“He’s my employer.” Her voice quavered. She took a shaky breath. “When you said I chose him over you—I never chose him in the way that you meant. That’s the truth.”
It was, in the letter-of-the-law sense.
Then—as ghostly hands cupped her face, as Garrett said in a very different tone, “I love you, you must believe me”—she saw Peter materialize near the house. He ran flat out for the door, pulling a leaf from his pocket and turning himself invisible before he reached it. Looking straight through the equally invisible Garrett, she saw the door open and close as if by itself. Peter was inside—and he knew something was wrong.
Garrett, still holding her, had missed the whole thing.
“Beatrix, say something!” he demanded.
“You’ve chained me to a tree,” she whispered. “You’re going to turn me over to them. I don’t think love enters into it.”
“I’m not going to turn you over,” he said. “I’m going to marry you.”
Peter stoodin the brewing room, heartbeat roaring in his ears. The dark liquid in the hallway behind him and the amber brew dripping down a counter in front of him, broken glass glinting on the floor, eloquently confirmed his worst fears. How had the wizard, whoever it was—Garrett, it had to be Garrett—slipped into the house without them knowing? Where had he taken her?
Beatrix—arrested. Her sister’s efforts—ruined. And all because he’d wrongly thought there was no way for a wizard to get into the house without setting off their charms.
Wait.His heart jangled. If his charms never went off, shouldn’t that also mean the wizard hadn’t teleported away with her?
Couldn’t they still be in town?
He rushed to the cellar, thinking the back way out would be safest—and there he found an answer to one of his questions. The glass pane for the lone window lay in pieces on the floor. The window was in reach of the door handle, which unlocked if you turned it from the inside. The whole procedure could have been done in less than the six seconds the house had gone unprotected when he left for the Sederey farm.
He was an instant away from opening the door to hurry out after them when clear-headed thought caught up. If he found them, what then? Their only hope was to knock the man out and run.
That turned him around and propelled him to his bedroom to get what he could not afford to leave behind. He pocketed the contracts that spelled out the Vows taken by him, Beatrix and the other members of Lydia’s inner circle. He grabbed all the cash he had on hand—not much. Then he retraced his steps to the cellar, stuffing his coat with leaves.
Heart in his throat, he slipped out the back door.
Beatrix staredat the approximate place where Garrett stood. She’d known a good bit about him before this moment. That he would not take the hard path when the downhill slope beckoned. That he might not entirely like his work, but he wasn’t about to stop. That he didn’t understand her, for all his protestations of love.
Even so, the plan he’d just laid out was a shock.
“Please—could you explain that again,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself.
“You’re not the one they want. I can cut a deal for you, Beatrix,” he said, his voice soft and patient now, as if this were perfectly rational and he hadn’t been screaming at her in an unhinged manner a moment earlier. “You’ll testify against Blackwell—they’ll want to do it closed-door, so don’t worry, your reputation won’t be harmed. Your sister will resign as president of the League, as she should have done right away. And we’ll marry.”
And we’ll marry. Not “and I hope you would agree to marry me, but naturally that would be your choice.” He presented it as a simple tit-for-tat, like a plea deal—except rather than a reduced sentence, she would get life with him. Did it not occur to him that she might not want this? Did he give any thought to her preferences and how that would affect his own chance at happiness in marriage, let alone hers?
She would sooner go to prison.
He kept talking—about how she needed to be rescued from the mess her life had become, how she couldn’t be expected to make good decisions all on her own—and she tried to block that out and think through the implications. If Peter escaped now, he was safe. Lydia’s reputation would be harmed, there was no way around that, but perhaps her sister could overcome it. After all, if Garrett anticipated a closed-door trial against Peter, didn’t that mean the magiocracy wouldn’t want to alert the public that womencould use magic? And wouldn’t the same hold true for her trial?
She’d be damned if she let Garrett force her sister to stop.
“Oh, Beatrix,” he said, embracing her, missing perhaps that she had not said a word. “We’ll be so happy.”
Her hand—the one not chained to the tree—was pressed awkwardly against his neck. She could feel the beat of his heart through his carotid artery, no protection spell between them. And she knew then what she could do, what she had to do, because therewasa way to fix everything with magic that required no leaves. Dozens of mangled crabapples attested to her skill at delivering crushing force. What would solve this problem—for Lydia, for Peter, for her—was if Garrett were dead. Neck snapped.
Do it.
She pressed her hand more firmly against him, focused, took a deep breath?—
The moment of insanity passed. She sagged into him, horror turning her legs to rubber. Her tingling hand fell to her side. Good God, what waswrongwith her?
“My darling angel, it’s all right,” Garrett murmured, wiping tears from her face. “I’ll take care of everything. This will be for the best, you’ll see.”
She was trembling everywhere, shivering uncontrollably now, her mind a horrible, buzzing blank. But when he exclaimed, “You’re cold,” she latched onto it like a lifeline.
