A Witch Bound To Fae

I moved beneath a canopy of silver-leafed trees, keeping my boots to the tiled path. The leaves trembled though there was no wind. Pale flowers opened along the branches, each one revealing a dark, wet center.

I knew enough about fae plants to recognize a warning.

I also knew enough to understand that Thornwake had already recognized me.

The first vine struck from my left.

I ducked. Its thorns tore through my sleeve and scored my upper arm. Heat flashed across my skin. I spun and slashed, cutting the vine in two. Black sap spattered the tiles, hissing where it touched the salt stitched into my boot soles.

Another vine uncoiled behind me.

Then another.

“Not tonight,” I said, though my voice shook.

I threw a pinch of crushed rowan into the air. The powder sparked red, and the nearest tendrils recoiled. I ran.

The conservatory unfolded around me in impossible layers. A corridor of glass became a flooded fern room, then narrowed into a passage lined with thorn trees. Water dripped from leaves large enough to hide a person. Something moved beneath the dark surface of the pools.

I kept the stolen key in my fist. Its metal was shaped like a narrow branch, with a black crystal set into the head. It had belonged to a Thornwake executive, which meant it should have opened the inner gates.

Instead, the next door remained sealed.

A sigil burned across the glass: a crown pierced by a thorn.

I placed my palm against it.

The ward bit me.

Pain shot to my elbow. I jerked back, staring at the blood welling in my palm. The sigil brightened.

“Human witch,” a voice said behind me. “You’re either very brave or catastrophically uninformed.”

I turned.

He stood at the far end of the passage, where the moonlight fell in narrow bars through the leaves.

I had seen his face in business journals and city gossip columns, though photographs had failed to capture the dangerous stillness of him. Lucien Vale wore a black suit without a single wrinkle, his silver cuff links catching the green light. His hair was dark, swept back from a face too beautiful to trust. His eyes were not the gold I expected from a fae executive. They were a deep, stormy gray, almost blue at the edges.

The security chief of Vale Biotech.

The man whose company held the only living thornwake specimen in the world.

The man standing between me and my sister’s cure.

His gaze dropped to my bleeding hand. Something sharpened in his expression.

“Move,” I said.

His mouth curved without warmth. “That is not how trespassing works.”

“I’m not here to steal from you.”

“You broke into a sealed corporate facility with a forged identity, a stolen access key, and enough illegal botanical magic to poison half the building.”

“I need one vial.”

“Of course you do.”

The words should have sounded dismissive. Instead, they carried a strange restraint, as though he was holding back a question.

A vine crept along the ceiling above him. Lucien lifted one hand. The plant froze.

Not recoiled. Not stopped.

Froze, every thorn suspended in the air.

Fae magic rolled through the corridor, cold and clean, raising gooseflesh along my arms. I should have been afraid of it. I was afraid of it.

I was also watching the elegant line of his wrist.

“Your company took my sister’s treatment,” I said. “You bought the last viable thornwake strain and locked it behind a corporate seal. She has three days left.”

His expression changed.

Only slightly. The line of his jaw tightened.

“Name.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’re lying, I’ll know.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Then I’ll know that too.”

“Her name is Elara Voss.”

The silence that followed felt wrong.

Lucien’s eyes fixed on mine. “Voss.”

I heard the name land between us.

“You know it,” I said.

“I know your mother’s.”

My breath caught. “What did you say?”

The frozen vines shuddered.

Lucien stepped closer, and the air altered with him. He smelled of rain on stone and something darker, like cedar smoke. Every instinct I possessed warned me not to let him near me. Every other part of me noticed the way his attention never left my face.

“Your mother worked in Thornwake’s botanical division,” he said. “She didn’t leave voluntarily.”

“You’re lying.”

“I have no reason to lie to you.”

“You’re the security chief of the company that erased her.”

His eyes hardened. “I’m the security chief of the company that erased a great many things.”

Before I could answer, the corridor erupted.

The vines tore free from the ceiling. Lucien caught my wrist and dragged me toward him as thorns crashed where I had stood. His grip was firm, not painful, but the contact sent a violent pulse through my body.

Light flashed beneath my skin.

I gasped.

Lucien released me as if burned. A thin silver mark glimmered around my wrist, then faded.

“What was that?” I demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

A thorn whipped between us. Lucien seized it barehanded. Black sap slid over his fingers, but his face remained calm. He twisted, and the entire vine recoiled with a shriek that sounded disturbingly like a child crying.

“Stay behind me,” he ordered.

“I don’t take orders from men who imprison medicine.”

“Then stay where you are and let the plants eat you.”

I hated that he sounded certain I would choose survival.

I hated more that he was right.

We moved together through the passage. Lucien cleared the vines with precise bursts of magic while I scattered salt and rowan at the roots. He fought like someone who had learned long ago not to waste motion. I fought like someone who had spent her life being underestimated and had made a weapon of it.

At the inner gate, he pressed his palm to the lock.

The crystal key in my hand flared.

Lucien looked at it.

“Where did you get that?”

“Your board chair’s private office.”

His stare turned lethal. “You stole from Vale.”

“I borrowed access.”

“You broke into my headquarters?”

“To get inside this conservatory.”

“You have no idea what you’ve opened.”

The gate split down the center.

Beyond it lay the heart of Thornwake: a vast circular chamber beneath a domed ceiling, filled with luminous trees. Their roots curled through glass channels in the floor, glowing with blue-white veins. At the center stood a single tree with black bark and flowers like drops of captured moonlight.

Thornwake.

The cure.

My knees nearly gave way.

Lucien caught my elbow. “Wait.”

I pulled free. “My sister is dying.”

“And that tree is protected for a reason.”

“People always say that when they want to keep something for themselves.”

His gaze flickered. “You think I want this?”

“I think powerful men are very good at calling greed responsibility.”

For the first time, anger broke through his restraint. “You think I built the cage?”

“You wear the keys.”

Something wounded moved behind his eyes. It vanished before I could understand it.

I crossed the chamber.

The tree’s branches bent toward me.

Lucien swore softly.

I reached for the nearest flower. Its petals opened, revealing a bead of luminous nectar. The instant my fingers brushed it, the roots beneath the floor convulsed.

The conservatory screamed.

Glass shattered overhead. The trees tore through their channels. A wall buckled inward, and cold night flooded the chamber. I stumbled as the floor split beneath my feet.

Lucien lunged for me.

His hand closed around mine.

The world disappeared.

I felt him - not his body, but the locked rooms inside him. A boy standing in a burning garden. A woman’s voice promising she would return. Blood on white marble. Years of silence built brick by brick around a grief so deep it had become indistinguishable from rage.

Then he felt me.

Elara coughing into a bloodstained cloth.

My mother’s empty office.

The terror of being the only person left who could save my sister.

The unbearable truth that I had not come because I was fearless. I had come because losing Elara would leave me with no one who remembered me before the lies.

Lucien’s fingers tightened around mine.

“Mara,” he said, and my name in his voice sounded like a confession.

The chamber collapsed.

He pulled me against his chest as stone and glass rained around us. His arm locked over my head. I felt the hard line of his body, the heat of him, the frantic rhythm beneath his ribs.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“So are you.”

“Let go.”

“No.”

The word was quiet. Absolute.

Something struck the floor beside us. Dust filled my mouth. I pressed my palms against his chest, intending to shove him away, but he lowered his face until his breath touched my cheek.

“Tell me you want me to move,” he said.

The question cut through the chaos.

I should have said it.

Instead, I looked at his mouth.

His eyes darkened. “Mara.”

“I need the nectar.”

“I know.”

“Then help me get it.”

His gaze searched mine. “If I touch you again, the bond may complete.”

“What bond?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“No,” he said, with a rawness that did not belong in his polished voice. “It isn’t.”

The tree’s roots surged beneath us. A branch crashed down, trapping my satchel. I reached for it, but Lucien caught my waist and held me back.

“Leave it.”

“The vial - ”

“I’ll get your cure.”

“You expect me to trust you?”

“No.” His thumb brushed once over my hip, an accidental touch that felt anything but accidental. “I expect you to survive long enough to hate me properly.”

I almost laughed. The sound broke apart in my throat.

He released me only long enough to wrench the satchel free. Then the floor gave way.

We fell into darkness.

I landed against him on a bed of wet leaves, his body taking the impact. For several seconds, neither of us moved. His hand remained at my waist. My cheek rested against his throat, where his pulse beat hard and fast.

Above us, the ruined conservatory groaned.

I lifted my head.

A luminous thread ran from my wrist to his.

It was not light exactly. It was something alive, silver shot through with violet, wrapped around our skin in a delicate, unbreakable loop. At its center, the stolen key had melted into a small black thorn.

Lucien stared at it.

Then he looked at me.

“You took the nectar,” he said.

I followed his gaze. The flower was clenched in my fist, its glow fading into the sealed vial I had managed to close around it.

My sister could live.

But the bond between us brightened, pulsing with every beat of his heart.

Outside the broken walls, alarms began to howl.

Lucien rose, pulling me with him. “When they find us, they’ll execute you.”

“Your people?”

“Fae law.”

“And you?”

His hand remained around mine.

His expression went cold, but his eyes did not.

“I’m going to make them believe you’re already dead.”

The bond flared between our wrists.

Somewhere beneath the rubble, the thornwake tree opened every remaining flower at once.

End of chapter one. 29 more chapters in the full book.