One Mark: Steamy Friends to Lovers Paranormal Romance (Blackwell Djinn)

by Nikki Kardnov

  “That doesn’t exist.”

  “As far as you know. Dae said rare, didn’t he?” Poe pointed out.

  Thorin rolled to all fours and stood up. He held out his hand to Poe and pulled him to his feet.

  “What are you two doing here?” he asked.

  “Saving you, clearly,” Poe said.

  Thorin snorted and turned away.

  “From yourself,” Dae added.

  He went to the fireplace and with a hand on the mantle, leaned toward the flame. The heat warmed his skin. “I’d rather be alone right now.”

  “Well that’s too damn bad.” Poe came over and plucked a framed painting of their mother from the mantle. “The longer she’s gone, the more secrets of hers come out.”

  Dae came in between them. “She must have had her reasons for shielding you from the truth.”

  Thorin shook his head. “I don’t care what they are. I deserved to know.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so bent out of shape about it.” Poe set the picture back in its place. “I would be extremely happy to uncover that father was not my father. He was an asshole, remember? And not the good kind, like me.”

  Thorin looked over at his brothers. The light of the fire cast long shadows over their faces. But even so, now that he knew, he could see the physical differences between he and them.

  He didn’t have the sharp jawline his brothers had. His was rounder, less shark-like. His nose was thicker at the bridge and his nostrils wider.

  But what did he do with this knowledge now? Their mother was dead. Red was unreliable when it came to revealing profound truths.

  “We will face this together,” Dae said as if reading his thoughts.

  The fire snapped and embers flitted between them.

  “And what am I to tell the Conclave when they demand my parentage?”

  “The truth.” Poe unrolled his shirtsleeves and buttoned them at the cuffs. “If they aren’t satisfied with that answer, they’ll open an investigation and then they’ll do the hard work for us.”

  “And the other matter?”

  Poe raised his brows. “Killing a Northman?”

  “The Conclave should be thanking us,” Dae said.

  “They could lock me away for a century for what I did.”

  “You just have to prove you were provoked, which you were.”

  “And Lola?” he asked quietly, his voice suddenly hoarse.

  Already he missed her presence. He could still smell her honeyed scent on his skin. She would never forgive him and he didn’t deserve it anyway. But gods did he want it.

  I will be better, he wanted to tell her. Just give me another chance and I will be better for you.

  “If Lola loves you, she will come around,” Poe said.

  Love. He didn’t feel worthy of any kind. Not from his family. And certainly not from Lola.

  Poe stepped away from the hearth and snapped his fingers. The flames were extinguished with a hiss and the room was plunged into darkness once again.

  “Let’s be on our way,” Dae said. “The sooner we get this over with the better.”

  Together they closed up the castle and one after the other, they disappeared.

  Chapter 37

  LOLA

  When Lola left the Blackwells, she had intended to go straight home, but twenty minutes later, she was not surprised to find herself turning down Linden Boulevard. The street where Rose lived.

  Would Rose still be in town? Was the little house on the corner even hers?

  Lola had been there a few times before. It certainly seemed like it was hers. But now that she looked around the neighborhood—a quaint suburbia with white picket fences and window boxes full of flowers—she realized Rose didn’t exactly fit in.

  She parked in the empty driveway of the one-story house. The curtains in the windows were drawn open and there didn’t seem to be much movement in the house. Not that that necessarily meant anything.

  When they’d hung out here, Rose had preferred the back deck. “It gets better light,” she’d said.

  Lola went up the front walk and rang the doorbell and waited.

  What was she doing here anyway?

  She wasn’t entirely sure.

  Part of her wanted to go to someone who had the other side of Thorin’s story, someone who had actually been there.

  She rang the doorbell again and kept her finger on it so it buzzed and buzzed.

  Finally she heard footsteps on the hardwood floor and then the door yanked open.

  Rose blinked out at her in the late afternoon light. Her eyes were swollen and rimmed in shadows. She looked ready to bite the head off of whoever rang the bell, but when she saw it was Lola she clamped her mouth shut.

  “Hi,” Lola said. “Can I come in?”

  Rose looked past her at the street.

  “I came alone.”

  “Well, that was stupid,” Rose said. She scanned Lola up and down. “I see you’re healed. He make a deal with you too? You turning into a wish slut, Lo?”

  Lola rolled her eyes. “Let’s not do this. We were friends at one point. As pissed as I am about the twisted wish, I still believe that there was something to our friendship.”

  “I didn’t twist your wish,” Rose bit out. “I gave you the ability to read auras. It was the safest option I could come up with which I had hoped had the added bonus of showing you who Thorin really was.”

  “But...I...” She thought over the things she’d seen with her new vision since Rose granted the wish. Truth be told, she’d seen more good than bad. It just so happened that her first encounter with the new vision was a hideous one. She still got goosebumps thinking of the man with the black, smoky eyes in the café.

  Maybe she’d overreacted?

  Maybe this was more her fault than she first realized. If she’d taken a second to breathe and think, maybe she wouldn’t have pulled Thorin into the middle of things.

  But still.

  He’d lied to her!

  Killed people!

  But she wanted to hear the whole truth. All of it.

  “You warned me against seeing Thorin,” Lola said. “Why? I want to know what really happened in 1644.”

  With a cluck of her tongue, Rose turned away. “Fine then. Shut the door behind you.”

  Lola did as asked and followed Rose into the kitchen. She was aware that she could possibly be making the biggest mistake of her life. Rose was unbreakable. Ten times stronger than Lola. Possibly still invoked. Had big scary djinn brothers who wanted to harm the Blackwells.

  But Lola had spent the better part of the last month getting to know Rose one-on-one. Lola wanted to believe that if Rose was a vindictive murderous she-devil, Lola would have picked up on it long ago.

  Hell, her neighbor, Mallory, gave Lola stronger potential-murderer vibes than Rose did.

  In the kitchen, Rose tossed out the cold coffee from the pot and refilled it with water.

  “Want some?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She busied herself at the coffee maker.

  Lola leaned into the counter and waited.

  Rose’s house had reminded Lola of her paternal grandmother’s house. Nana Betty, Lola had called her. Despite the fortune Lola’s father had amassed, Nana Betty refused to take any of his handouts. She lived in the same house Lola’s dad had grown up in. The floor was black and white checkered tile. The countertops green speckled laminate trimmed in a metal strip. None of her cabinets shut properly, or if they did, they had to be yanked open with brute strength.

  The moment Lola stepped into Rose’s kitchen the first time, she’d felt right at home.

  She was sad now that their friendship was over just as quickly as it’d begun. In any other world, she and Rose could have been great life-long friends.

  “So you want to know what happened in 1644,” Rose said as she grabbed two white mugs from the upper cabinet.

  “I know about the village.” Lola went to the fridge and pulled ou
t the cream. “I know what he did to the people there. What I don’t know is why.”

  As the coffee pot gurgled to life, Rose turned to her. “I loved Thorin back then. With all my heart.”

  “I know.”

  “I loved him so much that I was willing to do anything to keep him.”

  Lola tried not to bristle at that. Tried to remind herself that despite the fantastic sex she’d had with Thorin all night long, he wasn’t hers.

  “It was a different world back then,” Rose went on. “There was death and destruction everywhere. All around and all of the time. Wars were rampant. I can remember walking through the fields after one of the random battles in the Hundred Years’ War and the stench—” She wrinkled her nose. “You have no idea what it was like.” She pinned her gaze on Lola.

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  “Men cared not for mercy. And they cared less for the rights of women.”

  The coffee maker huffed a plume of steam. Rose grabbed the pot and filled both mugs.

  “We were staying in Walwick village back then. My brother, Aleksander, was in the middle of a deal with the Baron Suffolk. We’d been there long enough that Thorin had caught the eye of several villagers and I had caught the eye of several men in the Baron’s house. Thorin had never been one for dalliances. So when he started entertaining one of the village girls with some level of seriousness, I became…well, jealous, for lack of a better word.”

  Lola took her offered mug and added a few spoonfuls of sugar.

  “Thorin and I had been on and off for a while.” Rose added a splash of cream to her coffee and dragged the spoon absently through the drink. “Our families certainly didn’t help matters and I think by that point, Thorin had tired of the wedge our relationship had put between him and his brothers.

  “But the more he drifted from me, the more desperate I became.

  “And one night, I cornered the village girl and told her to keep her distance. And instead of fear, which I had fostered in most of the village, the girl defiantly stood up to me and said, ‘I’d like to see you keep us apart considering I am his caeli.’”

  Rose’s gaze turned far away. She held the mug of coffee before her, but she didn’t make a move to drink it.

  “I had no reason to doubt her. The girl knew the proper term for it, which meant Thorin must have told her and why would he tell her unless she saw his magic?”

  Rose blew across the steam rising from her mug. “I knew that if this girl was his Fated that I’d lose him for good. So I did the only thing I thought I could. I turned Thorin into the monster I knew he was. There was no way a simple, poor village girl would love a man like that. No one would accept him like I had.”

  Lola griped her cup tightly. “What did you do?”

  Rose’s eyes flicked up to meet Lola’s as she said, “I told him the girl’s brother tried to rape me.”

  Lola gasped. “Oh Rose. You didn’t.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that look. Do you know how many men tried to rape me back then? It happened so often that lying about it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.”

  Lola decided to reserve her judgment. Rose was right—Lola didn’t know anything about the world in the 17th century.

  “Thorin believed you?”

  “Of course he did. He’d already witnessed the men of the village groping me and leering at me. I told Thorin the girl’s brother had caught me off guard. I said he had friends with him. I said they held me down.”

  Her eyes welled with tears. “Up until that point, I’d thought his rage a beautiful, violent thing. Like a tornado. So destructive but impossible not to watch in awe.

  “He stormed up to the girl’s house. Her brother denied any wrongdoing. The father angrily defended his family, which only provoked Thorin more. And then he was gone to the rage.”

  She blinked and a tear escaped and slid down her face. “He was unstoppable.”

  “What about the girl?” Lola asked, dreading what the answer might be. “Did he kill her too?”

  Rose shook her head. “She was spared. Half of the village got away. You should know that at least. And from what I heard, Thorin took care of her financially for the rest of her life.”

  Outside a dog barked. Kids somewhere in some backyard screamed and laughed.

  And here inside this house, Lola was trying to decide what to do with this new information. She was trying to decide whether she wanted to return to her old, normal life, or wage a new one.

  Because hearing Rose’s side of the story did change things.

  It changed everything.

  You don’t go up to a sleeping lion and poke it in the ass and then blame it for wreaking havoc.

  Thorin wasn’t entirely innocent, but he wasn’t entirely to blame either. And knowing what role Rose had played made Lola want to hurt her. Not physically. Lola wasn’t a fighter. And anyway, she was no match for a djinn.

  But she had a card to play.

  The trump card.

  “The girl,” Lola said. “She wasn’t his caeli.”

  Ashley had told her enough about caelis to know that a djinn only got one in a lifetime.

  “I know.” Rose’s gaze flicked up to hers. “We Northman have a psychic too. And once upon a time, she told me of a beautiful girl. An artist. A dreamer. She told me that this girl was already Fated to tame the beast living within Thorin. That girl was Lola St. James.”

  Lola slammed the coffee cup onto the counter. “You knew? For how long?”

  “Seventy-three years.”

  Seventy-three—Lola gulped down air.

  Seventy-three years ago, her own father hadn’t been born yet.

  Rose had known Lola’s fate this entire time.

  Which meant—

  “You came here to provoke him again.” Lola gritted her teeth and took a step toward Rose. She pointed a finger at the other girl. “You started this whole thing in motion.”

  Rose scowled. “No. I had more sense this time. I promise you that.” She blinked and a pinch of regret appeared between her brow. “I made the mistake of telling one of my brothers about you. Who you were. With Dae and Poe already having their caelis, my brothers decided they couldn’t let Thorin have his too. Especially not after seeing what he was capable of all those years ago.

  “They came here wanting to kill you or Thorin, but I told them I had it handled. I said I’d drive a wedge between you. Adonis made the mistake of goading Thorin. Don never did have a knack for finessing people.”

  More tears trembled on the rim of her eyelids. “I never expected my brother to be killed though. If I had, I would have never told them the truth.”

  Lola set her coffee down and turned for the door, but Rose grabbed her arm to stop her.

  “You can’t stop this now,” Rose said. “He murdered my brother.”

  “This wasn’t all Thorin’s fault and he needs to know that.”

  “What are you gonna do, Lo? You take pictures for a living. You are mortal. Nothing you can do can change any of this. Thorin still murdered those villagers and he still murdered my brother. Face it, he’s brutal and damaged and you should stay away from him.”

  Then why did everything within her tell her to go to him?

  The only thing she was sure of was this: Thorin had a kind heart.

  He was loving and gentle and so damn compassionate.

  If anyone deserved redemption it was him, and Lola had to believe that there was a way to help him.

  She yanked out of Rose’s grip and surged for the door.

  Rose followed. “By this time tomorrow, Thorin will be locked away in a dungeon somewhere in a Conclave prison and by the time he emerges, you’ll just be bones in the ground. Just give up.”

  No. Lola’s heart squeezed at the thought. She couldn’t lose him now. She would not give up on him.

  Because she believed with every fiber of her soul that he would never give up on her.

  He’d run from her because he was ashamed, and
she hadn’t given him the opportunity to explain himself.

  God she had mucked things up again. But she could right it.

  She shoved through the front door.

  “Don’t do this,” Rose said. “You put yourself at risk. I have more than one brother, you know.”

  “I know.” Lola made her way to her car. She stopped at the driver’s side door. “I’m not just Thorin’s caeli, Rose. I’m also his best friend. And as his best friend, I’ll do anything to help him.”

  She’d thought her first wish with Rose had been a mistake. But her newfound ability had shown her the truth. This whole time, she should have trusted what she saw with her own two eyes and what she felt with her heart.

  Thorin was not a bad man.

  He’d just been victim to a puppet master who couldn’t seem to let him go and to a rival family that couldn’t stand to see him get ahead.

  Lola had to get to Thorin. She had to tell him the truth. She just hoped she wasn’t too late.

  Chapter 38

  THORIN

  House of Cleaves was situated on a cliffside in northern Wales and when Riev said the trial would be at midnight, he’d meant midnight British Summer Time. Which meant 7:00 P.M. Eastern Time.

  It wasn’t long after Thorin and his brothers returned to Blackwell House that they were leaving again for the trial, this time with Mad in tow.

  “Do you plan to throw me under the bus again?” Thorin asked his older brother.

  Since he wasn’t invoked, and not caeli-bound, Mad had to rely on one of them to take him to Cleaves.

  “It was for your own good,” Mad said as he smoothed back his long, dark hair.

  “You’re starting to sound like Red. When do you plan to be your own man?”

  Mad bristled. “When do you plan to stop acting like a petulant child?”

  Thorin growled. The witch disc grew hot and Thorin had to grit his teeth against the lance of pain.

  “Hey, hey!” Poe came between them. “Fisticuffs are for later. After we settle this matter. Mad, do you promise not to be an asshole at the trial?”