The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 2060: The Life You Bought (Part One)

The grave was the same.

The rain, the cedar, the shovelfuls of wet earth. This time she fought it. She tried to hold her breath the way Ashlynn had. She tried to claw her way up through the mud.

She drove her ruined hands upward into the earth, and her broken fingers bent the wrong way against it. Her nails peeled back from their beds, one after another, until mud packed into the raw, bleeding flesh beneath them. She kept digging anyway. She dug until her fingertips were nothing but torn meat and splintered bone, and the earth above her never grew any thinner.

Her lungs began to burn. She held on. She held on while her chest heaved and her throat convulsed and the pressure built behind her eyes until she thought they might burst. She held on until her body betrayed her, and she gasped, and the mud rushed in.

It filled her mouth. It filled her throat. She choked on it, and every choking breath drew more of it down into her chest, cold and gritty and endless.

In the end, her broken hands couldn’t grip, and the earth was so heavy, and the darkness came for her just the same.

Then the hand in her hair dragged her roughly from the cold, clinging earth, followed by the same slow, patient voice.

"Through olive’s deep and deathless root, Knit the bone and bear new fruit."

The familiar warmth filled her as her body healed. Then came the fire. Her fingernails pushed back out of her raw fingertips like thorns forcing their way through skin. Her ribs dragged and ground back into their places. Mud forced its way back up her throat in a thick, choking torrent until she lay retching on her side in the rain. And just as before, the memory of every blow laid down on top of the last ones like fresh snow atop old ice.

"You failed again," the Olive Seed said, standing over her in the rain. "You’re very good at it, you know. Failure. And disappointment. Even with Crimson Promise at your side, still, you were useless. And helpless," the Seed mused. "Weak and powerless."

Jocelynn didn’t answer. She couldn’t stop shaking. Her teeth chattered so hard that she bit her tongue, and she tasted blood mixed with mud.

The Seed crouched beside her. Its wooden fingers brushed the wet hair back from her face, and the touch was so gentle, so exactly like Ashlynn’s, that she wanted to scream.

"Shall we try something different?" it asked.

Before Jocelynn could answer, the forest dissolved around her, leaving her somewhere else entirely. The Olive Seed was nowhere to be seen.

Jocelynn stood in a corridor in Lothian Manor. It was night, and the torches had burned down low in their iron sconces. Her back ached. Her feet were swollen in her slippers, and when she looked down, her belly rose in a great round curve beneath her nightgown. It was enormous. Heavy and taut, pulling at her spine with every step, the skin stretched so tight across it that it itched and burned.

She was with child.

Owain’s child. She knew it the way she knew her own name. She’d been married to him for... a year? More? Somehow, she couldn’t quite remember the wedding. Only that there had been one. She remembered that she was the Marchioness of Lothian now, and that she’d woken in the night to find his side of the bed cold and empty.

He’s probably working late, she told herself. Reading reports in his study. Or with his knights.

She pressed a hand to her belly as she walked. The baby kicked against her palm, strong and restless. Then it kicked again, harder, a sharp blow beneath her ribs that stole her breath and left her bracing one hand against the cold stone wall until the pain passed. A boy, the midwives said, from the way she carried. Owain wanted a son more than anything. He’d told her so on their wedding night, and every night since.

He wanted a son to carry the Lothian name. A son who could wield a sword like Mountain Breaker, carving out his own legend. And one day, a son who would become the second Duke of Lothian after his father finished conquering the demons that threatened their borders.

She’d given him everything he wanted. Hadn’t she?

The portraits of dead Lothian marquises stared down at her from the walls as she passed. Bors scowled from his portrait, as did his father before him. Their painted eyes seemed to follow her down the corridor, cold and judging.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a name kept trying to surface. A face. Someone who should have been here, and wasn’t. Someone she’d lost. But every time Jocelynn reached for it, it slid away like a fish in murky water, and left nothing behind but an ache she couldn’t explain.

And yet, the cold, hard knot was back in her stomach. Bile crept up the back of her throat, and she swallowed it down.

She waddled down the corridor, one hand pressed to the small of her back where a deep, dragging ache had settled into her bones. A pair of maids came around the corner with an armful of linens and saw her. They stopped. One of them went as white as the linens in her arms. Their eyes slid away from hers, toward a door at the end of the hall, and then they curtsied and hurried past without a word.

Jocelynn looked at the door.

It was one of the guest chambers. Light flickered beneath it. And from the other side, very faintly, she heard a sound that made her blood run cold. A man’s low laughter.

Her husband’s.

And then, beneath it, a woman’s voice. A soft, broken little sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been something else entirely.

She didn’t bother knocking.

The door swung open, and the smell hit her first. Wine and sweat and the musk of bodies, thick and close in the overheated room. The candlelight inside fell across a rumpled bed and a tangle of sheets. Owain sprawled across it, bare-chested, with a cup of wine in his hand. And beside him, clutching a sheet to her chest with white-knuckled fingers, her ashen-blonde hair spilling loose across the pillow...

"Samira," Jocelynn whispered.