Nope, she’s full of shit, and speaking French will not distract me.
My finger wobbles as I shake it at her accusingly. “Don’t you dare tell us all to spill our shit about men and conspiracies andshit when you’re keeping something that big to yourself. It’s hypocritical, and you know it.”
Her lips press together hard at my words, and I see a flash of what I believe might be the gorgon in them. She doesn’t want to admit this shit, and she likely hasn’t even told her mates. It has to have been forbidden by her sentence at the Society trial, and I’d bet there are consequences for telling, now that I think about it. Guardians are expected to clean up messes of their lost ones, and we’re taught a multitude of ways to do that. Some are controversial and long-lasting; some are more commonplace. I’d bet a tribunal of the highest supes from a bunch of realms uses far worse things to prevent major scandals from rocking the community up there.
“I’m going to say things, and you’ll give mesomeindication of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that I can use to proceed.” I arch a brow as I wait for her to do something, and when she looks up, I take that as my cue. “You can’t actually tell anyone what went on there, not even your mates, because they did something that will bounce back on you if you utter a single word.”
Her eyes skate upward, and I curse under my breath. Reb and I always thought that a trial that big was overkill for a woman simply killing a high-ranking college dude, whether he was an old-money dragon or not. It was a nuke to drive a nail in our opinion, but nothing we readeversuggested why they would haul her in versus Sibbies or local cops. I mean, supes kill one another all the time—her own mate has been accused twice but never taken to the Society’s version of The Hague.
How do I craft this without making it too close to the edge for whatever they fucking did to her?
“Do your mates have at least aninklingof how bad Magnus was?”
The upward skitter of her eyes again tells me it’s something they’ve figured out on their own, and she’s been able to let them draw their own assumptions. That’s actually good, but I don’t know if it means something was done toheror if she simply figured out how shitty this dude was and took action. Now I have to follow this line of questioning into a much darker place, and I’m kind ofgladthe kid is off coming to terms with all her shit. It would probably fuck her up to talk about the things I’m going to suggest eventually.
“Morgana, did he do things to you?” This time, her eyes move down, and I breathe an enormous sigh of relief. My brows furrow when the next obvious question comes out. “Did he plan to?”
The gargoyle looks straight ahead and doesn’t move—unsurprisingly still for her species—and I believe that means she didn’t know what he planned for her after they married. That tells me that her desire for justice, the push from her supe sides to take him off the planet, was rooted in what he was doing toothers. I study her for a moment, taking in the way she’s sitting, and the aura in the air.
This has to be bigger than him stealing money from the college or being a general asswad to a bunch of fawning mistresses—she’s afraid of what will happen if she tells, not what will happen if I know.
Carefully, I look at her directly and murmur, “Was he doing something that affected alotmore people than you?” The swift glance up makes me tilt my head. “Supes who couldn’t defend themselves against what he did?”
Again, she studies the ceiling. Everything inside me that has been trained as a Guardian lights up despite my personal grief and obvious drunkenness. This woman went on a mission to stop a wealthy, older dude with fucktons of connections across the globe and maybe the realms to stop him from abusing others. Yet somehow, she’s the one who ended up shackled to that place to clean up his fucking mess.
Fuck the patriarchy right in its goddamn nose with a cucumber—we’re supposed to bebetterthan the dumbass humans.
“Morgana, was your ex a supe trafficker?”
Her eyes flutter closed for a second, and I think she’s telling me I’m off-base until a tear slides down her cheek. It rolls over her jaw to drop onto her sweatshirt, and when she looks up, I can see more threatening to fall. She clearly hadno ideaabout this douchewaffle’s proclivities for however long it took him to convince her to marry him, and once she knew, she did the only thing she could to stop it.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “Magnus must have beenreallyconnected for that to go on under the radar for so long; the dude’s a dragon, so he had to be centuries old. Being a pimp isn’t something you stumble on in your old age, either; it was something he’d been doing for averylong time.”
Swallowing hard, she just looks at the ceiling as tears escape her lids.
I’d kill this motherfucker myself if she hadn’t already; no wonder she takes no one’s shit now.
“So… I bet you met him in some academic fashion, and he wooed you. Everyone thought it was romantic and charming. Because you had different careers on separate continents, you thoughthe was amazing and understanding when he didn’t mind long periods of separation. Right?”
That Morgana nods at, so their tale of courtship must not be covered under the binding. She sucks in a breath, reaching for the unopened scotch bottle. She takes less than a second to uncork it, and I watch her take a hefty draught before I continue my interrogation.
“Since he was like… some traveling Indiana Jones-type dude, the rumors of his cheating always made it back to you, but you wrote them off. He could consistently show you ‘proof’ that it wasn’t true, but by the time you figured out that it was smoke and mirrors, it was too humiliating to admit he was a fuckboy.”
“Yes.”
We’re still in the non-magical NDA area, so I’m safe, but we’re going to cross that line soon, I fear.
“You thought he’d calm down once you were married, especially if you moved to the States. But while you were digging around to confirm your suspicions, you ran into something else. Whatever you were doing to snoop led you to something so big, and so undeniably awful that you had to keep snooping until you reached the end of the trail.”
Her eyes go up, and I sigh, realizing that they definitely locked her down at the very point of her discovery, not once she validated it. “Okay, so you kept playing Nancy Drew, probably secretly enlisting help from anyone with the skills you needed. If it were me, I’d use fake names and shit, so the target didn’t know it was me. And you kept going until you hit a jackpot so heinous that you knew you couldn’t turn things over to the authorities because it went too high and was too scandalous.”
Morgana takes another deep breath and aims her gaze at the ceiling across the room, and I have to stop to figure out what that means. I assume that I’m headed in the right direction, but there are pieces of it I haven’t quite gotten yet. This non-verbal communication would be easier if she had looser parameters, but obviously, the being or beings who did this shit weren’t fools. She can’t use sign language or silly Pictionary-style gestures, either, or she’d be doing it. Writing must be out, too, because she isn’t asking for paper.
This kind of shit is supposed to beillegal, yet our goddamned leaders have done it to prevent her from squealing on whatever widespread nonsense they all missed while they were polishing their own knobs.
Shit like this is why Reb threatens to quit the Guardians all the time, actually. We know it’s our ‘destiny’ to protect someone once they’re born, but hehatesthe politics and insists that we’re often being lied to. Unfortunately, he might be right about that now that Morgana is slowly but surely spilling her tea. I blink as it occurs to me, and I hold up a finger as I ask, “Does it have to do with lost ones?”
Another upward look, and I groan low. That’s definitely not good because there are alotof unactivated Guardians in Bay City alone, and that numberhasto be much, much higher across the country and the globe. If Magnus Corona was a globe-trotting archeologist who visited countries everywhere under the guise of digs, yet was scooping up lost ones to sell off to the highest bidders? He had unprecedented access to a very vulnerable population of supes or supes to be that may never have evenreachedenclaves to be evaluated. They could be sold as sex slaves, weapons, trophies, illegal zoo exhibits… The possibilitiesareendless, and he had to have cronies at every level of government and all over the world to make it work.
