Whatever control I’d had over my expression shattered. “Why? Why should I leave it? Should I trust you? Like I trusted you this morning? Like you set me up to talk to Sarah Anne?”
He stiffened. I mean really stiffened. I swear I saw muscles in his cheeks I had never known had existed before.
“Just leave it,” he snapped, expression so cold, his lips and eyes could have frozen clean off.
Everything told me to drop it. From his countenance, to the tension climbing his jaw, to my own beating heart. Problem was, I couldn’t drop it.
I stood there, curling my hands until it felt like my fingernails would perforate my palms. “Why? Because that would be easier? Because you wouldn’t have to answer any questions that way? You’re meant to be my magical bodyguard, right? So why do I sometimes feel that you’ll be the reason I die?”
Snap. Something snapped in him. No, he didn’t suddenly thrust forward and hit me. It wasn’t anything like that. But I’d definitely struck a nerve, a serious one, for I had never seen Max like this. His cheeks were so stiff it looked as if I’d slapped him.
He couldn’t say anything, either. Not a word. And his shadow? That long, dark shadow that sometimes looked more real than he did? It flickered, almost as if I’d delivered it some devastating blow.
I didn’t get an opportunity to find out why Max was reacting so strangely – at that moment, Bridgette and Sarah came back.
I was gratified to see there was no blood on their hands.
They simply looked grim.
Though Max didn’t thaw by the time they arrived, both women were too distracted to pick up on his epically icy mood.
Sarah exchanged some mumbled words with Max, and when I tried to pick up what they were saying, Max simply lowered his tone. Doing it again, ha? He seemed obsessed with me doing the right thing, but apparently I didn’t need to know what was happening in order to do the right thing. Nope. All I had to do was follow and obey.
Just when I got the idea that I could walk away, Max appeared to know what I was thinking. He growled at me to stay put.
Reluctantly, I waited there, arms crossed, kicking a mark on the pavement as I waited for Max to finish with Sarah.
Several minutes later, he was done. With a grim, judgmental, and yet somehow caring look, he shrugged me forward.
Time to follow, ha?
With no other option, I fell into step behind the ever mysterious Max.
…
Fagan
He sat there in his suit, hands clamped on his lap, expensive shoe tapping against the desk before him.
He stared at the security footage being played over the computer screen set up on the desk.
The more he watched, the more he tapped his shoe against the desk. Swearing for the hundredth time, he pushed harder back into his seat and clenched a hand into a fist.
He was on a deadline, here. A tight one. Either he produced the hearts for the Lonely King, or Fagan would find his magical protection canceled. Abruptly. And Fagan had enemies. He had a list of enemies as long as his arm.
What made it worse, was he had to time his murders to the second. The Lonely King demanded it. Fagan hadn’t questioned, but he could bet the Lonely King was casting some kind of complex spell and time was important somehow.
Fagan didn’t need to know the details – he just needed to kill. And thanks to that little bitch who’d interrupted the murder, he’d missed today’s target.
He tapped his foot – tap, tap, tap – until it sounded like he was trying to hammer through the leg of the desk.
He’d spent a week tracking down Bridgette Black – sifting her out from the other witches based on her unique skill set. She was a body doubler, and you didn’t see those every day.
Now? Now he’d either have to find another or go up against the coven.
“Fuck,” he spat once more as he balled up a hand and struck the desk. The blow was sharp enough, hard enough that it rattled the computer screen, threatening to topple it and send it crashing down to the ground.
Though Fagan’s knuckles smarted and he even picked up several splinters from the rough edge of the wood, he didn’t care.
He rested back and continued to watch the footage.
It showed the masked assassin – a specific breed of magician who lost their facial features over time as they practiced magic – going after Bridgette, chasing her down to a car garage.
Fagan always took footage of his acquisitions, as he liked to call them. Not only could he use them for training purposes, but the Lonely King required it. Fagan had made a mistake with Farley – that bastard had started acquiring hearts for himself. Now the Lonely King would not let Fagan make such a mistake again. He had to take footage of every murder to prove that none of the hearts went missing.
He watched the footage, and everything went according to plan until suddenly, out of nowhere, a woman appeared. She shifted one of the cars, and what should have been a well-timed attack failed to hit home.
“Fuck,” Fagan roared once more. His first assumption was that the woman was just some passing witch, a member of the same coven as Bridgette.
In fact, he was about to ball up a fist, hit it on the keyboard, and stalk out of the room.
He stopped.
He turned. He stared at the screen.
Wait.
He’d seen that face before. The freckles, the porcelain skin. It was her. The seer.
The frozen sneer of anger that had
