Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(122)

The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Lord-Smith Vance gave us explicit instructions that there should be no visitors,” he began, and Wren opened her mouth to explain that he’d changed his mind, hence the letter, when he finished, “Especially you.”

She glanced at Leo, but it seemed he was out of charming excuses or names to drop. They both were.

She sighed. Their time was up.

“Take them both—”

Wren unleashed a cloud of bonedust. The nearest guards reared back, choking and blinking against their streaming vision, while Leo kicked out at the table, sending it careening into the last guard who was seated, trapping him against the wall.

The guard captain recovered from the bonedust first, reaching for his sword, but he had staggered backward and was inches from Julian’s cell. Julian grabbed the guard’s arm from behind, stopping him from withdrawing his sword, and the next thing Wren knew, there was a tug at her waist, and Julian had his other arm around the captain’s neck, Ironheart pressed to the man’s throat.

The rest of the guards stopped fighting at that point, allowing Wren and Leo to hastily disarm them. They bound and gagged all four, then dragged them into the cell at the end of the hall. They’d be discovered eventually, but Wren hoped it wouldn’t be until the guard shift changed.

She removed the captain’s key ring but was crestfallen to see that the one for Julian’s cell was missing. She crouched before the captain and tore his gag free.

“Where is it?”

“Lord-Smith Vance has it,” he said with an inordinate level of satisfaction.

“Of course he does,” Wren muttered, shoving the gag back in place.

“Now what?” asked Leo from behind her.

Hands shaking slightly, she faced Julian’s cell.

“I…,” she began, voice tremulous, but Julian ignored her. He was tugging off the black glove on his left hand… a glove she’d never seen him remove before. And underneath…

There were black lines sprawled across his hand, wrapping around the musculature like tendons or veins.

It was iron. Shards of iron embedded in his skin. Wren thought of what he had told her about amplifiers, about the combination of material, blood, and living matter.

There was bright-red scarring where metal met skin, and Wren flashed back to their kiss in the spring, when her fingertips had trailed over raised ridges across his shoulder, the contact causing him to hastily pull away.

The lines of iron disappeared under his sleeve, confirming that the implants likely went all the way up his arm.

Avoiding their stares, Julian crouched before the lock. Like the bars, it was made of steel—iron in nature, but an alloy, and therefore untouchable to his magic.

He couldn’t manipulate or reshape the lock, but apparently, with iron reinforcement, he could crush it with his bare hand. Wren recalled the wooden shelf in the closet in Caston, the fact that he had accidentally crushed it to splinters suddenly making sense.

The metal screeched as his hand squeezed, damaging the lock beyond repair and peeling it away from the frame. Wren marveled at the intricate control involved to make the iron implants bend and twist and function within his living hand.

The door swung wide, and he strode through it, drawing his glove back over his hand.

He made directly for Wren.

She backed up until she bumped into the cold stone wall, then had no choice but to stand there and meet his gaze, his fury, head-on.

He looked slightly deranged, his hair askew, his eyes sparking dangerously. Despite how effortless it had looked, he was sweating from the exertion of crushing that steel lock. He kept shaking out that hand as if there was pain as well as fatigue.

He came to a stop bare inches in front of her. She raised her head. “I’m sorry.”

His lip curled, disbelief etched across his features. She couldn’t blame him. She had betrayed him willingly, however difficult it had been.

“He would have killed you. I couldn’t let him.”

“He. Your father,” he said, speaking the words with careful deliberation. She regretted he’d had to find out that way, but it was relatively low on her list of sins, so she decided against apologizing again.

“You were right,” she said instead. His expression flickered, and she couldn’t tell if he was surprised that she had admitted as much or annoyed that the words were so insufficient. “We never should have come here. And we need to leave. Now.”

He continued to stare at her, hard, and then a rueful smile twisted his mouth. He chuckled darkly and stepped away, giving her space. A part of her lamented his absence.

She glanced around, then pointed to a locker on the far side of the room. “Your armor and weapons,” she said. He stalked wordlessly toward it.

“I think that went well,” Leo said brightly. “For me, anyway.”

She glowered at him.

“What are you up to, little bird?”

Wren froze. Slowly she turned toward the stairwell, fear pinning her to the spot. Her father stood in the doorway with half a dozen of his personal guard ranged on either side.

Leo and Julian had also paused, and now both their heads swiveled to face her.

She swallowed. “I’m leaving,” she said, her voice tight. “We’re leaving.”

“I see. I know you’ve been through a trying time—all three of you. And high-pressure situations like that can cause a certain… bond… to form between the unlikeliest of people.”