God, I felt sick. I’d been nuzzling into him. I leapt away as if his touch burned.
I fumbled for the weapons in my holsters, but the knife and gun had been removed. My scalp prickled. The small potion vials remained, missed by Reed just like Robbie had hoped.
Then I saw her.
Kate.
She was tied to a chair, wrists bound, mouth gagged, eyes wide with fear. There was a smear of blood at her temple. Her hair was dishevelled.
I couldn’t embrace the relief that licked at my guts. She was alive, but for how long?
This was what we called a sticky situation, or a clusterfuck, but thanks to Loki, I was far from down.
Loki’s presence flickered weakly through our bond. Unconscious but living. I pushed down my worry for my caladrius. I couldn’t split my focus, not when the wrong decision, the wrong move, might be the difference between life and death. Mine or Kate’s.
We weren’t alone in Kate’s lounge. Reed, the arsehole, was there too, but so was Dwayne Witterhall, the black-ops Connection subterfuge wizard who wiped minds for a living. He wassupposedto be on my side.
‘I knew you were on the take,’ I snarled at him.
He shrugged. ‘Needs must. You work for the Connection. You know how corrupt it is. Does it truly make any difference whether I’m following their orders or someone else’s?’
I thought of Thackeray’s orders to close Aspen’s case, but also his blessing to pursue it off the clock. ‘Not everyone in the Connection is corrupt. There are good people.’
‘There are. You’re one of them. And I’m even sorry for what I’m about to do.’
I strengthened my mental shields and braced for an attack, but it didn’t come. Not yet anyway.
Instead Jingo drew my eye. ‘What am I going to do with you, Inspector?’ In his hands, magic-cancelling cuffs dangled. I’d lurched awake and away before he’d secured them. Lazy, stupid, sloppy. I was absurdly grateful for the error.
‘She was blasting air all across the field, and she hasn’t been to a hall in several weeks.’ Reed looked at me coolly. ‘She has to be close to empty.’
He wasn’t wrong. My skin was itching, but it wouldn’t take much to rip my magic from me and send me sprawling into the Common realm where I would be as defenceless as a newborn babe.
I’d have to use my magic sparingly. I had to make it count. I needed to give Robbie time to ride to my rescue. As much as I hated the thought of being rescued, I had to imagine he would come for me. That he would be fine on that field of death. Hehadto be.
Keeping my mental shields up and Witterhall in my periphery, I moved closer to my intended target in the guise of looking at him fully. I drew my eyes up and down him.
Jingo as Troy Fairglass. Mer royalty with perfect skin, perfect lustrous blue hair, perfect smile.
A monster who lurked behind a beautiful face.
He looked at me with affection. ‘My dear Inspector.’
‘I am not your anything. Not for one second. I know it was you. All those years ago. It was you in Broadlake. You’re the one who cut me up.’
He smiled broadly, almost proudly. ‘So smart, Stacy. So smart. You were, even then. I could see it in you, the potential, but you were too soft. I had to make you stronger. When I snatched you, I was going to kill you and deliver your corpse to your father’s door. But then you looked at me with such defiance that I couldn’t resist breaking you first.’ His smile widened. ‘But you didn’t break, not completely. Oh you screamed and cried, but you didn’t give up. I wanted you to give up.’
He was mad. He was mad because he had broken me, totally and utterly. I had the scars and nightmares to prove it. But I kept my face blank. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ I promised.
‘I have never been in a woman that way,’ Jingo purred. ‘But I’ve thought about it. About possessing you. About our souls being one. But ultimately, I dismissed it. If we resided together, I couldn’t fuck you, and I found that I want to do that. I’d enjoy defiling you that way. Even if the pleasures of the flesh are muted to me, your anger, your fear, would be delicious. You were too young for my tastesback then.’ He raked his eyes over me, making my skin crawl. ‘But you’re not now.’
He was vile. The worst kind of man. One who took power and became twisted and ugly from it.
I hoped to hell that Troy was paying attention.
‘I was young then, but my father found me. He rescued me, and he later discovered that you’d been lurking in Broadlake. That Broadlake survived your inhabitation by severing his soul with the IR. At the moment of death, as you leapt from him, Broadlake severed his soul from yours and sank back into his body. He survived you. I bet you didn’t like that, did you, Jingo? And even you haven’t been able to get at him in Wraithmore to tie up that loose end. That must gnaw at you.’
Jingo waved a hand nonchalantly. ‘I could kill him if I wanted, but it is a waste of resources. No one believes him. He’ll rot in there.’
