Page 51

Chapter thirty-seven

Rae paced Aidan’s room, fingers curling and flexing at her sides.

She’d pulled on one of his shirts, the fabric barely hitting her thighs, but it had been the first thing she could find.

Orion stood guard outside, and she knew there was no shaking him off.

The Vampire was loyal, she’d give him that.

Ru, not so much. The rutok had bolted at some point during their whispered argument on the stairs, most likely in search of Quinn.

With the shutters down over the windows, there was no way out of her predicament.

Somewhere beneath her feet, her brother’s murderer walked free, and Rae wanted nothing more than to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze the air from his lungs.

She should’ve known the bastard would try something like this, should’ve seen it coming all those years ago when her cousin had died. When Rae had killed her.

She dragged her hands through her hair, fighting back the tears pressing at the corners of her eyes.

Seylan had been the promise of something new for the Witches.

For Demesia too, Rae was certain of it. She hadn’t seen him for ten years, but he’d always given her hope that she’d made the right decision.

That leaving had been the only course of action.

Now, every choice felt like a mistake, a thousand missteps stacked on top of each other with no clear path, no direction to take next, and her chest tightened with the weight of it all.

Rae felt Aidan’s presence on the other side of the door before it opened, his power so great it was impossible to ignore. He shouldered the door shut, two glasses in his hand and a bottle of visk in the other, pausing when he laid eyes on her.

“You let him leave?” Rae asked, already knowing her cousin was gone.

Aidan stalked past her, placed the glasses on the bedside table, and poured a double measure in each of them. “Sit.” His hair was unbound, dark waves falling across his eyes, a dark, notched shirt highlighting the contours of his muscles and a glimpse of the tattoo on his chest.

He handed her a glass, and Rae tried not to snatch it from him, forcing herself not to down the whole thing in one. She remained standing, just to piss him off.

“How long?” Aidan asked, his eyes never leaving hers.

“What?”

“How long since you stole my magic?”

Rae hid her scoff in her glass as she took a sip, focusing on the burn as it slid down her throat. “You’re the all-powerful Provident, Vale. You should know how long it’s been missing.” Still, his silver eyes remained on hers, and she knew he wasn’t going to let this go without a full explanation.

“Fifteen years,” he breathed.

She knew what he was getting at. Rae was only thirteen years old when his magic had been taken from him, the all-powerful Provident, as she’d put it.

“I didn’t steal it.” Despite herself, she downed the contents of her glass.

Silence dragged on as Aidan watched her, emptying his glass slowly before he placed it on the dresser behind him. “You stole my magic from another Witch, presumably? Went into hiding. Came back here with a plan to what, destroy me? For what? Surely you knew I had an Ascendant?”

The visk fuelled her anger, driving her into his space. “I didn’t steal it.” She all but slammed her glass down next to his before tilting her chin up to glare at him, pressing a hand to her chest. “It was forced into me, against my will.”

A beat of silence and then, “By your mother.”

Rae hated the way he softened at that, had to turn away from the look she didn’t want to see in his eyes.

She reached for her thumb ring before remembering she’d given it to him, glancing over her shoulder to see him toying with it instead.

“By my mother. She knew it was only a matter of time before you took your uncle’s position.

So she stole it from you, and put it in me.

” Rae swallowed. Stared at her hands and willed them not to tremble, her voice not to break. “But I couldn’t control it. She tried…”

“To make you,” he said, his voice rough. “Fifteen years. And it was inside of you the entire time.”

Anger lined his words, and it flipped a switch in Rae.

“I hated you for it,” she said, facing him again.

“With every beating. Every time I almost drowned. I hated you.” Her chest heaved with the admission.

It wasn’t just his silver flame. There had been something else right from the start that she hadn’t understood at first. Something, that once she did, she’d been far more afraid of facing.

“Emlyn died because I couldn’t control it.

Maddock’s sister. She was—” Rae’s voice cracked, and she swallowed the lump in her throat.

She wouldn’t give him the fucking satisfaction of her tears.

“My best friend. And my people deserve better than a ruler who can’t control what they are.

” They deserved Seylan. Rae leaned against the wall, mirroring Aidan’s stance, arms folded across her chest, his shirt riding up her thigh, aware that the Vampire tracked her every movement.

“My mother tried to drown me as punishment the day after the funeral, and when she couldn’t, she shoved me into our basement and left me there.

It took me four days to escape, and once I did, I ran and never looked back. ”

His gaze burned into her. “And she let the world believe you fled because of the betrothal.”

Rae nodded. It was the story her mother had spun.

That she’d jilted the Fae prince and bolted.

It was that or admit their princess had murdered her own cousin, and her mother would rather let the world believe it had been because of Rae’s poor choices rather than her own failings.

“I had no interest in marrying Casius, but I would have endured it. It might have prevented all of this.” Nim.

Seylan. Maybe even the Liberalists joining forces with the factions.

All of it like a game of dyshe, and she was the first piece.

“Your brother knew you had my magic?” Aidan asked. He handed her another glass of visk, and just as she wished for a joint to go with it, he pulled one from his pocket, lighting it with a silver ember from the tip of his finger.

Rae almost smiled at that, but the mention of her brother snuffed out any joy she felt at seeing Aidan’s trivial use of the magic she’d returned to him. “No one but my mother did. And she died a year after I left.” A fact he was well aware of.

“But you were here because of him,” he said as if he saw through all her layers of bullshit, and she wondered for a second if he’d already sought every answer for himself whilst she slept. “ For him. Omnia was just a front.”

He handed over the joint and Rae nodded, eyes falling shut as she took a deep drag and pictured Seylan’s face.

There was no use hiding the truth from Aidan now.

“The silver,” she said on an exhale. “Every item I enchanted. It’s spread wide across Demesia.

My magic is like a web over the whole city.

I was going to nullify the Orders for my brother so that he could start from an even footing. ”

“To protect him,” Aidan mused as she passed him the joint. “Take out the competition, put us on the same level as the humans.” He clicked his fingers. “Just like that.”

When Cillian had first explained it to her, Rae had been hungry to prove herself.

To do something good. To allow her brother to rule fairly in a world that seemed to be anything but when he possessed little magic and was a sweet, shy character that others would only abuse.

“And now it’s over. And the competition is far worse than Vampires and Fae have ever been.

” But they were borne of magic too. Torrin and the other hybrids all had an alarming amount of magic at their disposal.

Aidan seemed to consider that. “I was your mark. At Rush.” The night they’d ‘met,’ but she’d already been watching him for months, observing his patterns.

“Did you orchestrate the attack too?” he asked coolly as he handed back the joint.

To his credit, whatever anger he was feeling, and Rae was certain from the way his eyes had darkened and the tightness in his stance that he was alight with it, he kept it contained.

She shook her head. “I knew it was going to happen. I just needed to get close to you. I needed more money for silver; I needed to know if you were in on all of it, to know what you knew.”

“I would have helped you,” Aidan said quietly, the words clipped.

“You wouldn’t have looked twice at me, and we both know it.”

“Do not presume—”

“To know you? You’re absolutely right, Vale, I don’t know you at all. We’re strangers to each other.” Even as the words fell from her lips, she knew they’d never truly been strangers at all.

“Strangers,” he repeated flatly. His anger was palpable. And he had every right. She’d used him, withheld his magic. Had almost taken everything from him.

“The tattoo?” he asked, downing the last of his visk.

“More spells?” Rae brushed past him to the bathroom to run the tap over the end of the joint, discarding it in the bin beside the sink.

She didn’t have an answer for him. The only other person that had known she’d had his magic was dead.

The only person who knew about hers was dead now too.

Besides, Aidan still had secrets, she was sure of it.

“So, now what?” He blocked the way back into the bedroom, his silver eyes as molten as the metal she was so used to melting with her torch, her skin heating as his gaze roamed over her bare legs.

“You got what you wanted,” she said, waving a hand dismissively to try and get past him, but Aidan didn’t budge, his scent and warmth wrapping around her.

He closed a hand around her wrist, the other tilting her chin up to look at him. “And you?” he asked, his tone far kinder than she deserved.