Both men turned to face me, processing the next shock of the evening.
“Does she think she’s going to get a shot at killing Kylan?” Shan asked, caught between horrified and furious.
“I don’t think she’d be that cocky,” Caspian claimed. “What about… what about the necklace? Maybe it was a threat or a sign.”
It all clicked in my head.
“The cousin,” I said, releasing Cas to pull out my phone. “After Cas told me about her aunts and cousin, I looked into them. Freya’s cousin has much less magic than her, and doesn’t practice much. She’s a sitting duck. Look at the photos on her social media.”
Mabel Alverona’s social media was chock full of her Null and supernatural friends, but every group photo included her. And in every group photo, she was wearing a necklace. Sometimes the pendant was hanging visibly against her chest and others it was tucked beneath her clothes, but the string was always there.
“Fucking angels,” Shan muttered, snatching the phone out of my hand and zooming in on the necklace. “That’s the one those demon bastards gave her. She said it was from her house. Freya handed herself in as an exchange. Does she seriously believe Kylan is going to be so kind as to let her cousin go unharmed? I didn’t think she was such an idiot.”
“What choice did she have?” I asked with a shrug. “Would you have let her help save Mabel if she’d told you about the situation?”
Their silence said no.
“She might have explained her history as a killer while asking you for help, but you wouldn’t have believed in her ability to protect herself until she could prove it. By the time you all came up with some kind of alternative plan, her cousin might have been dead.”
A few beats of silence passed before Shan shook his head.
“And now they’ll both be dead. I really don’t see how that’s better.”
ChapterThree
FREYA
“You’re fucking joking.”
His fluffy hair bounced as he laughed some more.
“Afraid not, love.”
“Don’t call me love.”
Nolan ignored me like I’d never spoken, stepping closer to my cage and trailing his fingers gently down the bars. Amabella and Clement stayed further back, giving us the illusion of privacy. “It was the perfect setup, so you can’t blame me. I love stealing my cousin’s toys out from underneath him and you walked right into the palm of my hand. All I had to do was call in a favour in Zemterra, and I had a distraction far before Jude could set one up. Do you truly believe Jude is intelligent or connected enough to come up with a hellhound in less than five minutes?”
My blood ran cold in my veins, and I wasn’t certain I was in complete control of my expression. Did I look furious? Terrified? Shocked? I was all of those things, although the terror wasn’t for myself but for Mabel.
What the fuck would Kylan do to her when he realized I was in the hands of someone else?
And I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been, because Nolan was right. Jude wouldn’t have come up with a hellhound and would have had a far bigger entourage for me. I’d seen the signs, wondered about them amid it all, and hadn’t considered the possibility that this wasn’t just between Kylan’s mafia, me, and Shan’s organization. That there was a fourth entity out there, waiting for the prime moment to swoop in.
Yes, I considered myself my own damn entity.
“You need to give me to Kylan,” I said, smoothing out any potential hitches in my voice.
“No one has ever been this excited to meet my cousin,” he said, grinning.
I shot forward and slammed my fist against where his fingers wrapped the bars. The reverberations made my arm shudder all the way up to my shoulder, but it was worth it to see the wince when I pinched the digits. Somethingcouldmake the grin fall off his face.
“Clearly you’re more concerned about your own cousin than mine,” he said. His grin was back as fast as it had vanished.
My body was so close I pressed up against the bars, focusing my glare on him. He didn’t move back or give any indication he was worried about me trying anything. The nonchalance irritated me to no end.
“Mabel is Kylan’s captive,” I said through clenched teeth. “I was turning myself over to him.”
“I’m well aware. You’re incorrect on who her captor is, though. Jude is the one holding the young witch. Kylan would never bother himself with something so insignificant as having captives.”
