to rescue me, like he knew somehow I was scared and in trouble. Come to find out, my parents so disapproved of our relationship, my mom called him and made up a story about how I'd been taken.
“The Silver Wives captured him and strung him up in the basement. The price of admission into the club was his death. I refused, but it wasn't enough. They killed him right there in front of me and I couldn't do anything but scream and cry like a pathetic little baby.”
“Him, him?” Juliet asked with tears pooling in her eyes. “The guy who sent you presents and flowers all the time? The guy you went to the opera with on your birthday?”
Kerrigan gave a drunken burble. “Yup. Him.”
Ivy hugged Uriah harder, remembering the end of that summer when everyone came back to school and Kerrigan seemed like a shadow of her former self.
Nothing any of them did could cheer her up, and all she would say was she'd had a falling out with her family and would never be going back to them ever again. She never said a word about a man who'd died trying to save her.
Rowena recovered from the shock first, reaching out to curl her hand around Kerrigan's wrist, having cried a few tears of her own. “What was his name?”
Kerrigan's lips wobbled as she lifted her hand to stroke the long necklace Ivy hadn't ever seen her take off, her voice breaking when she uttered his name. “Maksim.”
“I wish you would have told us about Maksim and let us be there for you,” Rowena whispered sadly.
“You were,” Kerrigan responded firmly, the wine starting to take hold of her as she lifted her bottle. “Those Silver bitches got exactly what they deserved. They can rot in hell for all I care.”
“As much as I agree,” McManus broached with a careful look around the room. “I'm more than a little concerned about what kind of force could take out a coven of dark witches known for performing blood sacrifices to boost their power, and wondering what this coincidence is Ivy mentioned earlier.”
“Me too,” Uriah rumbled.
Rowena nodded, flicking her fingers at the spear of crystal on the table. “We got a call from school just before you arrived, Abel. Our old Headmistress was found murdered in her office, which should be impossible considering the wards and spells surrounding the school.
“After we all left, it seems the Headmistress wrote Ivy a letter to say a group of people would be coming to find her. The same people who killed her mother. That's too many unexplained deaths in too short a time frame to be unrelated.”
Ivy shuddered in response to Abel’s penetrating stare of a predator in a man's body. Uriah must have felt her tremble, because his growl was the next thing that shook her. A throaty snarl of warning that McManus took without much more than a blink.
“Can I read the letter?” Abel asked calmly, and at Ivy's nod, Callie passed him the sheet of thick vellum. While he scanned the page, Uriah gently pushed Ivy out into the hall for a private word. Still reeling from the blow of so many secrets revealed, Ivy clung to him like a little girl afraid of the dark.
Uriah only put enough distance between them to be able to look down into her eyes,
“There are some things about me I didn't tell you. Stuff in my past that I'm not proud of, and I'll explain everything later. If everything goes to shit, and I don't get a chance to make it special, you need to know that I love you. I don't expect you to say it back to me, I just wanted you to know.”
“You didn't need to say it,” Ivy whispered, smiling as happy tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. “I already knew.”
Uriah's long lashes fluttered in surprise, his head tilting to the side curiously. “You did?”
“You built me a home and made my dreams come true, never