Was he going to go on the villain spiel, giving away every aspect of his evil plan preemptively? I doubted it. He was too intelligent and acknowledged he wasn’t unbeatable. And if his plans weren’t done, he wouldn’t tell me about them.
Also, I still wasn’t convinced the men knew the extent of what he’d done. The horrific experiments he’d run. The beliefs he held about other races. I couldn’t stop myself from believing they were all good at heart. If I told myself they’d been tricked, my heart didn’t break into quite as many pieces. Felix wouldn’t talk about his basement lab in front of them.
I was better off asking questions about the past, though I had wasn’t sure why he was letting me ask at all. Maybe because my questions would reveal more about what I’d concluded during my time in Hadley House.
“Why were you locked inside the house?”
“The Hallowed Council decided I was dangerous and imprisoned me in my own home. How horrible, yes?”
“Why did they think you were dangerous?”
“Oh, you’ll find out all about that on your own. People will tell you all sorts of things about me when they find out we’re related. I’d rather wait and let you find out as a surprise.”
His laugh grated against my sensitive ears. I wanted to do what the woman had suggested and fight him, kill him, avenge her. Avenge… my parents. It hit me then that she hadn’t been lying, and her presence didn’t appear to be a test. What had my uncle done to my parents? Why would killing him avenge them?
Was I too scared to ask? Possibly.
You shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.
“So I orchestrated a prison break,” I said, gritting my teeth against the question I almost asked. “That’s why you pretended to be dead and hired a shoddy lawyer to trick me. How did you communicate with people outside this house?”
“Some secrets are meant to be kept, and that’s one of them. Technically, child,Iorchestrated the prison break. All you did was play along and use your magic to make it happen. And, honestly, you didn’t play along as well as I’d hoped you would.”
He paused. Did the man get off on me asking all these questions? “How did I not play along? You’re standing in the fucking driveway, aren’t you?” I bit out.
“You cut it close. Zan looks half dead. How many rewinds did it take her to break the seal?”
Zan bit his lip. “About fifty-two.”
“I’d expected under forty,” Felix said, humming. “Did she end up distracted, or was she simply not smart enough to figure out my clues?”
I held back my blush with everything in me and internally begged Zan not to tell Felix about the trysts with the men. If he found out about them, he would use them against me. My heart hurt enough without them intentionally trying to harm it. “She wasn’t smart enough,” he said, hesitating for a second.
Felix clucked his tongue. “A shame. Well, she has time to work on her problem-solving skills. All the time in the world, in fact, stuck in that house.”
Panic ran through me, and I jerked away from the wall, glancing back behind me. I wasn’t in the house, so I couldn’t be stuck inside. Unless… on unsteady feet, I turned to look at my uncle. He was grinning wide enough to show off his destroyed teeth again, and everyone except me was in the mansion’s driveway. But me…
I was still on the damn porch.
No.
“You fucking asshole,” I spat out.
My entire body was trembling from the strain of standing after using all my magic and being a vessel for so much more than I usually had residing in me. I had about five minutes before my body would give out completely, and if I was reading into things right, he’d locked me back in the house. The one I’d just given everything to release him from.
“I’m only doing to you what you wanted to do to the men,” Felix said, playing innocent as he gestured to where they stood alongside him. “You were going to try to keep them locked in the house, weren’t you? If you’d had the time to learn more about spellcrafting, you would have changed the wording.”
Eyes flying wide, I shook my head. “Excuse me? That wasyou. You wanted them to stay locked in this house forever. You’re a goddamn crazy fanatic; you told me to keep them inside and I wasn’t going to.”
What was his play by lying?
It only took me a few seconds to figure it out. All the men were blinking at me, any sympathy they’d once held going out the window. They believed him. Not me.Him.Bennett’s jaw was clenched like he wanted to take a swing at me, Abraxas had his tongue poking out as he hissed. Waylon and Kirin avoided eye contact, the camaraderie we’d built while crafting the artifact vanishing.
And Zan… he was shocked.
How did he believe this shit? I would never want to keep them locked away. He was supposed to be the one who knew me. We’d spent nearly two months together, and he remembered every second.
I fought the tears trying to leak from my eyes. There was no way I was crying in front of him. Or them. They’d made their choice, and it was him. None of them needed to see how deep the betrayal cut me.
“I never said I was a good person, dear, but I would never want my friends and fellow inmates to stay locked away, when they’ve already spent so much time in that cursed mansion. You can lie about my motives all you want, but you’re only lying to yourself. I have plenty of things to do, being a free man for the first time in twenty-eight years. We’ll catch up eventually, I’m sure.”
He turned on his heel, everyone doing the same to follow him as he headed for the unmarked carriage in the drive. I was caught between fury and panic, desperate to believe it wasn’t true and I wasn’t stuck in this Ixaris forsaken house all over again. Without thinking, I used my last vestiges of strength to throw myself off the porch. Somewhere in the depths of my mind, I couldn’t believe I’d been conned and betrayed so thoroughly, and I needed to know for certain.
I hit a solid wall, crackling with magic. Electricity flickered along every contact point from my shoulder to my ankle, glowing red. My eyes widened, and I realized what was happening before the pain hit all at once. I was electrocuted with the force of a thousand lightning strikes, every bone and blood vessel in my body feeling it. The scream that left my hoarse throat reminded me of a banshee or a raging ghost.
My vision blacked out immediately, and my last thought before I hit the ground was how painful it was that my men probably didn’t even look back.
***
TO BE CONTINUED
