by Eva Chase
His lips slid from mine to kiss my cheek. “I love you,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
My heart squeezed. “I didn’t think you’d be here if you didn’t,” I said, but the teasing comment fell flat. I tipped my face against his shoulder. “I love you too.”
His arms came around me. For a minute, he just held me, and I melted into his warmth. Still waiting. His hand stroked over my hair. Then he drew back to look at me properly.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “And that’s why I’m not sure I should be. Not like this, not anymore.”
My brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“When that attack hit this afternoon…” His jaw tensed. “They compelled me with magic. Tried to force me to go outside and make some kind of scene to help them figure out where we are.”
Moldy cinders. No wonder he was upset. “But you didn’t,” I said. “You stopped them.”
He held up his right hand, the one that had been resting on my waist. A dark bruise mottled the whole back of it. I sucked in my breath in horrified shock. He was left-handed, so I hadn’t noticed anything odd about him mostly using that one during dinner—he must have managed to keep the bruise out of view without me realizing.
“This is how I stopped them,” he said. “That’s what it took. I couldn’t shake them otherwise. And next time, if they’re closer or they just try harder, I might not be able to do it at all.”
“If I’d known—”
“You would’ve used your magic to ward them off,” he filled in for me. “I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Because then they still would have figured out where we are, so how would that have helped anything?”
“I can’t let them hurt you—or make you hurt yourself,” I protested.
“I know.” He lowered his head again. His voice roughened. “The way I see it, there’s only two ways this can work so that I’m not a danger to you. Either I become your consort, so I have the same bond you can use to protect me like you do for the other guys, or I leave and hide out somewhere else where it won’t matter if I give myself away.”
“No,” I said firmly, shaking my head. “No. At this point, I don’t think they’d just let you go. You’ve seen way too much. They’d probably find you anyway, and the Spark only knows what they’d do to you if they caught you alone.” I paused, touching his face to bring his gaze back to mine. “I mean, unless you’d rather take your chances that way.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “I’m in this, Rose. I’ve been in this since the moment I got back, even if it took me a long time to admit just how much I wanted you. I want to be with you, every way I can. I’d have gone into the ceremony that day at Seth’s house if you’d let me. Are you ready?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t want you binding yourself to me because you feel like you have to.”
His laugh came out hoarse. “It’s not like that. Not even slightly. I know you, and I know what I want. There’s no one in this world I’d want to commit myself to other than you. Unless… unless there’s some other reason you don’t want to go through with it.”
My pulse lurched. “No. No, it’s not—” I didn’t know how to put the feeling swelling inside me into words. I tugged him to me and kissed him hard, as if that heat between us could say enough on its own.
Five consorts. Five men who would act as my husbands and more. From the moment Gabriel had walked back into my life, that thought had been there in my head. I’d wanted it before I’d even been sure he felt the same way.
“There isn’t anything I’d like more,” I said when we eased apart. “I just wish… it could have happened differently.”
“Me too. But you trust me, don’t you? To know I’m ready, no matter what else is going on.”
When he put it that way, yeah, I did. If any of us had always known their own mind, it was Gabriel. The corners of my lips curled up, but my smile was bittersweet. “Okay. But I don’t even know if the consort ceremony will work when I’m already consorted. The other guys, we kind of did it all at once. And I don’t know how we can do it without that magic bringing the Assembly down on us.”
“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment. “Isn’t there anything that can shield your magic, make it so they wouldn’t be able to detect it, even for a little while?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “Nothing except more magic, I suppose. And of course if I cast some kind of shielding spell to mask it, the shielding spell will tip them off. If we had another witch who could cast a shield, someone they don’t see as a criminal…”
Oh. My fingers grasped his shirt where they’d been resting on his chest.
“What?” he said.
“My aunts,” I said. “Ky thinks Ginny is keeping my secret—the part she knows, anyway—right? If we wait until tomorrow, give it a whole day and there’s still no sign that we need to worry, maybe it’s time I tell her the whole story. See if she could shelter us, at least for long enough for us to do the ceremony.”
“Would that work?” Gabriel asked. “Her shielding it?”
“I think so. Any witch should be able to mask my magic. And the Levesques are a powerful family.” I drew in my breath with a shiver of nervous anticipation. “I’m going to have to trust someone sometime. We can’t keep running on our own.”
Chapter Seventeen
Rose
My house back home on the Hallowell estate had always felt like a castle, all that old stone and the turrets rising from its walls. The main building on the younger Levesque estate was more of a proper country home, with a sweeping covered porch around its robin’s egg blue body and big airy rooms boasting huge windows and pale hardwood floors. The furniture was all in muted earthy tones, and the smell of hay and fresh mown grass drifted through those windows, stirred by the ceiling fans overhead.
“Both my husband—Owen—and I had older sisters,” Aunt Ginny had told us when she’d escorted us inside. “So neither of us had an estate to inherit. Instead, we’ve built a new one of our own. I think it’s turned out rather well.”
Not that we’d spent much time talking about her house. No, the morning had been dedicated to explaining my rather unusual situation first to her in another park meeting, and then, when she didn’t recoil in revulsion, coming here to lay it all out for the rest of the younger branch of my mother’s family. My aunt, reasonably, hadn’t thought it fair to offer her property to harbor theoretical criminals and theoretically criminal magic without running it by the rest of the relatives.
So now the five guys and I were sitting on linen couches in the house’s bright living room while Ginny’s husband, her two daughters, and the older daughter’s husband took in our story. I’d asked the guys to let me do most of the talking, and I didn’t think they’d minded. It was intimidating enough for me to be explaining this to four members of witching society who all looked as though their eyes were ready to fall out of their heads.
“There is a precedent,” I said, my hands clenched together on my lap. “At least, I think there is, for having multiple consorts. I’ve seen etchings on an old witching building on the Hallowell property showing it, and a witching historian confirmed she’s seen them elsewhere, but that the Assembly goes out of their way to destroy that evidence.”
The older daughter, Naomi, laughed a little breathlessly and glanced at her husband, Greg. “Can you imagine?” she said with a playful glint in her light brown eyes and a swish of her chestnut ponytail. “Maybe I should add a couple more to my entourage.”
From Greg’s grimace, I didn’t think he liked the idea of sharing his wife and consort at all, but he managed to answer in a similarly teasing tone. “I don’t think you’d ever win the cover-stealing contest if there were three of us to contend with.”
“Hmm. That would be a concern.” She turned back to me, her expression still amused. From what I’d gathered, Naomi was a couple years younger than me and only recently married. She didn’t seem fazed by my unusual cons
orting at all.
Owen, Aunt Ginny’s husband, looked more perplexed than anything. “And your spark is kindled?” he said. “Even though none of them is from a witching line? Are you sure there isn’t any witching blood in your families?” His gaze skimmed over the guys on either side of me.
“It is kindled,” I said before they felt any pressure to try to answer on their own. “And I suppose it’s possible one or two of them might, farther back, but I can’t believe all of them do. It would be too huge a coincidence. My spark reacts to all of them. But that’s not the point. This faction of the Assembly doesn’t approve of our consorting either way.”
“I don’t understand,” the younger daughter, Stella, spoke up. Like Naomi, she’d inherited her father’s chestnut-brown hair, but her eyes were green like her mother’s. Her waves had been cut at an ear-length bob that made her thin face look even narrower. She was only nineteen, not yet consorted or close to it. “Why should it matter to them? If your spark is kindled, it’s kindled. If your consorts accept witching society, why shouldn’t witching society accept them?”
“Very good questions,” Jin said with a smile, leaning back against the couch.
My uncle Owen gave him a wary look. “We’ve kept to our own for good reasons. Witches and the unsparked don’t have the most pleasant history of mixing.” He turned to me again. “I can’t blame you for the decisions you made. The pressure you were under, the threat you were facing—but taking this route would be hard even if the Assembly wasn’t interfering. Your consorts have ties to the unsparked world. How many people will know about your magic by the end of this? How are their people going to react to this relationship?”
“We’re not going to go sharing Rose’s secrets with the rest of the world,” Damon said. “Give us a little credit. And who and how I hook up with anyone is none of anyone else’s business.”
Seth and Kyler exchanged a look. “We wouldn’t talk about the magical side of things around anyone else either,” Seth said. “Our parents, well… Like Damon says, they don’t need to know those details.”
“I don’t have anyone to hassle me,” Gabriel said. “But it is a small town. I see your point. People will notice something. They’ll gossip. But we can deal with that when it comes to it. We’re never going to come to it if the Assembly keeps attacking us and Rose.”
“You did cast illegal magic,” Greg said to me.
My chest tightened. “I did. But only what I had to in order to save myself. I’ll gladly face prosecution for that—if the crimes committed against me are also recognized and given due weight. And if they leave my consorts out of it. The guys have never hurt anyone at all.”
Damon shifted beside me at that, and the echo of gunshots passed through my mind. Well, that was one more thing we’d deal with when we came to it, if we ever got to.
Aunt Ginny was shaking her head with a wry smile. “I can’t imagine what your mother would have made of all this. But I think she’d have been proud that you found your way out of that trap your father set for you, no matter how. She’d be proud that you followed your heart. I can see how much you care about all of them—and how much they care about you. So…” She threw her hands in the air. “I say, who are we to judge?”
Naomi cocked her head, her gaze turning a little more serious. “It’s not just about judgment, though, is it? You wouldn’t have come to us and told us all this unless you needed something.”
A flush crept over my cheeks. “I would have wanted to reach out anyway. It’s only that I wouldn’t have taken the risk right now if our situation wasn’t so dire.”
“Oh, that’s absolutely what I meant,” she said, waving off my embarrassment. “Not intended as a criticism. Just a question.”
I took a slow breath. Somehow this part was harder than laying out all the rest. “Gabriel and I reconnected later. He wasn’t there when we did the first consorting ceremony. But we’re just as much in love, just as willing to commit to each other. He’s one of us. And the Assembly’s efforts are hurting him so much more than the others because it’s so much harder for me to protect him. I want to see if I can complete the ceremony with him as well. And since they’re tracking my magic, I’d need to do that somewhere other magic can hide what I’m doing.”
“You want to conduct the consorting ceremony here,” Owen said. I couldn’t read his tone.
“We could do it tonight,” I said quickly. “I’ve conducted it on my own before—I wouldn’t need anyone to get directly involved. It’d just take some magicking to cover up what I’m doing. We’d leave in the morning if that’s all you’d want to do with us. I don’t want to bring the Assembly down on you. I just… It’s the only way I can see us surviving more than another few days. And I didn’t have anyone else to turn to.”
“This is what you want?” Ginny said to Gabriel. “You know what a commitment the consorting bond is.”
“I know,” he said steadily. “I know my life might be a lot easier if I went back to living it the way I was before. But it’d also be a whole lot emptier. I’ll take that trade, without hesitation.”
“And the rest of you don’t mind having a little more competition for my cousin’s affections?” Naomi asked with an arch of her eyebrows.
Jin laughed. “It’s not competition. It’s more hands on deck.” He grinned so slyly my blush deepened into a burn.
“It probably sounds strange,” Ky put in, leaning forward. “It would to me if I wasn’t part of it. But we spent six years together when we were growing up, being there for each other, having each other’s backs… I’ve never been as close with anyone as with the five people around me here, and that includes everyone, not just Rose.”
“It feels right,” Seth added when his twin paused. “We’re just better when we’re together.”
“Yeah,” Damon said, his voice low. “We are.”
Ginny looked to her husband. “Do we need to discuss this on our own?”
He took her hand, and even though there was still some skepticism in his expression, his affection for her shone on his face. A little of the tension in me relaxed.
“You want to say yes,” he said, an observation rather than a question.
She nodded. “There’s a small chance the Assembly will find out and accuse us of who knows what? Oh well. We should have pushed harder back when Alora first ran off with Maxim, or when she died, or… any time since then. If we had, maybe Rose wouldn’t have been backed into a corner like this to begin with. If we don’t stand up to them at all… What if some suitor tried to arrange a consorting like that for Stella?”
My younger cousin paled. “Okay. That’s it. I’m just not getting married.”
“Hey.” Naomi nudged her sister. “We’re not letting any creeps get their paws on you or your magic.” Her gaze slid back to me. “I’m in. I say we do this. Not just for tonight—I think you should be able to stay here until we figure out how to get this faction of the Assembly off your back.”
Ginny was still watching Owen’s reaction. He rubbed his square jaw. Then he nodded to her and to me.
“Let’s see how tonight goes. You do your ceremony. We can play it by ear from there.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jin
I could hear Rose talking with her cousin before I reached the “magicking room” they’d ducked into. “I suppose this bowl would work—oh, no, wait, this one is better. You have charcoal sticks?”
“Right here,” Naomi’s amused voice said in return.
The supplies rustled. Rose laughed to herself, but the sound was a little strained. “I only need two this time. Have to remember that.”
“Yeah, I guess it must have been quite the ceremony the first time. Four all at once! Mine was intense enough with just one consort.”
A jolt of heat shot to my cock just at one flash of memory from that night. Rose’s voice dipped with a shy but also sly note that warmed me even more. “Yeah. It was pretty amazing, all right.”
I
came to a stop by the doorway and leaned against the frame. The two women looked over at me, Rose’s usual welcoming smile a little tired around the edges, Naomi’s filled with mischief. The way they were standing together, you could almost believe they’d grown up together as close cousins rather than just having met earlier today.
“Anything I can help with?” I asked, peering into the room. A wide wooden cabinet filled one wall. Otherwise the place was spartan. It reminded me a little of an artist’s studio, just a very neat one with the only natural light coming from a skylight in the ceiling.
Rose swept her fingers through her hair, scattering it over her shoulders. “I don’t know. I think we’ve got just about everything for the ceremony now. What else did we— The ribbons. I don’t have them. I’ll need two lengths of rope or twine.”
“Right on it!” Naomi said brightly. She rummaged in the cupboard. “Any preference of color.”
“Blue,” I said automatically. “For one. The other one white.”
Rose’s eyes darted to me, but it shouldn’t surprise her that I’d noticed. We’d given her those ribbons as a gift back when we were kids, right before she’d been torn away from us, six in different colors. She’d used five of them, one for herself and one for each of us, in the original consorting ceremony. Of course I’d seen which one she’d kept in reserve.
She’d used white for herself. The purple one for me, which seemed a reasonable choice—vibrant, a little decadent. Red for Damon and his passionate temper. Green for Seth’s supportive strength. Yellow for Kyler’s bright intellect.
Blue fit Gabriel perfectly. The guy had the same steady, persuasive pull as an ocean tide. My fingers itched. When we got back home—because we were going to, that was the only answer I’d accept—I should make a painting of our group. All our colors woven together like we’d once woven those ribbons, only with all the new complexities now that we’d grown up.
