“Pretty much, yeah,” I said, closing the book and leaning back.
If not a directory number, what else could it be?
I didn’t have long to ponder before the door slammed open, Bennett strolling confidently into the room. “Way, you’re in trouble.”
He jumped up, little black wings sprouting from his back. They brought him fluttering up into the air, high enough to be out of his reach. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“You’re a brat. You know you get your ass beat when you talk down to me.”
Getting his ass beat had a whole different meaning now I knew how they did it. If this interaction had happened before I’d watched their scene, I would have been worried for Waylon. Fuck, I had been when I’d come across them in the bedroom the first time. But he liked being treated like this. Bennett glanced at me, giving me a tight smile. “Nothing he doesn’t want, I assure you.”
I shrugged, staying out of it.
Waylon flew higher toward the ceiling, out of Bennett’s reach. He didn’t say anything, but he was smirking. If what I’d seen before was a fun time andnotconsidered a punishment, I couldn’t imagine how he was going to walk tomorrow after a true punishment. “Come down and I might go easy on you.”
“No thanks, Benny.”
Bennett growled, his expression twisting up. Sharp incisors gleamed, extending and swelling until they were thick weapons in their own right. The hair covering him thickened further, almost to the point of being fur. His muscles bulged beneath his shirt, but there was no change there.
A glance up at Waylon confirmed a bulge tenting his pants and a gleam of excitement in his eyes. He’d been waiting for this reaction.
“Down. Now.”
“Fine.”
As soon as he landed on the hardwood, Bennett swept him up into his arms, the hold not looking comfortable. They were out the door and barrelling down the stairs before I could wish him luck. Certainly before I was tempted to follow them and watch because, damn it, I was so tempted.
“Focus, Hadley,” I said to myself, putting the spell directory back in its place. “You have a job to do. The sooner the better, before your brain gets so ultra-focused on the men that you do something crazy.”
Like offer to join.
I’d stood up and turned to face the shelving again when a searing pain ripped through my abdomen. My vision instantly went blurry, but I managed to draw my gaze down.
A spear stuck out of me, thrown clean through my torso.
What the fuck was up with this hallucination, and why did it hurt so bad?
***
This time I woke up gasping.
Still in the bathtub.
Zan murmured those same words, and I descended deeper into panic than I had during any previous instance, because I was no longer convinced this was a hallucination. I couldn’t die in hallucinations. They couldn’t hurt. Being speared like a wild boar on the hunt wasn’t a metaphor for something. It had actually happened, and now I was here.
Back in the bathtub.
Back to the morning after I’d first shown up at Hadley House, reliving the same dayfor a third time.
Vaguely I realized I was rocking back and forth in the tub, hands covering eyes that were dripping with tears. Zan had vacated the area, but this time his disappearance didn’t help. None of my usual coping mechanisms felt like they would help. Any calming word I tried to force past my throat didn’t go, and my hands were trembling too hard to pinch myself. I couldn’t stop the stream of sobs long enough to litter my arms with bite marks and bring myself back from the edge that way.
Kirin didn’t burst through the door this time; he gently snapped the lock and started to step inside before seeing the state of me. His body backed out, but he didn’t close the door behind him.
I was watching through a tiny slit between my fingers, only seeing enough to register what was going on. When Bennett appeared, I shut my eyes again. What was he going to do? There were two sides of him; the commanding one he used on Waylon when he was being a brat, and the gentle one he’d shown when he took charge and made me feel safer after I’d passed out the first time.
“If you tell us what’s wrong, we can help you,” he said softly, going for gentle.
I didn’t want my body to react to him positively, not when someone in this house was killing me. The bug bite could’ve been an accident, but a spear through the chest wasn’t. However, my body stopped rocking as vigorously as it had been. His tone unwound me.
