We’d had a brief conversation while he’d been in his pink cat carrier — which I would never let him live down, and he would never forgive me for — but it hadn’t been more than asking each other if we were alright.“You’re contractually obligated not to claw my eyes out,”I said.
“I’ll take death over having to deal with those absolute idiots without being able to speak to them,”he said.
His look was pointedly aimed at Cas, and I laughed. Caspian pouted, practically hiding behind me. “It’s so weird when you do the telepathy thing,” he said. “Is the little pussy cat talking shit about me?”
Ozzy hissed.
Caspian pressed himself further into the back corner.
“Apparently he wasn’t pleased with your communication skills on your way in here,” I summarized.
“That’s a gods damned understatement,”he grumbled.
“Get settled back there if you’re still scared of him for no reason.” Moving on the bed, I rested my back against Caspian’s chest and he curled around me. “Ozzy has a lot to tell me.”
“I want to say you have some explaining to do, but I’ve figured out what you did and why, and have resigned myself to being furious you did it without my help. When I felt you leave the club, I went to check it out and found the three dumbasses fighting over what happened. They realized Kylan had Mabel. I went to find you, but unfortunately, I’m a fucking cat.”
My familiar sounded so incredibly bitter, like he was lamenting a time when he hadn’t been a cat. Looking into his curse had, understandably, been pushed to the wayside, but the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced he wasn’t a cursed familiar. He was cursed tobea familiar and had been as humanoid as the rest of us beforehand. He sure as fuck had never acted like a witch’s contracted servant.
“I couldn’t save you alone,”he continued.“So I went back to find Cas and Em, who were insistent that they do literally everything other than follow me to your location.”
“I’m assuming they were looking for Shan,” I said aloud, not bothering with the telepathy. Caspian knew all this.
Cas pouted behind me. “Is he complaining about that? We wanted to go in on the rescue with a full team, or at least not be leaving Shan dying in a ditch somewhere. It was a hard choice to make for me because I love both of you.”
His cheeks went hot, warming my shoulder where he was nuzzling me. Oswald saw his blush and rolled his eyes.“He makes up for his complete and utter obliviousness by being affectionate and needy. I see why you like him, after all.”
“Whatever,”I said, switching to talking out loud after I’d acknowledged his embarrassing point. “We were all there for what happened next, Fluffy.”
Ozzy glowered. Maybe I should lay off. His mood was downright foul. Understandable, after the cat carrier.“I was placed in the same room as Shan and Emmett, who seemed to forget about my presence after Nolan was done petting me like a common animal.”
I wasn’t surprised at the petting.
“Shan asked Nolan for a job for the three of them doing assassinations. They also revealed the real reason they were at Club Chaos looking for the killer.”
My breath caught. Everything had changed and it no longer mattered what their mission had been, not when they were fired from the Next Life Company and prisoners as much as I was. But it still mattered to me. What did they think of me with my murderous tendencies? Had they been prepared to throw me in prison?
“You’re going to be furious, but they wanted you to kill Kylan. For the Next Life Company, but not really for them because no one would know you were connected.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Spinning in his arms, I ended up nose to nose with Caspian.
“You three assholes wanted to hire me?”
His mouth opened and closed a few times, used to denying me answers. Then he nodded twice. “Yeah. I told Shan he was a dumbass as soon as we found out you were the killer all along. If he’d told you what we wanted, we could have had a happily ever after before it came to this.”
There still would have been the difficulty of killing Kylan, and the problem where I needed to have no associations to the Company, but yeah. We would have been a lot better off if they’d fucking told me. How was I supposed to assume they were trying to get someone else to carry out their dirty work? The Company was supposed to be more straight-laced than that.
“I so, so badly want to be mad at you.”
He winced, showing me why I could never actually be mad at him.
“It’s fine, lover boy. I’ll settle for beating Shan up the next time I see him.”
“He’ll probably be in the mood to fight and be thrilled if you do.”
Cas looked sad again, and I sighed. “He won’t be mad at you. And if he is, he’ll get over it. You have plenty you should be furious at him for, so it’ll even out.”
