The door shut behind him with a soft click.
Dominic didn’t turn from the fire. He stood there long after Arthur’s footsteps faded, the light burning gold across his hands.
He wanted to say Arthur was wrong. That the bond didn’t matter. That she didn’t matter.
But the taste of her name was still in his mouth.
And the fire kept burning lower, no matter how much he willed it to hold.
Chapter 6 - Layla
Layla had entered the basement, hopeful. The shop was closed up, the door locked tight against any nosy alphas that might try and barge their way in.
And she was feeling confident.
It had been a week since her last attempt, a week since Dominic’s intrusion had thoroughly spooked her out of trying the ritual again. But some habits died hard, and in her restless curiosity, an idea had come to her.
Funnily enough, it was Dominic himself who had sparked the idea.
Wolves were aggressive by nature. She’d considered more violent spells in the past, reasoning that whatever it was suppressing her wolf must be able to counter that innate raw strength, and would therefore need raw strength to destroy. All those spells tended to tap into blood magic, or other such dark arts, things she was loath to turn to.
By all accounts, there was always a price for those kinds of spells. One she wasn’t willing to pay.
But Dominic hadn’t used his strength when he faced her down. If anything, he’d shown incredible restraint, especially as she insulted him so readily. Which had gotten her thinking. Perhaps she needed the opposite of strength.
Perhaps she needed to find a way to make herself weak enough that the barriers would also weaken, unable to sustain themselves from her diminished state.
It was a dangerous idea, but she’d found just the spell to avoid physically having to injure herself.
It was old, hundreds of years old, from around the times of the witch burnings by the humans. In the sudden, aggressive trials, some witches had found ways to temporarily expel their power from their bodies, rendering them weak and feeble when faced with the human tests. The problem was, power couldn’t simply cease to be. It had to go somewhere. And that somewhere tended to be unpredictable and often dangerous. Caved-in ceilings, churning rivers, that sort of thing.
But Layla figured, with practice, she could siphon her power into a carefully controlled space within a salt circle for long enough that perhaps her wolf would be able to break free of its restraints.
And so she found herself, yet again, having dared to venture down into the basement, sitting before a simple clay pot surrounded by a thick circle of salt.
So far, it was going well.
Warmth prickled under her risen hands. Not heat exactly, but the idea of it, moving up through the chalk into the thin skin at the base of her thumb. She kept her shoulders down and her jaw unclenched. Don’t force it. Let it come.
She exhaled, long and slow, and the power flickered.
The shelves to her left creaked.
She held still. The shelves sometimes creaked.
Her skin fizzed with a harmless static. The thrum deepened.
Her gaze flicked, unhelpfully, down to her notes. She had them near memorized, but this was new. Uncertain. She needed to be sure she was doing it right.
She reached carefully out and drew another rune onto her slate tablet with jerky movements.
The room answered like a breath taken too fast.
The candles flared with an angry buzz, and the scent of ozone cracked open the air. Her palm burned, then cooled, and her stomach swooped in fear.
“Easy,” she whispered, as if talking to a temperamental stallion.
The shelves creaked again, louder, a long splintering sigh, then a small cascade of dust tumbled down over the spines.
