Page 63 of An Oath at Midnight

“And you get to decide that?”

Bram took a step closer, and I took one back, not because I was afraid, but because I was overwhelmed, by this, by him. Goddess, every part of me felt oversensitized, raw.

He watched me do it. “You are afraid.”

I shook my head again. “How do you know him? Why did you do it? Does this have anything to do with my task?”

“I don’t know him, and because he enjoys killing females. Does unspeakable things, then he kills them. And no, this has nothing to do with your task.”

Agatheena had wanted me to see this. To see Bram like this. To see the truth. I looked down at the male slumped on the floor. He was the evil I felt when I walked in here. I didn’t feel it anymore, the feeling left the moment he’d died.

“Is this your job, the thing that takes you away?”

The muscle in Bram’s jaw jumped. “Yes,” he finally said.

I could tell he was testing it out, testing to see if he could talk. He’d made an oath, but I’d just walked in and seen his secret for myself. Maybe that voided it? “You kill people?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So you’re some kind of…assassin?”

He nodded. “I hunt bad people and I kill them.”

“Why you?”

“Because I’m a crow, it’s what we’re born to do.”

My head was in a whirl. “And your brothers?”

He held his body unnaturally still, watching me closely, and he nodded again.

“And you…you enjoy it, don’t you? You enjoy the kill,” I rasped.

He didn’t look away, didn’t flinch or try to hide. “Yes,” he said.

I felt as if I were spinning out of control. “Is that why you didn’t want me to know?”

“Yes.”

I swallowed hard. “And this part of you—”

“It’s always there. I’m a shifter, Magnolia. I’m not human. My animal side has always been dominant. I think you know that.”

I did. I knew it. It was one of the many things I’d loved about him.

“Crows enjoy the hunt, the kill,” he said. “Not to do it is ignoring the very core of our nature.” He took several more steps toward me, and this time I didn’t retreat, I stayed where I was. Because no matter what I’d just witnessed, this was Bram. My Bram. “And I do it because if I don’t, I could become one of the monsters I put down.” He took another step toward me, his chest heaving. “We are as dark as our feathers, as the shadows we shift into. I kill because I have to, but also because it’s what I am. Because I need it, and yes, because I enjoy it.”

He took the last two steps, closing the space between us.

“The oath… Why can you talk to me about it now? Because I saw you?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s how it is with everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Because they don’t usually live long enough to tell anyone what they saw?”