Unwilling (Book One of the Compelled Trilogy 1) by Kristen Pike Read Free Book Online

shoulders. The same blue eyes that Rowan had stared at her with a feverish exhilaration and the true smile Rowan knew to be Elias’s, looked at her so earnestly Rowan couldn’t help but smile back hopefully and take the hand he offered her. Elias grabbed her cup, placing it on a small table they kept in the room and she let him drag her hastily out to the back, towards the Great Tree.
    Rowan stopped short when she realized what he intended. “Elias, you cannot do this thing!” She shouted at him as he hurried ahead. Elias stopped beneath their mother, his breaths puffing out in clouds from the cold as he turned to look at his sister. A thick noose hung around her mother’s neck, the bench propped under her in its familiar spot. Rowan could tell she wished to struggle. Her body would tick every now and then, her face contorted in an ugly cry, made uglier by the large dirt brown scabs crisscrossing along her pale skin. Wailing from deep in her soul crushed the silence between Elias and Rowan.
    “Elias, my son, my Tal, my Moval, I beg of you, please. I never meant to-“
    “Shut your mouth!” Elias screamed at his mother, she fell silent though her desolate tears seemed to fall with a deafening loudness.
    The first time Rowan ever used it she had never meant to. She didn’t even know that she could. If she could have gone back in time, she never would have done it, though she did save her mother’s life that day.
    Rowan walked to her brother placing her hand on his arm, trying to desperately reach the brother she knew to still be buried inside this brother she did not. His eyes flicked twixt hers, the excitement in them diminishing.
    “Elias, you cannot do this, it has been enough. Please, you cannot compel her no more.” Rowan felt a spark of heat a flickering fire a raging inferno beginning to leap to life in her chest, lazily working its way through her, making her limbs tingle but Rowan pushed back against it and the feeling quickly died. Rowan was left feeling tired and cold and for a brief moment, a miniscule second that barely mattered, as if she wanted the heat inside her to come back. “For the love you have of me please stop, let this vendetta die.” Elias took a step back. He looked between their mother and Rowan, a deep confusion working its way across his face. He looked as though he wanted to argue; instead, he hurried off, slipping back inside the warmth of the house silently.
    “You’re just like him!” Their mother shouted viciously to Elias’s turned back, her voice cracking. The moment Elias disappeared back into the house Rowan’s mother tore the noose from around her neck. She collapsed onto the bench in a dirty heap, with her head buried in her hands. Rowan said not a word to her mother, as she too went back inside.
    Rowan didn’t see Elias or their mother for the rest of the day, and she went to bed that night fatigued, her head lost in a hazy cloud. She didn’t think of the repercussions of what she had done. Using the “gift” hadn’t felt as Elias had described, Rowan didn’t feel the adrenaline, the power surging through her. She only felt tired, and perhaps a little sad. It felt more like a curse to her than a gift, a rampant firestorm that would consume her and devour everything that made her who she was until there was nothing left but the Beast inside.
    When Rowan crawled under the covers and closed her eyes, she did not expect to be woken just a few short hours later by her panicked brother.
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    The door came crashing open and Rowan bolted upright in her bed, her heart jolting inside her chest. Its mother come back to finish me off at last. Rowan thought alarmingly in her sleepy state. When she only saw Elias, she breathed a sigh of relief. I’m being silly, Rowan thought, and tried to calm her frantic heart.
    “Rowan, it won’t