“Fucking gods,” I gasped. “The fuck, MacKenna. Give a guy some warning.” He opened his mouth, but I drew another deep breath and continued with, “And maybe give a guy some warning his warlock’s a fucking psychopath! What the hell did he do to me? Please tell me he’s in custody right now.”
The scowl went nuclear. “He said the same thing about you! What the hell didhedo toyou?” MacKenna raised an eyebrow, and his hands clenched as if his claws wanted to make an appearance. His eyes already had a faint golden glow, a definite warning. “You blacked both Walter’s eyes and broke his nose and his cheekbone, Castelli. He had to knock you out so you didn’t beat him to death.”
I stared at him, my own fingers twitching, my eyes warming with their own glow. My gums itched. I wanted to drop fang and fucking attack him. Or someone. Walter. Fucking Walter? Uncanny valley mini-Ken-doll dude was namedWalter?
“I wanted to know what he did to me before I punched him, not after,” I gritted out. Because whatever whammy had hit me, it hadn’t done a damn thing to muddle my memories. I’d been magicked. I’d felt it on my skin. And that overwhelming, uncontrollable urge to do bloody violence hadn’t been organic. “He compelled me, or put some kind of spell on me, I don’t know the terminolo—”
“Bullshit,” he said flatly, pushing off the wall and looming at me. “Fucking bullshit. Why the fuck would he want you to attack him? Walter’s been with me for years. I don’t think he’d lie to me, but I know you would.”
“I’m not lying, and I don’t know either! That’s why I’m asking you!” I forced myself up onto my elbows, needing to not be lying there like a fainting Victorian lady while he threatened me, but with my head throbbing and spinning too much for me to take more of a stand than that. “But he did. I felt the magic, like—prickles. On my back. Everything went blurry and all echoey. And then I attacked him. Out of nowhere, MacKenna. I wasn’t angry.” That wasn’t strictly true. Walter had pissed me off. But not enough to try to kill him, especially since that could only have worked out badly for me.
Case in point, here we were.
MacKenna glared down at me, lips in a flat line.
But he didn’t speak for a long time, leaving me in heart-racing, brain-exploding suspense.
“You’re going to stay in this room,” he said at last. “Not just in the suite. In this room. You open that door,” and he gestured behind him, “and I’ll have the cops here in five minutes. Walter asked me to have you taken away already for his safety, and I thought about it, so you’d better be fucking grateful to be here instead of there. You don’t move. You understand?”
“MacKenna, you have to listen to me. That wasn’t what I wanted to do. It was magic compel—”
“Shut the fuck up.” His low, flat, uncompromising tone, and the brilliant flash of his eyes, was enough to cut me off at the knees. The words died on my tongue. “I don’t have to listen to anything. Particularly not to you. I know you’re a liar, and a selfish, self-centered one at that. I experienced it ten years ago, and again a few days ago when you cheated this casino and me, and I have no reason to believe a word out of your mouth. Stay. Here. Do you understand? Yes or no.”
Protests, complaints, and insults bubbled up, screaming for release. His words rang in my ears, and I went all dizzy again. “Yes,” I muttered.
“Someone will bring you some food. I don’t want to hear anything from you.”
And with that, he turned and left the room, shutting the door without even bothering to slam it.
He couldn’t lock it, either, since it only locked from the inside. But he didn’t need to. For one thing, I could break it down in two seconds, and he knew it. And for another, even if I’d felt up to staging an escape attempt, it wouldn’t work. He could keep me here if he wanted to, no cops required.
I crawled out of bed to the bathroom, did the necessary, and then staggered straight back to bed, head still aching like a bitch. Gods, I hated magic so much. Flipping the pillow to find the cool spot helped a tiny bit, and I curled up and tried to breathe through the pain.
And the seething, simmering anger at not being believed.
Although to my shock, anger didn’t top my list of negative feelings.
I had a heavy, miserable clenching low down in my belly that felt a lot like…hurt. MacKenna’s pungent assessment of my character kept echoing, over and over again, until it felt like falling down an endless well of dislike and disdain.You’re a liar. Selfish and self-centered. Experienced it ten years ago, and again a few days ago. Liar. Self-centered. Liar…
Maybe he was right. Maybe everyone seemed to hate me for a reason.
But this time, I’d been telling the truth! Random violence wasn’t me. Lying, maybe. Selfishness…well, okay, yes, but if you didn’t look out for yourself, who would? My family sure as hell hadn’t when the chips were down. Brook took over our family company and shoved everyone else out, and my parents, who’d always told me how important it was to have an alpha heir who kept up the expected lifestyle and displayed the right face to the world, cut me off the second they had to choose between my well-being and their own luxuries. Like they couldn’t have funded both, even with less money coming in. One private jet instead of two wouldn’t fucking kill them, would it?
So if everyone else got to be selfish, why shouldn’t I?
And I wasn’t violent. Iwasn’t. That hadn’t been me, except in the sense that Walter’s magic had employed my physical body as an instrument of his will.
How could MacKenna believe that I’d attack a man who was no physical threat to me for no reason at all? Drunken seduction attempts and complaints about employees weren’t on the same level as flat-out unprovoked murderous assault.
It took me a couple of hours of tossing and turning and marinating in my misery, my pounding headache, and my anger to circle back to the question MacKenna had asked and that I’d been too upset and distracted to focus on at the time: Why had Walter done it? What the hell did he have to gain? Discrediting me with MacKenna? Now there was a laugh and a half.
I flipped onto my back again, staring up at the ceiling and blowing out a long breath that I hoped would carry some of my confusion and frustration away with it.
It didn’t.
Seriously, though. MacKenna already thought he’d met pond scum he liked better than me. And if Walter had managed to lower his opinion of me even further, what did he get out of it? MacKenna trusted Walter but not me, employed Walter for actual money but hadn’t given me a dime—okay, unless you counted the comps when I first arrived, but whatever—and was obviously protective of him, which indicated loyalty, if not friendship.
All that I had was…MacKenna’s dick. Did Walter want MacKenna for himself?
