by May Dawson
“Why would they craft something with that kind of power to hurt them?”
“It was a crown that gave a shifter incredible powers, until the Fae got their hands on it.” He frowned. “We’ve got to do more research, Maddie. If this book is right, this could be a powerful weapon. We could use it to stop Winter.”
Hope made my heart speed. He flipped through the pages as quickly as he could as I carefully placed the pieces all back in the cabinet where we’d found them. The same thing that might damn our people might save them, too.
Then he slipped the book back into place. “I studied stories of the Fae shifter king they reference here, who could take a witch’s powers. We thought he was a fairy tale, the myth of an enslaved people…”
“The Fae used the crown to punish the shifters for their uprising?” I asked, filling in the dots.
“Right. They turned the crown into a collar to control the shifters. But with the right spell, it could be used as a weapon again.” He frowned. “I don’t think the witches or the wolves should have all the power, though.”
That was something to debate another day, someplace safe.
I kept having the creepy feeling that the sisters might be moving behind me.
“How do we help these girls?” I glanced at them over my shoulder.
“We don’t,” he said. “Not yet. We can’t afford to blow our missions. They’re not suffering, I promise.”
“If they were, would it matter?”
“Don’t ask me questions like that.” He went on before I could say anything else. “When Winter dies, so will they. Once and for all.”
“Then I’ll kill him,” I promised.
He might be my father, but in his blood-stained workshop, there was no denying that he was a monster too.
And I might have found the key to defeating him.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lex
I yanked on Rafe’s desk drawer, where we locked the cadets’ cell phones until liberty started, but the drawer didn’t open. I frowned as I realized it was locked.
“Looking for something?” Rafe demanded from behind me.
“Yeah. Since when do you lock your desk?”
“Since when do you try to rifle through it?”
“I’m not rifling. They’re supposed to get their cells back after we finish today.”
Rafe crossed his arms. “Really?”
Heat sparked in my chest as I turned to face him. Rafe was talking to me like I was one of our damn cadets.
I was far more heated than I would’ve been otherwise, because he was right. He’d caught me. I intended to use Maddie’s left-behind phone to contact Piper and make sure she really was home safe. I wouldn’t relax until I heard Maddie’s voice.
Something felt wrong. I’d had nightmares all last night. I had to know she was safe.
“I can’t believe we’re lying to each other after all these years,” Rafe muttered. “What were you really doing?”
“There’s something wrong with Maddie. I can feel it.”
Rafe raked his hand through his hair. “What’s wrong with you? That girl has always erased all your common sense. Now she’s this close to costing you—”
“No,” I interrupted, and Rafe raised his eyebrow. “Don’t blame her.”
“Why not?” he demanded.
I shook my head.
“Where’s your phone, Lex?” Rafe challenged me.
I crossed my arms, leaning on the edge of his desk. I’d bet he knew damn well before he asked the question. “Clearborn took it.”
Rafe mirrored my posture. “I heard this story. Someone told me they saw your face all marked up like you’d been beaten to hell and back. But it’s the damndest thing. You didn’t mention anything to me.”
“I didn’t particularly need a hug,” I told him.
“God damn it, Lex.” Rafe raked his hands through his hair. “Why can’t you let the girl go?”
“You don’t want to, either,” I said. “If you didn’t still feel something for her, you wouldn’t be so pissed. The real reason you’re furious at me right now is because you’re allergic to giving a fuck.”
“Are we doing pop psychology now?” Rafe demanded. “Because I’ve known you for a long time, Lex, and I’ve watched you fuck up your life and everything you ever wanted over the course of the last year. I have some thoughts.”
“Stop talking to me like I’m one of the kids.”
“You’re acting like one of them.”
“You’re getting a bit power-mad, Rafe,” I said. “Why is that? Because you slip around her, so you’ve got to try to tighten your control, be more perfect, pretend it isn’t happening?”
“Oh, bull shit,” he said.
“You told me everyone notices that I’m never the one to whip our cadets,” I said. “Well, everyone notices how weird you are around Maddie Northsea. And the fact that you can’t be in close quarters with her without yelling at her, or popping a hard-on, or both, which is—”
Rafe shoved me. When my shoulders slammed into the wall, rage sparked through my chest. Regret flashed across Rafe’s face just as quickly.
When I cocked an eyebrow at him, he took a step back, raising his hands. I wasn’t going to hit Rafe, any more than I’d hit anyone in our team.
“You’re not going to solve your Maddie problem with more control,” I warned him.
“I don’t have a Maddie problem. I can see who she really is, after the way she acted…”
“Oh, come on. You should know her better than that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She put a curse on us.” My words came out heated. “She made us hate her. Because she doesn’t want us to follow wherever she went…I don’t think she went to Northsea territory.”
He scoffed. “She’s always been impetuous and hot-tempered. You’ve got to find a supernatural reason now for her bratty behavior? Seems like a reach, doesn’t it?”
“Clearborn knows something, but he’s not telling us. He’s not telling me, that’s for sure.” There was a bitter edge in my voice.
Clearborn’s judgment of me stung. My own father, my alpha, they’d both seen me as nothing but dirt. Then I’d come here, and I’d excelled, and I’d felt like I was good enough. I’d packed away their judgment as nothing but the cruel words of foolish men.
But Clearborn was competent and principled, the kind of man I could respect, and he thought I was worthless too.
“First of all, I think you’re grasping at goddamn straws,” Rafe said. “Because you need to be needed, you need to take care of that girl.”
I shook my head.
“But second, if you think Maddie used magic to alter how we feel about her, to destroy the bonds between us…” he shook his head. “She stole something from you.”
Of course he’d say Maddie stole something from me. He would never admit she had taken something from him.
“She must have been scared,” I said.
“Don’t make excuses for her,” he said. “Either way you imagine this story playing out, she humiliated you in front of Clearborn. That was the probably the last strike for your spot on the Council’s Own—”
“We’ll find out.” I said evenly. I wasn’t going to sacrifice Maddie for my spot on the Council’s Own.
Not that it would be easy for me to help her. The only person who believed me was Dani Hedron. I’d texted her to tell her that I was safe after I made it back to the academy, and she had texted back that she was too. Then Clearborn called me into his office. She had no way of knowing why I never called her again to unravel Maddie’s spell, if we even could.
“You shouldn’t love her anymore, Lex,” Rafe said. “She’s a hazard. You loved her, for all your faults, and she acted like she hated you. You’re still trying to protect her and she tried to destroy you. Don’t you see it?”
My eyes narrowed as I understood. “That’s why the spell works so well on you. You hate her more than you would
if she just hurt you. You hate her because she hurt me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You’re a good friend, Rafe.”
He shook his head, rejecting the compliment.
“You’re a terrible boyfriend,” I added. His damage apparently kept him from fighting the curse; I wouldn’t have expected that weakness, but maybe it was no surprise. “But that’ll change once you two just give into each other.”
He shook his head. “I’ll never want her again.”
“Now that you can finally admit that you ever wanted her at all? Now that you think it’s over?” I cocked my head to one side, studying him, before letting it go. Rafe was too passionate beneath that cold exterior, in his own way. He wasn’t ready to admit how he felt about Maddie. “What did Clearborn tell you?”
We’d always gone into each other’s desks freely. There had been things we’d both left in the past, because we didn’t want to remember them. But there had never been any secrets between us.
Not until Maddie.
Rafe stared at me as if he would refuse to answer. But he couldn’t lie to me.
He heaved a sigh. “He told me you had some crazy thought about Maddie leaving the academy, that he was worried you’d go after her. I didn’t realize just how crazy until now.”
“Then pick up your phone and call her. Make sure she’s safe.”
“Her cell phone is in my desk,” he said. “Remember? Impetuous, bratty behavior bordering on the criminally insane? She didn’t stop to pack a bag before she careened out of here.”
His jaw tensed. “Her duplicate car key is in my desk, too. She turned in one and carried the extra. She always planned to have an escape route, I guess, if things here weren’t going her way.” His eyes met mine evenly. “Think about that, Lex. Think about who she is.”
“I know who she is. She’s my girl.”
Rafe snorted, running his hand through his hair.
“And she’s your girl, too,” I reminded him. But sometimes, there was a thin line between love and hate.
Maddie’s curse had broken him.
Rafe’s mouth tightened into a hard line, but he struggled to rein himself in.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Lex,” he warned me, his voice stern.
It was the same way he talked to Maddie. Rafe ordered us around as if he could just fix us, and then he could escape the pain that came with caring about someone.
Loving someone always comes with a price, though. In all of love’s many forms, it comes with a measure of worry and grief and frustration.
Rafe hadn’t learned yet that love was worth it anyway, but I thought he would.
Chapter Forty
Maddie
When I saw Winter again the next day, my heart almost stopped. He smiled at me, his eyes brightening in a way that seemed genuine. I pushed down the memory of the Everly sisters’ frozen faces, and smiled back.
If Echo could learn to be a different person, whoever he needed to be to meet the mission, then so could I.
“I have a mission for you,” he said.
My heart stopped, but my smile didn’t. “Great.”
Winter led Echo and me into his office. The fire was still roaring, but this time, the room didn’t feel quite as welcoming. As he took his seat at his desk, he gestured to the chairs in front of him.
“I need you to steal something for me,” he said.
Oh. Either he trusted me more than Clearborn had expected, or this was a set up.
“A mission for the two of us?” Echo asked, glancing at me before he looked back to Winter. “You must have decided I’m disposable.”
Winter smiled. “Maddie’s not that frightening. It seems she’s forgiven you.”
I smiled back, knowing that one day, I was going to rip Winter’s throat out. I wondered if he’d see me as not frightening that day.
The witch who raised me up had been resurrected from the dead once, before Piper and her men put him down forever. I was going to make sure Winter never crawled up from the dirt again.
He had almost conned me. I wanted so badly for him to be who he claimed to be: a man caught up in a war, but principled, decent to his own. For some reason, I thought of Clearborn, who was sometimes cruel too, but never senselessly.
“It won’t be just the two of you, though,” Winter added. “You’ll take Alice.”
Echo’s lips flattened. But he asked, “What do you need us to do?”
“We’ve had to all but give up on the Cure as a widespread measure, because we can’t find a delivery method,” Winter said. He glanced at me, as if he wasn’t sure he should speak so openly in front of me, and then he sighed faintly before he went on.
“There are shifters in the Fae world, too, and the Fae enslaved them using what they call the Dark Collar. They are not a particularly helpful people, the Fae, but their magic is. If we get the last piece of the Dark Collar, we should be able to force the Cure on all the packs.”
His gaze lingered on me as he added, “Bloodlessly.”
“You’re hoping to end the war by taking away the wolves’ fangs and not by killing them?” I asked. I didn’t believe him. Given the chance, he’d wipe my real family off the planet.
“I thought it would make you happier,” he said, his lips pursing to one side. Then he admitted, “Also, with half my coven dead, it might be nice to avert full-on war as much as possible. If the wolves are no longer a real threat, we can work toward peace.”
God, the man really did think I could be redeemed to the dark side.
“The only problem is,” he said, “the last piece of the Dark Collar is in a mortal museum a few hours away. You’ll need to steal it.”
“No problem,” Echo said. “Mortals are easy to steal from.”
“It’s not that simple.” Winter drummed his fingers on his desk. “It’s actually being moved to an auction house. That gives us an opportunity to steal it in transit, which should be easier.”
“All good news so far,” I said.
“Not for you,” Winter said briskly. “There’s more than one shifter artifact on the manifest for the auction house. I believe that the shifters are going to be after that truck too.”
Fuck. Fantastic. This was Winter’s test.
I was going up against my own people.
“Do you know what pack?” I asked, praying that it wasn’t a pack I knew.
“I thought I’d leave it up to you to figure that out,” Winter said, and his tone sent dread churning through my gut.
Stealing the last piece of the Dark Collar was one thing.
Coming into conflict with a pack could turn bloody.
If I killed my own kind, how would I ever go home again? Winter knew that damn well.
“Maddie.” Winter’s eyes bore into mine, yanking me out of my reverie. “Are you willing to go?”
I had no choice. “Sure. I’ve been meaning to get into thievery. I need a new hobby.”
“Good,” he said, although his gaze was still hard.
I’d known to expect to be tested. I was supposed to stay the course through it all: torture, the murder of my wolf, stealing from my own kind. This was the cost of saving the packs.
He opened a folder full of schedules and manifests to walk us through the plan. I tried to focus on the plan, until he closed it and pushed it across the desk. “Be safe out there.”
“I’ll look after her.” Echo rose to his feet with his usual easy grace. He headed for the door, and I followed.
“Maddie,” Winter said. “Come back to me safely.”
He always sounded so confident. Did I imagine that there was the faintest pleading note in his voice?
I stopped, lingering in the doorway, then turned back. “I have a question for you.”
“Anything, Maddie,” Winter said, with a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes.
Remember that he’s a psychopath who turns women who offend him into creepy living sex dolls. Don’t be taken in because he l
ooks like he’d buy you a pony and take you to the fair if you asked.
Goddamn daddy issues really do my head in sometimes.
“Do you really believe that there can be peace between the witches and the wolves?” I asked.
“Do you think I’m lying to you?” His lips arched faintly. “Perhaps because you’re lying to me?”
Anxiety squirmed through my stomach. If he thought I was lying to him, why would he send me on a mission?
His gaze softened, as if he saw my fear.
“You’re planning to go back,” he said gently. “I know that.”
I shook my head. “I can’t… even if I wanted to, without my wolf I’m nothing to them.”
“I didn’t think even the shifters were that foolish, to pass up a chance to have a girl like you on their side.” He sighed, leaning onto his elbow on the desk.
“If you think I’m lying to you, why…”
“Between you and that friend of yours, you killed half my coven,” he muttered. “Forty-two witches. The wolves shouldn’t just welcome you back home. They should give you a medal.”
His words washed over me and left dread in their wake, making my eyes widen.
“And I should give you a cemetery plot,” he went on, standing from his desk. He was a big man—not by shifter standards, but by human standards, he was intimidating. Terrifying. He seemed to loom over me.
And he thought I was going to betray him. Something cold twisted through my gut, and I raised my chin, drawing myself to my full height. Such as it was.
There was a chill in the air as the two of us stared at each other. Winter made no further movement to clear the distance between us. I would’ve tried to kill him if he took two steps closer.
His posture relaxed as he sighed, and something sad came into his eyes. I no longer felt like he was tempted to strangle me to death, there in his office.
“Yes, Maddie, I think there can be peace. Not just between the wolves and the witches, but between you and me.”
“Why would you send me on a mission if you don’t trust me?” Did he hope that I would cross a line that meant I could never go home?
