Please note:- 'OF CROWS AND THORNS' is a saga that is shared in a rather unconventional manner. As you are aware the saga is set around Nelle and Tabitha's dilemma. Nelle and Tabitha own the bigger books in the saga, and the Crowther brothers own the smaller novels (as well as Miss Lila, whom we meet in CAGED and is my wild card). 

During the series we are going to bounce between Nelle and Tabitha's books - and every so often one of the Crowther brothers' novels will be slipped in between. Each book, no matter what timeline it occurs in and who the leads are, affects and builds on the greater storyline of Nelle and Tabitha.

There is a very good reason why RISING is Book 2 in the series, as, without it, you won't truly experience the story of CAGED. You'll be experiencing a very different book to what the rest of us are reading and I fear you'll miss out on the nuances at play and all the clues gathered from RISING that are to be applied in CAGED. So I would like to gently encourage you, if you haven't already, to read RISING before entering CAGED. Ava xoxo

***

When I was nineteen I was stolen and caged like a bird.

Trapped inside a tower.

My twentieth birthday was soon approaching. The Witches Ball not long after.

The first threat loomed —The Emporium and the Crowthers' desperate need for a Goods Appraisal.

I had little time left to find a way to escape the Keep, and him, Graysen Crowther — a man intrinsically bound to my soul.

But as I stood regally upon a dais, paraded in front of all the Houses as leverage against my father, a Horned God offered me salvation.

Of course, nothing is ever given away for free.

***

Present Time

Raw, unfettered hostility poured through my veins at Graysen's touch. I twisted my spine and shook free of his hand which had been spread across the lower part of my back. I stepped inside the room to which he'd guided me, my bare feet making little noise upon the cool stone floor.

Menacing shadows rippled along the walls and floor, striking out at the undulating light cast by candles in wrought-iron sconces and candelabras, spilling from a chandelier hanging above a long trestle table. Ferne sat in a high-backed chair. A Heriz rug with a bold, geometric pattern was nestled beneath the table. Graysen stepped flush with me where I'd slowly drawn to a halt.

The animosity melted away, replaced by bewilderment.

There were large-scaled maps on one wall, pinned with all sorts of mismatched tacks, as well as images of otherworldly creatures—Horned Gods—I recognized from time spent raking through my family library on a hunt for any creature that could reveal what I was. My gaze glanced over racks of weapons—swords and daggers; war scythes, battle axes, and crossbows. A low glow of several computer monitors emitting dull blue light over documents and files strewn upon a shared desk, along with a nest of wires and half-formed devices from House Simonis, deconstructed by the Crowthers, I assumed, to be made into something new.

I flicked my brows up in curiosity, half-turning my face up to Graysen. At my silent question, he answered, "This is our family room."

My face slackened in surprise. "It looks more like a War Room."

His black eyes flared wide, then narrowed as he glanced about, taking in how I might see the room. Thick, inky brows slashed over equally dark eyes, a moment before he grunted. And I suppose that was his way of agreeing.

But there were touches, remnants of what I supposed the room might have looked like without those brutal additions. In the opposite corner was a stuffy couch with matching armchairs, their colorful fabric now faded and worn. Paintings and photographs were tucked around the maps that had territories crossed out with slashes of red ink; and little clay things that perhaps a child clumsily made—lopsided animals and wobbly cars—had been placed in pride along the mantle above the cozy fireplace. On the bookcases lining two adjacent walls, I spied a collection of children's books, obviously much loved judging by their ratty spines.

Graysen gestured behind me. I took it as a silent request to move, and I did, walking away from where the Crowther women were gathered at the table. As I moved past the wall lined from ceiling to floor with books, I realized the photographs propped up along a single shelf were of the same young woman.

I barely remembered her from my childhood, and it stupidly took me a long moment to realize who she was, even though I was standing in her home. She stared back at me with green eyes alight in a heart-shaped face. A sheen of golden hair curled over her shoulders, and her rosy lips were open and spread wide, captured in a moment of pure joyous laughter.

Oh my gods...

Tabitha Crowther.

My gut twisted and my footing stumbled. I was drowning, pushed under a wavering surface of water as coarse currents of guilt washed through me.

Tabitha had been stolen by the Horned Gods in place of me, for whatever purpose they had in mind for her, 12 long years ago.

Both of us alive.

Both of us trapped.

Would our fates be the same?

Would the Crowthers make me suffer like she was?

But that was a question to which I already knew the answer. I was the Crowthers' way into the Witches Ball, where I'd stand on the auction block and be bid on by those reclusive Horned Gods whose dark power came from an ancient language. I'd be nothing more than an object, reduced down to body parts—the bits of me that could be used in their spells and potions and curses.

Graysen herded me to a far corner where the bookshelves met one another, and the smell of paper and ink greeted me. When I turned to face him, our eyes met. For a moment I saw the turmoil raging inside—guilt and remorse. Fury. My heart pounded wildly at the wintry blast of feelings lashing out at where I stood, chilling the blood in my veins, turning my bones brittle.

He blinked slowly and, when he next looked at me, his gaze was blank and unfeeling. "Stand here and do not say a word," he said, his voice low and gravelly.

A spike of anger flared—Like hells I will!

My mouth parted—

He pressed a calloused finger across my lips.

I went to bite him when his sharp tsk stopped me. "Not a single word," he whispered in a soft growl. "For your own good—be silent."

Without waiting for a response, he left me there, twisting away to stride a little deeper into the room. I realized he'd guided me furthest away from his aunt. Despite the modern lighting set into ceiling recesses, candlelight was the only source of illumination. The shadows lingered in the room like another presence. I welcomed the shadows, pressed myself deeper into them, welcoming the dull ache as the bookshelves at my back dug into my spine—desperately trying to ignore the photographs and paintings capturing memories of Tabitha.

Graysen placed himself directly between his aunt and me, forcing me to lean sideways to peer around his tall body to see her.

Valarie stood at the head of the dark wooden table while Ferne sat as stiffly as I stood, her hands threaded together, resting on top of the table. She rubbed her thumb back and forth over the other, pulling the skin taut over the knuckle and turning it white with pressure.

Valarie was tall just like all the Crowthers. They were a family of considerable height. Her black dress of crushed silk wrapped around her body like the shadows in the room. Silver threads ran through her midnight hair, which had been smoothed back and woven into a simple bun. Her features were sharp like her gaze. Coldness radiated from her—I could feel it all the way across the room nipping my skin like hoarfrost.

I was a thing to her. She was curious, wanting to know what I was, what lurked beneath my skin, and how it might be turned to her advantage—information her twin brother, Varen, and her nephews had discovered less than an hour ago.

The play of light and darkness created hollows in her cheeks and made the age lines in her face deeper. Her empty eyes glowed otherworldly in the shadows. I fought the urge to shrink away. To keep myself from trembling. To remind myself who I was and what it felt like to have wrath burning through my veins.

I was a Wychthorn from the Great House.

I would bow to no one.

And I would never let them see me break.

Tipping up my chin, I met her icy gaze with my own glacial one.

Graysen squared his shoulders as if bracing himself for pain. His deep voice rumbled through the room. "Wychthorn's a wyrm."

Ferne's mouth fell open.

Her shock was almost tangible. It leaked out like crisp moist air from a cold room and my skin prickled with goosebumps. Hearing it spoken out loud, a name given to the power, to the thing that lived inside me...

So much had happened in the space of an hour, a day, a weekend...

And I was a wyrm, only to learn that knowledge, meet the wyrm face-to-face, and have the creature that had been with me since birth leave me. No, not gone, just hidden from me in a way I hadn't had time to work out in my mind.

A wyrm.

I was a wyrm.

I caught the flash of confusion and surprise in Valarie's eyes, swiftly hidden as she regained control of herself. "A wyrm," she repeated. Her thin eyebrows nudged together as her gaze turned to her nephew. "How can that be? They are beasts."

Graysen had his back to me. The armor he wore, the intricate fish-scaled cut, clung to his tall body, broad but in a streamlined way. He adjusted his stance minutely and candlelight struck off the adamere hilts of the blades strapped to his thighs and the outside of his boots. He ran a hand through his black hair, streaked with ash, turning it salt and pepper, then dropped his hand to brace it on his hip. I watched those powerful shoulders lift as he shrugged. "Who the fuck knows?"

It was Ferne who put it together. She rose, her chair scraping along stone as she leaned forward. Her arms supported her upper body as she spread her fingers over the table. She angled her head toward us both, and the strip of lace across her eyes appeared a darker shade of blue in the dimly lit room. "You're a Tamer," she said to Graysen in that low, raspy voice of hers, an incredulous note to her tone. "That's why I could feel what was between you two. Why there was that strange connection between you both."

Valarie's calculating gaze crawled all over Graysen. He'd shifted sideways and angled himself slightly so I could see his profile. He looked cold and unaffected, but I knew him...at least I thought I had. The thumb digging into the tip of his middle finger gave him away. He, like me, was trying to come to grips with the knowledge, what it meant for both of us, to finally understand why there had always been that hyper-awareness that sparked and shimmered between us.

"It's not corporeal. Not-quite-living. She can't shift into the beast. I guess it's more appropriate to say she's part-wyrm. For some gods-forsaken reason, it's as if the spirit or essence of a wyrm has attached itself to her." The reason why no one, not even the Crowthers could ever have anticipated, nor guessed what lurked beneath my skin.

Our world had never seen such a thing before.

Graysen turned fully to face me. A shiver rippled down my spine at the sight of how empty his expression had become—a cold mask he hid behind, I reminded myself. His gaze was exactly like his aunt's as he raked it from the top of my head to the tips of my dirt-encrusted toes, sweeping back up again as he assessed me clinically, like a thing. "The wyrm hasn't reached maturity. It's still adolescent."

I blinked with shock. The wyrm had been massive. How much bigger it was going to grow? How much more powerful? Those beasts could bring mountains to their knees, and the Crowthers' fortress would have been reduced to rubble if it had reached maturity.

But it also made sense why my emotions were so closely entwined with the wyrms. Adolescent, the wyrm was temperamental, full of fire and anger—the reason it was kept in burrows deep beneath the earth until it gained control of its emotions.

"She saved your life," I heard someone say above the sudden noise of the door opening and heavy boots clunking on the stone floor. Caidan entered the room, his arm slung under the Jett's armpit, supporting the youngest Crowther brother as he limped beside him.

I had. My wyrm had lashed out when my gaze had landed on Graysen as he'd approached, drawn to me like a moth unmindful of a flame. I'd been caught in a half-feral state, threatened by him and his family, and my wyrm had reacted instinctively to protect me—breathing out flames of sunshine and moonlight to shred him into nothing. But I had saved Graysen's life by casting a tempest of cool air to drive the flames aside.

"You would have been barbecue," Caidan added, a taunting kind of amusement in his tone.

Less than barbecue. He would have been incinerated into nothing, not even cinders or ash would have remained.

I slid my eyes to Graysen. A muscle feathered in his jaw as he stared back at me.

Even now, with Zrenyth's rope around my throat, I didn't regret saving his life. But he couldn't learn my weakness, so I bared my teeth at him.

And because I was watching for it, I saw a sharp glint of guilt ripple through his eyes before he turned his gaze aside.

Caidan led Jett to a couch and eased him down. Jett stretched his long legs out and tipped his head against the headrest, wincing and turning away from the light. Sweat coated his forehead, and plastered loose strands of hair to his temples. Though his muscles were locked and tense, there was the barest hint of a shiver moving through his limbs.

Valarie's long skirt whispered over the floor as she crossed the room to a small table next to the couch. She picked up a candelabra, casting a golden glow over Jett. Fat molten wax dripped as she moved it away from Jett, allowing the gloom to settle around him. "You shouldn't be here," she said to him as she sat the candelabra on the fireplace mantle.

"Nothing better to do. Besides, I wouldn't want to miss this," he gritted out between clenched teeth as those eyes, shining bright in the darkness, met mine.

As Caidan turned—the breath whooshed from my lungs.

"You're hurt..." Ferne cried, spinning around. How she knew that I didn't know.

"I'm fine," Caidan replied, but his voice was tight as he flopped onto the couch beside Jett. His face—the side that had been hidden from me when he'd entered the family room—was melted ripples of skin, hair burnt away in chunks.

I did that. My wyrm's fire had scorched that flesh.

In fascination, I watched the puckered skin slowly begin to heal across Caidan's face, the vicious third-degree burns smoothing and becoming less raw and ugly. Caidan gingerly flexed his jaw and winced. The Crowther siblings had unnatural healing, but that didn't mean it wasn't painful.

Ferne hurried toward the filing cabinet, her hands spread before her, and I wondered if she also used her heightened senses to guide her, along with the familiarity she had for her home.

Metal clunked and grated as she dragged open the bottom drawer, fishing around inside and pulling out a soft leather bag. She moved to the couch and the bag thumped softly at her feet as she knelt beside Caidan. Tilting her head, she rummaged around inside, feeling the shape of the vials and roots and glass containers I imagined, and pulled out several syringes, offering them to her older brother.

Caidan picked one that was filled with a mossy-green potion.

He half-shrugged out of his jacket, drawing one shoulder out far enough so that he could stab the needle into his upper arm and pump in the painkiller—a mixture of medicine and magic, melded together by House Simonis. As the painkiller worked its way through his system, his eyelids lowered as he let out a sigh, his body relaxing and curving into the cushions behind him.

Ferne offered the same handful of medicine to Jett.

But he grunted out a no.

Ferne huffed out a breath through her nose, and her mouth was a bitter line as if she'd expected his answer and it still annoyed the hells out of her.

Exhaustion limned my body and my knees wobbled, threatening to buckle. I'd reached near-exhaustion fighting for freedom. I steadied a hand against a shelf—the leather-bound books pushed back against my fingertips—and dug deep, drawing on what little energy was left to me.

Graysen cut a swift glance at me, worry almost indiscernible, but it had flashed through his gaze.

Anger burned brightly and slit my eyes. What right did he have—

The sudden sound of the door shoving open, unhurried footfall, and whispering leather, sliced my thoughts apart and had all our attention swinging toward the door. Varen—Valarie's twin brother and the Crowthers' father—strode in. Kenton was right behind him, a large hand clasped at the side of his neck as he rolled it from side to side. The wyrmfire tattoos curling up his throat stretched with the motion. Each of the Crowther brothers were tattooed—similar, yet distinct from one another with a variance in the pattern. The adamere armor cladding each of the male Crowthers was soft and malleable, the jacket and pants more akin to motorcycle leather than the plated metal our ancestors wore. Each one of them was sweaty, dirty, and sooty, and the unruly black locks the brothers all shared were coated with ash. And blood... Blood was smeared all over their armor, into the dirty creases of their calloused palms and fingers, and splattered along their cheeks.

They brought with them the stench of smoke and death. But hadn't that been me? Wasn't it me who had wielded that, inflicted that upon them?

It was deathly quiet.

Kenton leaned his thigh against the lip of the table, folding his arms across his massive chest, his chilling focus solely on me. And my fingers inched for my adamere bracelet...only to scrape against the naked flesh of my inner wrist. The beads that kept me in check and gave me comfort when I needed them the most were gone, lost somewhere in that nightmare I'd survived through only yesterday.

Graysen paced back and forth in front of me. His footfall didn't seem agitated, nor was the way he carried himself, but there was something territorial about his action. I realized no one could get past him to me, and I wondered if he was aware of it.

I caught the perplexed look that passed between Jett and Kenton.

Varen, the patriarch of the Crowthers, was the tallest amongst them all, and there was a brutal beauty in his weathered features. He braced his hands on the back of a chair. His roughly-hewn voice split the silence apart. "We lost good men and women today."

And those eyes, those violet eyes shifted my way. All of them. All the Crowthers stared at me with angered grief brimming just below the surface, but there was also an unease as if it were a rocky truce between us. As if they thought I might suddenly strike out and unleash the wyrm.

But of course, I couldn't, because this thing around my neck had cut me off from the power that resided within me.

"The wounded are in the infirmary. Some won't make it through the night," Varen informed the room. He dropped his gaze down to his meaty fingers, clenched tightly around the wooden chair before pushing off to straighten. He wiped a hand down his face, shooting a decisive look at his sister. "We'll bury the dead tonight."

Caidan propped his elbows on his knees, bowed his head, and hid behind bloodied hands that kneaded his temple and hairline.

"Collens? Hollis?" Jett asked, both hands fisting on his thighs.

Varen swallowed thickly, then nodded, and rattled off a series of names. My fractured mind took in only a few—Collens, Greta, Liam, Hollis. But the fallen were named. Named—they became people. People fatally harmed.

I'd killed them.

Me.

My stomach clenched and the acidic taste of bile burned its way up my throat.

I might not have taken a life—punching back with dark power and wicked howling wind—but I hadn't reigned the wyrm in. I'd allowed it to maim and kill. It had torn through the Crowther ranks, slicing and dicing and crushing them beneath its might, incinerating them with its wyrmfire of moonlight, threaded through with sunlight—a mixture I'd never heard or read about in my quest to learn more about wyrms in my childhood.

Sickly abhorrence sluiced through my veins. My hands shook and my bottom lip quivered. I didn't understand how I was still standing with the way my burning legs trembled. After everything that had happened this evening, it was too much, what I'd been part of—what I had done.

Violet eyes clashed with mine. Jett's features twisted in fury. "Cousins of mine," he snarled, shoving to his feet. "Collens, Hollis..." He surged for me, a blur of flesh and rage.