Free The Responsible Witch (The Ward Witches) by Lauren McMinn

to get rid of everything he had eaten in the last twenty four hours. Unwilling to face other people for the moment, he pulled on his boxers and a pair of sweat pants, pulled a chair over to the window, and contemplated the sunrise.
    When he had met Dymphna, he was afraid to bond with her because he had nothing to give her. Now he knew he had something to give her, but it was all bad. She wouldn't be pleased, and he'd be lucky if she didn't call it off and leave him. Sure they had the bond, but it wasn't unheard of for badly matched couples to separate. He remembered her being uncomfortable with his last name, and there was worse to come when he finally told her all. And he would, because he believed in the whole truth. She deserved to know, so he'd tell her even if it meant losing her.
    A few hours into his brooding, she woke up gradually. She blinked at him from the bed. “Good afternoon,” he said, still staring out the window.
    “ Good afternoon. I can tell you're troubled. What's wrong?”
    “ My memory came back. In some ways, I kind of wish it hadn't.”
    Fully awake now, she got dressed. He had noticed she wasn't comfortable naked around him, so he didn't look as she put on her clothes. She came up and massaged his shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    “ No. But I need to. You deserve to know the truth about me.”
    “ Then come sit on the bed. I'd like to be able to look at you while you talk to me.”
    He obliged her, and she settled in facing him. “As you know, my father was Thomas Redman.”
    “ I know.”
    “ I'm his firstborn, and I was supposed to take over the family business and be leader of the Dark Order. Much like how Seb became Duke. Blood magic users can't bond, but he had found some way to get past that to make a child with another blood witch. They killed three other witches to give me their powers. Three people were dead because of me before I even reached one year old.”
    “ Gage, you can't blame yourself for that,” Dymphna said softly, grabbing his hand. She rubbed her thumb across his palm and he wanted to believe her.
    “ I was heir to it all, which is why they did it. Then one day it got too much for my mom, Denise . They asked her to bring her sister, a powerful air witch who believed in pure magic, to be sacrificed. She objected, but my father said she was a traitor if she didn't. It was a test, and she failed. She said she'd bring her sister along the next day when she could get in contact with her. But then in the night, Denise slit his throat. She made sure he was dead, then took me and ran.”
    Dymphna's thumb briefly stopped moving on his palm when he said his mother was a cold-blooded killer, but she started up again after a short pause. Hopefully that meant she didn't think too badly of him or his mother.
    “ She kept track of the Order, but they were so disorganized after my father's death that they couldn't muster forces together long enough to track her down. It was officially an unsolved homicide because the other members of the Order botched the crime scene so badly that the cops couldn't get enough evidence against my mother. I was heir to it all legally too, from the house to the money. The money helped get us through until my mother found a job and set up a home for us in Florida.
    “ But Denise was addicted, like Fiona talked about. She had been part of it all. She had killed people, and not just my father. She managed to stay alive on blood we got from the local butcher, and she never took more than enough to survive. The money my father left me also got me through college. But I'm the one to blame for the Dark Order coming back.”
    “ What do you mean?”
    “ The properties my father left me. I never went to them, in fact, I stayed away deliberately. The new generation of the Dark Order re-purposed them for sacrifices again. The home I grew up in was the same place they kept me and tortured me in the basement. They wanted to make me use the blood.