my brothers tried to tell me to be strong, that our oldest brother would come.”
“He wasn’t taken with you?”
She shook her head. “He was away at the time of the attack. He’d gone to the nearest town for supplies.”
“You think he’s the one who left the note for Grave?”
She nodded this time. “I’m glad he never tried to come to help us. The mages were too strong and would have easily defeated a lone phoenix. He did the right thing in hiring others to attempt a rescue.”
“Have you seen him since you escaped?”
Mackenzie sighed. “No. Our family had a plan. If any of us were taken, we’d go to another place we knew, a safe house. I went there and waited, but my brother never showed up. In the end, I moved on. I was afraid I would be found… and I thought maybe he had tried to rescue us and had been killed. If I could find him…”
Her gaze fell to his hand again and she prodded his fingertip.
“I’ll help,” he said and she lifted her head, her eyes locking with his as she sought the truth in them, needing to see he really meant that. In their violet depths, pain shone, stirring a feeling inside her that said she wasn’t alone—he had lost family too. “If your brother is alive, we’ll find him. Family is important.”
Something she felt deep in her soul.
Being a lone phoenix shifter had been difficult. Her kind had strong connections to their prides and their families, and she had missed it in the decades she had been alone, had felt as if a piece of her was missing.
There were other phoenix prides in the north, in valleys close to where her home had once been, but going to them hadn’t appealed to her.
Not when they hadn’t come to help her family. Her pride.
They had left them in the hands of the mages. Mackenzie drew down a deep breath and purged the anger that wanted to surge through her. She couldn’t hold it against them. Phoenix numbers were so low now that it was important everyone remained safe. If it had been another pride that had been taken, her family wouldn’t have attempted to rescue them.
She was grateful her oldest brother had had the sense to employ others to do the searching for him. Was he still out there somewhere?
“How did you escape?” Hartt lowered his gaze to their hands and turned his in hers, captured her fingers and stroked his thumb across them. “Grave mentioned a fire that scorched the mansion, killing everything.”
He flicked a glance at her, and she could easily read in his eyes what he wouldn’t ask.
“I didn’t kill anyone from my family. There was no one left to kill. It was just me, in a cell, waiting for my turn.” She sighed and clutched his fingers, savoured the soft caress of his thumb along hers and sought a deeper connection with him, one she wasn’t sure how to make happen, but one she desperately needed as that night rolled up on her. “I felt my brother die. I knew I was next. I let rage take me, stoked the pain I felt from losing my family into an inferno, until I was burning inside… a phoenix in spirit but not in body thanks to the spell.”
“If you couldn’t use your other form, how did you… oh… Mackenzie.” The soft way he said her name tore at her, brought tears to her eyes as he gazed at her, the black slashes of his eyebrows furrowing. “You killed yourself.”
She looked away from him again. “I thought it would be easy. I mean, I know I can come back from death. It should have been easy.”
But it had been so hard.
She had made several attempts, faltering at the last second, because the only option open to her had been snapping her own neck. The mages had left her with nothing in her cell she could have used as a weapon. Bleeding out would have been too dangerous anyway. If she had lost too much blood, she wouldn’t have resurrected.
She shivered as she thought about her latest death, about how afraid she had been, how desperate she had been for death to take her in the end because she had wanted to come back.
Her gaze lifted again, locking on Hartt.
She had felt compelled to come back to him.
“When I managed to… well, my plan worked. The rage I had stoked, rousing my phoenix side,