by Alisa Woods
“The only one who knows?” His heart lurched a little, and he wasn’t sure why that burrowed so deep inside him. He stepped closer. The back of her legs was up against the edge of the couch. “And I don’t really know what you can do. Tell me.” He gestured for her to sit, leading the way by easing down next to her. Her nervousness was spiking again. Was she afraid to be close to him? She didn’t have to sit right next to him—the couches were a mile long—but he didn’t stop her, either.
She abruptly sat down, close enough that the lace petals of her dress brushed up against his leg. So close… but she was staring straight ahead, fear and nervousness trilling the air.
“I’ve been up all night,” she said to the empty room. “I’m tired, and the whole thing with the free jumpers…” She turned to face him. “What happened in the alley, it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have…”
He braced a hand on the couch cushion behind her. “You mean this?” He brushed the back of his fingers across her cheek and watched the response. Eyelids fluttering. Lips parting. A surge in need that was so far beyond lust. He took that as permission, slid his hand into her hair, and pulled her in for a kiss. Just a gentle one, this time. Tentative. Asking permission again and again with each press of his lips and tentative touch with his tongue. Her response was insane, both the trembling eagerness and raging need drumming the air all around him. He pulled back before it got too heated—and it got heated fast. For him. “That’s definitely happening again,” he breathed, and he was surprised by the roughness of his own voice. He cleared his throat as he drew back farther. She was just as affected, and that worked a wicked magick on him. He had to rapidly blink back fantasies of pinning her to the couch right here, right now, and giving them both what they so clearly wanted. “But not now.” He forced the words out so he’d have to abide by them.
She nodded, visibly shaken by the kiss, but the fear was effectively banished.
He felt a twinge of guilt—was he manipulating her? Using his touch like he would use his Talent? He could never fucking tell with the upbringing he’d had—monsters, all of them. But she was wide-eyed and still breathing hard and open to whatever he wanted, which was where he needed her to be right now. It was his job to do that. That he enjoyed part of it for once was irrelevant.
He hoped.
“First things first,” he said, trying to keep his own focus off the way she was biting her lip and looking at him with those wide eyes. “You can’t tell anyone whatever it is you think you know about my magick. I trust you understand why?”
She frowned, losing that wide-eyed breathlessness. “You’re not from the FBI, are you?”
He lifted an eyebrow, but of course, she would figure that out. “I am actually, but in a dark division. We’re not publicly on the organizational chart.”
“PsyOps,” she said. When he tilted his head in tacit agreement, because obviously, she added, “I thought only the military had a PsyOps division. Not that they acknowledge that either, but I didn’t think the FBI had people who…” She stalled out.
“Use mental magick?” He gave a small snort. “Oh, yeah, they do. Agent Walker—the FBI’s resident incubus—is unique only in that he’s a regular field agent. The rest of us are much lower profile.”
“So you’re not an agent?” She braced her hand on the couch cushion, almost brushing his arm.
He was ridiculously aware of her nearness. “I went through training at the Academy. It helped give me a cover if nothing else.” She was wide-eyed again, eager in a new way, and he weighed how much to tell her. She was an insanely powerful witch, and he needed to know everything about that—so he would know what he was dealing with plus get a handle on the Dalvi side of this equation. And the best way to get Mercy to open up was probably to share some of his own secrets. Not everything—he’d never shared everything with anyone—but even that small decision to open up made an unexpected part of him nervous.
“We need to be honest with each other if this is going to work,” he said, the lie sitting a lot more sickly in his stomach than he expected. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” He added a smirk at the end to cover that up.
She huffed a small laugh and it was… sweet. Happiness radiated from her, but the fear and nervousness came back, strumming sour notes underneath.
Fuck. But he knew he was treading dangerous water here. And he had to do it without his Talent—no way he could have Dalvi all up in this business.
“Okay, you go first,” she said, scanning his face like she was guessing already.
He pulled in a breath. “Okay. I don’t have a degree in Biological Magick.”
She grinned. “I would have never guessed.” She was totally harassing him.
He squinted. “Thanks.” That unexpectedly rankled. “I’m in PsyOps because my Talent in emotional manipulation is very useful when going undercover.”
The grin fell off her face. “You’re an emotion-mancer.”
He was a little surprised she knew the technical term, but then again, she was a med-magick researcher. “I smoothed the way into the building today by flooding the security staff with an abiding need to accommodate us in whatever we want. Accommodation is a mixture of emotional states—a feeling of safety, an openness to suggestion, and a general feeling of well-being. I blend together whatever I need to get the job done.”
Her eyes were wide and nodding. “Does it work on everyone?”
“Everyone I’ve ever tried. Almost.” He watched her response to that. Did she remember?
She took a beat, but then she drew back, just a little. He was surprised it wasn’t more. “You tried it on me.”
He let out a little of the smile growing inside him. “I tried. You were having none of it. I could have leaned in harder, but I pulled back instead and went another route.” He blinked because he hadn’t meant to tell her that part.
But she snagged right onto it, peering at him. “You talked me into working with you. In spite of my gut response. And I went right along with it.” She was scowling.
“It would have been worse if I’d used my Talent,” he tried, but she was still scowling. “It was a mistake to even try with someone like you.”
She cocked her head at that. “Someone like me?”
“Someone who…” Shit, he was fumbling around here. “You know, uses their brain so much. You’re a logical person, Mercy Strange. Logic appeals to you. Soothes you. Gives some rationality to the world. You’re a giant tangle of emotions all the time, with so much hiding under the surface. I can understand why…” He trailed off at the look of alarm on her face. And her fear was screeching suddenly off the charts. Holy fuck, what did he do—
“How do you know?” she demanded, but he could see her discovering the truth all on her own. “You read people. You can read my emotions. Right now. It’s part of your Talent.”
He swallowed. Only a few people had ever known the full truth about that, and they uniformly reacted very badly to that knowledge. “I mean, we all read emotions all the time—”
“What am I feeling right now?” She glared at him, stony-faced, but per usual, she was a vortex underneath. She would know if he lied.
He drew in another nervous breath and went all in. “You’re afraid. I can hear it—it’s almost like a sub-audible electric whine. Fear plus a touch of anger, although not as much as you’re putting on your face. I don’t know why you’re afraid—that part I have to guess. Probably because any rational person would be afraid of someone knowing more about their inner emotional state than they know themselves. It’s like standing naked in front of someone with a hot poker. You’re exposed. Your fear is mixed with nervousness like maybe this is all unknown territory for you. That’s most of your emotional soundscape, but there are other pieces. Smaller sub-harmonies. I have to listen for them. There’s a little bit of…” He strained to listen. “Intrigue. You’re fascinated by all this. Maybe this is interesting to that brilliant mind of yours? And there’s a touch of attrac
tion—not quite lust, but you’re definitely still feeling the effects of our kiss. You… enjoyed that. You’ll be feeling it for some time.” He deliberately left off the overwhelming surge of anxious vulnerability that swelled up while he talked. No need to rocket that up any further.
Her stony-faced scowl had dissipated, and she’d drawn back a little, blinking. “Can you hear how uncomfortable all that made me? Holy shit.”
He had to fight a smile. “Yes. But it’s reassuring to know you enjoyed that kiss as much as I did.”
She just shook her head then rubbed her cheeks with her hands. “Wow. Okay. This is awkward.”
He leaned forward a little, and she didn’t back away. Good. “You’re one of a handful of people on the planet who know that much about my Talent. Can I trust you to keep it secret?”
“Of course.” She said it without hesitation. But then she leaned forward as well and peered into his eyes, which made him want to back up. He didn’t. “Have you always had this ability? Or did PsyOps, I don’t know, train you in how to do this?” She said it like she was concerned—concerned for him. Like she was afraid someone might have used him in the past for their own nefarious purposes.
If she only knew.
He couldn’t believe he had the urge to actually tell her. Because, quite literally, no one had ever asked before—no one he thought might actually care about him. And that was doing things to his own emotional state.
“Yes, they trained me.” He felt like he was holding his breath. “And no. I’ve been like this all along. Even before I came into my Talent.” He wiped a hand across his mouth. Was he really going to do this? Her eagerness had brought her eyes alive, but her lips were pressed tight. Waiting. “Okay, here’s how it is. I come from a long line of con artists and mental magick criminals. My great-great-grandfather used glamour and fake spells and potions to swindle the unwary. My great-grandfather was a mass hypnotist who drove a hundred people to commit suicide after he’d relieved them of their life savings. And those were just the bedtime stories my grandfather told me—he was a relatively decent guy, a grifter, fairly benign. Unlike my father. My mother was just a charmer, but even she used it to make people more compliant. My father used her—in ways I don’t spend time thinking about. When I was small, I thought she was a drunk… until I saw my father mentally assault her with my own eyes, using my own nascent Talent. I was only thirteen when I realized the haze she was always in was an after-effect of all the mental attacks. That my parents were probably incapable of loving anyone. And that they’d been using me, in a hundred cons, since I was born. So I left. I was on the streets, emotion-mancing my way into whatever I needed to get by. It was fairly horrible, but in a way, that was the freest I’ve ever been.”
He stopped because her empathetic concern was banging against his skin.
“Oh my god, Swift—”
“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me, okay?” Although there was part of him that was eating that up—and a part that was kicking himself for spilling so much. What the fuck was he doing? “Trust me, I’ve done a lot of horrible things myself.” He couldn’t help the wince.
“You were forced to,” she said, resolutely.
“What? No, I wasn’t. Well, in some ways—”
“Swift.” She placed her hand on his, which was still braced against the couch cushion beside them, and the contact short-circuited his protest as much as her admonishment. “You left. And you were a kid. Whatever happened from there, you were surviving. You did what you had to.”
He just stared at her. Her emotions hummed all around her—empathy, concern, a fierce anger but not directed at him—and they were playing havoc with his own erratic feelings, all stirred up by revisiting his sordid past. The one he’d tried to leave behind. “You might want to hear all the things I’ve done before you make any grand pronouncements.” He leaned back, getting space, because suddenly he wasn’t in control of any of this, and it was freaking him out.
“So tell me.” She was dead earnest.
“Well, I’m a felon, for one.” He said it harshly like he wanted her to know he shouldn’t be trusted. He’d spent his whole life trying to convince himself he wasn’t anything like his family, but he knew the truth—the Payne genes ran strong. “I got caught emotion-mancing a little old lady into letting me live off her for six months.”
“How long were you in jail?” It was matter-of-fact like he hadn’t just confessed to scamming Mrs. Habersworth, who didn’t deserve it and didn’t even want to press charges, but her asshole son took care of that.
“Two years,” he said, and it was bitter. “I’ll let you imagine what I did to survive in an adult prison from age sixteen to eighteen.”
She didn’t seem put off. “What’d you do after you got released?”
Somehow that angered him even more. “I wasn’t released. I got recruited. Military PsyOps. The real one. The one where you make people talk. They trained me very well in how to break a man, not that I didn’t already have first-hand knowledge of that. They taught me how to do it at a distance. In a crowd. Under “non-ideal” conditions. They had me for four years before I… before I…” Stop. Stop talking. Stop it now! What the fuck was he doing, saying all this out loud?
“You escaped.” She was breathless with this story he was feeding her. A story that just happened to be true.
“You can’t tell anyone any of this.” His heart was pounding now. “I mean it, Mercy.”
“I won’t.” Her eyes were wide again. “Wait… you did escape, right? You’re not still…” Her eyes went even wider.
Fuck, he was screwing this so badly. “No, I escaped. I mean, I got out. It’s just…” He looked away from those searching eyes of hers. Her hand squeezed his, comforting and encouraging. He forced himself to look at her, but when he did, her other hand was suddenly on his cheek. “You’re not using that whispering magick on me, are you?” His voice was a whisper of his own. “Because I’ve never…” His heart was still pounding, but he couldn’t look away, not with her touching him.
“I would never do that to you,” she vowed, solemnly, like it was a promise she was staking her life on.
He swallowed. “I conned my way out of the military,” he confessed. “My handler at the FBI doesn’t know. I have to do what they say or…” He licked his lips. Why were they so dry? “They’ll send me back. And I can’t do that work, not anymore. And I would never survive in prison, not now. Not with what I can do.”
“No.” She shook her head, minutely but forcefully. “Of course, not. How do we get you out of this?” Her hand was still on his cheek. Her focus was entirely, intensely, on him. And she was a crazy, mixed-up ball of righteous anger and sweet, soft concern.
For him. It was messing with his head.
“I, um…” He took her hand from his face and held it, gently, looking down at the places they were touching. Just hands. And yet, somehow, he felt naked. Exposed. He looked back into her eyes. “There’s no getting out for me. I am what I am. The FBI’s PsyOps program is probably the safest place. As long as I follow the rules, do what I’m supposed to… solve this case… I get to keep my job. That’s all I need.” But it wasn’t. It wasn’t by a long shot, and he was just now realizing how much more he needed that only someone like Mercy Strange might be able to give.
And that thought scared the crap out of him.
“Okay,” she said. He could see the gears turning in her head, and her emotions were skittering all over the place. “That doesn’t seem right… it doesn’t seem fair… but okay. For now. We work with that. We have to solve the case, anyway, right? That has to happen. We have to stop these people before they kill anyone else.” She was squeezing his hands and looking at him with such pure earnestness he almost had to look away.
But he didn’t. Because this disaster—spilling his guts and feeling all these feelings he’d had zero intention of dredging up—was to get her to spill to him. “Okay, your turn,” he insisted. “I’ve shown you mine. I
need to know everything about you. Your Talent, anything you’re hiding, like literally everything. Because the FBI wants to know if you have anything to do with this case and these drugs, and I need to prove you don’t.”
Her look of shock made him reach for her—his hand on her cheek like before. “I’m not going to tell them anything,” he promised. And he meant it. “But we’re going to need a story for what happened today. And I don’t want you… I can’t let them…” No fucking way was he letting PsyOps get their hands on Mercy Strange.
Her shock morphed into a surge of fear. “They could lock me up. My magick’s illegal.”
“I won’t let that happen.” Then he pulled her close and kissed her again—fierce and quick, but she melted into him, and he liked that way too fucking much. He forced himself to pull back. “I promise you.” Sealed with a kiss. Was he some lovestruck kid? What was this vow? This sudden need to protect her? But even though he didn’t understand it, he knew he meant those words with everything he had.
“Okay.” She was as breathless as he was.
“Tell me everything.” He didn’t actually want to talk—he wanted to haul her to whatever bedroom this palatial apartment in the sky possessed—but he needed to hear what she had to say.
That was the only way to keep her safe.
Chapter Eleven
She could still feel the ghost of Swift’s kiss.
Her lips tingled. Her chest was exploding with emotion, including the weird itchy-awkward feeling that came from knowing he knew—Swift could sense every tiny, fleeting thing. She felt naked in front of him, even though she was fully clothed. He saw her in a way no one else could. He knew things about her no one else did. It was terrifying… and freeing.
She pulled in a breath and let it out slow, willing her body to relax. To embrace that freedom. “You’re the only one who knows about my whisper magick.”
