She was giving him a very odd look.
“When two illusion Primes fight, we attempt to shatter each other’s fields. As you probably observed, an illusion mage is remarkably difficult to counter in close combat, especially when their field is active.”
“I noticed,” she said dryly. “You blurred and broke their bones, while they were shooting at the monster mouths biting at them from the ceiling.”
“Nothing that I made could hurt them. Those were mere distractions.”
“You are lying.”
He glanced at her. The calm mask was back in place over her lovely features, but her voice cut like a knife.
“I was there, Prime Montgomery. My heart pounded in my chest. I tasted adrenaline in my mouth. What you created were not mere illusions. It’s an alternate reality. Nightmares come to life. If I had a heart condition, I would have died. If my willpower failed, I would have hurled myself from the nearest window like the building was on fire.”
He had to salvage this. “Those are temporary, secondary reactions to fear stimuli. The illusions themselves cannot touch you.”
She faced him, and he glimpsed a dangerous light in her eyes. His rearview mirror showed him Lila rising in the back seat, focused on him with predatory intensity.
“They don’t have to touch me. If you are unarmed, and I’m holding a gun pointed at your chest, you could kill me without lifting a finger. You could make me run into a solid wall. You could walk me off a cliff. You could herd me into traffic, or trick me into hanging myself from the power lines.”
She was alarmingly perceptive. “Technically true, but I would be much more likely to simply disarm you.”
He regretted it as soon as he said it. It only confirmed her words.
“And then I would be at your mercy.”
The things that he imagined doing with Diana at his mercy… The world screeched to a sudden halt.
He slammed that mental door shut. He would deal with that surprise thought detour later. Right now, he had to smooth this over.
There were layers to illusion, and the most essential of them had nothing to do with magic, but with controlling how you were perceived. His father’s words surfaced from his memory:Appear as an accomplished manager, project competence befitting the CEO of MII, but never permit them to learn your combat capabilities. They must see you as a business partner, proficient but obsessed with perfection and vanity. Show as little of your true self as possible. Make them think that illusion is all you have. Your life depends on it.
Augustine had structured his public image around this tenet. He had altered his daily appearance, policed his interactions with even his closest allies, and taken his ego out of it—and, for the most part, he’d accomplished his goal. When people evaluated his threat potential, they defaulted to his illusions. Their worst fear was that he might enter their lives in a disguise and ferret out some crucial secret. He had convinced them that if his illusions ever failed, he would be helpless.
Fucking Dylan Hester. His fingers tightened around the wheel on their own. He should’ve broken a few bones while he’d had his hands on him. Unfortunately, Diana had been there.
He’d caught the look on her face just as he bent Dylan over the table. He’d expected fear or confusion. He hadn’t seen any of that. What he’d witnessed was much more disturbing. Shewent flat. Not just expressionless. Flat. It was as if her ego had receded deep into her psyche, and what it left behind wasn’t altogether human. She’d stared at him, unblinking. No emotion. No thinking. Just this eerie presence that was aware and watching his every move. Her reaction had tripped some sort of instinctual alarm ingrained in his very DNA, the kind of visceral recognition of danger that guaranteed you ran away from a tiger. It made him stop and reconsider.
“Why did Dylan try to kill you?” she asked.
Because he is a nervous fool.
“Dylan panicked. The moment he figured out who I was, he reacted without thinking. He has no reason to kill me. We are not in competition. The Hesters don’t have the resources to take our kind of contracts, and we have no reason to do the high-risk jobs they specialize in. We are not in a feud. In fact, our prior interactions were forceful but cordial.”
“What does that mean?”
It meant that, last time, he’d walked into the Hesters’ HQ pretending to be their mother, walked around for half an hour, then shed his disguise in the middle of the family dinner, and explained the terms of their continued operation in MII territory. Super-sensitivity to scents had its limits, especially when a strong enough perfume was involved.
“We had a business meeting, during which we established boundaries.”
She shook her head. Diana would never see him the same way. His carefully structured disguise had been dealt a fatal blow. He’d had no choice—low-end or not, Dylan was a Prime. Neutralizing him had been a priority. He should’ve never taken her along for it.
“Why didn’t Dylan recognize Nevada as another illusion?” she asked.
Sigh. “Lack of combat experience. In Dylan’s place, I would have attacked you. Or shot me. Instead, he sank all of his power into trying to break my illusion field. By the time I pinned him, he was completely spent. It takes a lot of magic and a concerted effort to pierce one of my illusions. He simply wasn’t strong enough, and he exhausted himself.”
Diana didn’t respond.
This really could have gone better. He had an irrational urge to turn the car around, drive back to the Hesters’ brokerage, and punch some walls with Dylan’s face.
