When we broke apart, some of the haze in her eyes faded away, and she shook her head. “Sorry. What were we saying?”
I licked my lips and led her over to the bed to sit down. “I just spoke with your father. He paid me for my services and told me to leave.”
The window to her room shattered the moment those words left my lips. “But I don’t want you to leave.”
Her pouty bottom lip trembled, and I wanted to suck on it. “I don’t want to leave either.” Thorny vines grew from the ground, and I grabbed her arm to get her to stop. “I’m not going anywhere, Layne, I promise.”
She shook her head, and the threatening vines stopped growing. “Why does he want you to leave? I don’t care if they want to marry me off. They don’t know me.”
“Layne, you’re so powerful,” I whispered.
“I know. I could take them all on if I wanted.” Her voice was dark and heady. “I couldn’t feel it before, Cypress, but I feel it now. The longer I’m here, the louder the voice gets.”
“What voice?” I asked, my own tone choked up.
“I’m going to ruin anyone that gets in our way, Cypress. I’ll protect us. Like you protected me.”
I held onto her arms. This was not going the way I expected it to. “Layne, we aren’t going to hurt anyone. Your father just needs to see that you can control yourself, and then he’ll back off this. Do you understand?”
She obviously didn’t, because for half a second—and that felt like an eternity—her eyes flashed red. That really couldn’t be good. “I will end them.”
“That’s not the Druid way,” I said fast, “whatever else you are or aren’t, you’re a Druid. You don’t kill people. Take a deep breath for me. Can you do that?”
Venom shot from her gaze to me in half a second. “You’re supposed to support me. When the whole world is against me, you’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am. Even though you can’t see it right now.”
“No,” her voice was lower than it should have been. She didn’t sound like Layne at all. “If you aren’t with me…you have no place in my life.”
Fuck. I didn’t know what to do. “Layne, just let me help—”
“Get out.”
This wasn’t her at all. She wasn’t herself. It was all her powers, overwhelming her. The earth quaked at her declaration. The entire castle shook. I didn’t know what to do, so I reached out to kiss her, but she shoved me away.
“I thought you wanted to be with me. You just care about your fucking reward,” she yelled. Thunder and lightning crashed outside, even though the sun shone brightly.
“This isn’t you, Layne,” I cried out against the roaring wind that slapped at my cheeks. I pressed against the pressure of it to get to her. Shouts outside her door could be heard.
“You’re right,” she whispered. “This isn’t me at all. I’m something more.”
Something hard hit the side of my head. In all my years of training to be the baddest of the bad, nothing could have prepared me for her. Sweet, innocent Layne.
The world went black, and I slipped into disbelief. Maybe her father was right. Maybe Nightmare was the safest place for her after all.
When I woke up, I was lying face down in the dirt. My head rang. I lifted myself up. Where was I? How had I gotten here? I was a fucking assassin. I didn’t faint. I didn’t lose consciousness. But then, I’d never encountered power like Layne’s when she’d turned it on me. She’d knocked me out and thrown me out. Well, fuck.
I rolled over onto my back and stared up at the sky. The question was what now. My last coherent thought had been she was safer at Nightmare, but I wasn’t going to let that happen to her. But if her father wanted to fucking temper her powers while they taught her to be in control, I could see the smartness of that now.
If she agreed.
Layne was a princess who had never had a choice in her life. Go here, do this. Even I had dragged her around. It was time to let the woman have a little self-determination. If she wanted it. That was the trouble with choice. We could choose to do the right things, we could choose to become assassins, we could choose to starve to death if we wanted to do so. But Layne had never chosen anything. Until she picked me.
I sat up. This fucking sucked. I didn’t have any choice anymore. She’d been my job, and she continued to be, but now it was a joyful job. A job I wanted for the rest of my life. Keeping Layne safe, loving her, losing myself between her thighs in the sweetest heat I’d ever known. I had no more self-determination. My path was set. And that meant I had to convince her family to let me through their wards and back into her life.
The first part would be easier than it should have been. I’d discovered living in that castle that her father’s wards waned and stuttered. He lost control of them. That was how they’d gotten her to begin with. He could last for weeks with it too hard to breach, and then boom, an hour would pass with nothing blocking anyone from walking on in. I couldn’t just let this go. I had to save her—from her parents’ negligence and herself.
Chapter Seventeen
Something dark was inside of me.
I didn’t understand it. I was drowning in power.
My eyes opened. There was an eerie sense of recognition flooding my awareness. The room was made of concrete and smelled like fresh paint and roses. Vines were slowly growing up the walls.
“Hello?” I called out. I wore a white dress that weighed a lot. And when I stood up, my head crashed into the wall, which was right next to the bed.
“Hello, my
