The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

chased her through a meadow outside Brigid’s Keep. He was fifteen and she was eight. He had escaped from his mother long enough to find Fynn with the other kids, playing tag in the high grass and wildflowers. She looked over her shoulder at Cain. The sun lit her hair in a halo. Her eyes were filled with kindness and play, and he knew in that moment that she loved him. She loved him and he loved her. He never touched her, but, in that moment, he knew that he would wait until she was old enough and he would make her his forever.
    “Is this your idea of internet porn? It’s rather dreary.” His mother stood behind him. He rushed to close the file. She clamped her iron fingers around his wrist. “Don’t try to pretend you weren’t looking,” she said. “I want to see, too.”
    “Just doing research.” Cain’s neck burned. “Keeping on top of the Kildare situation.”
    “I’ll bet,” his mother said. Her Chanel perfume coated the back of his throat. Long red fingernails clicked along the keyboard like insect legs. He forced himself to be still, even while recoiling shivers rolled up and down his back.
    “Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been here since last night.” A casual conversation might take her mind off his business.
    “Working,” she said.
    Her breath puffed against his cheek. He glanced at her face. He hated to see Fynn’s image reflected in her eyes. “You pine for this girl,” she said. “When you could have any woman you wanted.”
    “I don’t think it’s for you to worry about, Mother.”
    “A man like you. So rich, so hot.” She walked her fingers along his shoulders and began kneading the back of his neck. Cain swallowed a flume of rising bile. “Once she has babies, it’s over, you know. Her mother and sister will be dead, but as long as one lives, there can always be the Triple Goddess again. Then she will be too powerful for you to control.”
    “I thought of that. I’m not stupid,” he said. Resentment tingled in his jaw. He bit it back. He had to keep calm. This was an old conversation. They always had the same one, hashing over the same details of their compromise. She liked to make him feel every inch of her generosity.
    “So what are you going to do before you run off to play castaway? Make a hysterectomy stop and drop her uterus off on the way?”
    Cain shut the screen to blackness. When his mother laughed, it sounded like it came from the throat of a dead woman. “You are! How perfect,” she said. “You truly have thought of everything. She’ll hate you, of course, but that won’t matter so much. The world will be over beyond your bug-bitten island, anyway. Maybe by the time she’s ninety, she’ll forgive you enough to let you touch her.”
    She bore down on the loose spot in his shoulder. When he was a child, she had dislocated the bone from the ligament there. She dug in where she knew it still hurt the most. Cain opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was sucked into pain.
    “I would give you any woman in the world, but you had to choose her,” she said. “When you know the death of the Three would make me so happy.”
    His shoulder thunked out of joint. He winced in agony, but did not cry out. She stepped off to watch him push the bone back into its socket. He gagged as it slipped in.
    “But I’ll let you have her. I’m too good to you, Son. I always have been.” She moved toward the eastern window. “Life with you will be a living hell for her,” she said. “That will have to be enough for me.”
    “They’ve been moving,” he said, his voice tight. Waves of pain emanated down his arm. He needed to get her off the subject of Fynn before she changed her mind about letting him have her.
    “Yes,” she said, ticking her nails against the thick glass. “Today is the day.”
    She motioned him to join her. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief. Evidence of pain whetted her appetite for more. He had years of practice hiding all kinds