Hickok tapped her notebook with her pen. “But thereissomething you ought to be telling me, isn’t there.”
“I don’t—” he began.
“Yes.” Beatrix lifted her chin. “Come upstairs.”
He trailed after them, annoyed, until it hit him on the second-to-last step that Rydell was sure to find out eventually. There was no contest when it came to which of the two he’d prefer to write about it first.
When they got to the landing, Beatrix gestured Hickok into the brewing room and hung back.
“Sue must have thought this could help,” she murmured. “I think she might be right.”
He let his skeptical expression stand as an answer and went in.
“Any recording devices in here?” Hickok said quietly, eyeing the walls.
“No,” he said, hoping that remained true.
“What about the rest of the house?”
“Besides the telephone, you mean? We’ve stopped checking for bugs downstairs. We just assume we’re being recorded and behave accordingly.”
Hickok shook her head. “I’m trying to get some traction on the story, but no luck yet. Anyway—go ahead, tell me why Sue Clark called.”
Beatrix handed over the bills and noted all the ways this was and could be disastrous. She explained that she’d been let go. Then—in for a penny, in for a pound—he shared most of the details of the previous night’s attack, leaving out his inability to defend himself with magic and asking her to keep off the record his strong suspicion that another wizard intervened.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to have noticed it,” he said, “and I don’t want to make clear that I did.”
Hickok nodded. “Any idea who it might have been? Your protector, I mean?”
He let out a long breath. “This will sound odd, I know. But I think it was someone sent by the Abbott administration.”
She raised her eyebrows but didn’t laugh. “Why?”
“Invisibility isn’t a widely known spell. And reds—the high-octane leaves you need for teleportation—are tightly controlled by the government.”
“OK,” Hickok said, “but any idea why they would want to prevent your injury or death?”
Yes, now that he knew they thought his skills were hard to replace. But he didn’t want to share that. He shrugged and gave a broader answer. “If I’m killed with magic, who would people blame?”
Hickok gave her ringinghahof a laugh. “One more thing, back on the record: Why did you write that contract for your wife—why take the risk?”
He sighed. “Well, it’s pretty obvious I didn’t understand that itwasa risk. I mean—‘we all have certain inalienable rights and I won’t impinge upon yours’ shouldn’t be a radical idea.”
Her smile was sharp. “How very sweet and naïve of you.”
Beatrix had not been so naïve, he knew. She must have thought they’d safely concealed the contract from the magiocracy’s prying eyes—and the fact that they hadn’t was alarming in what it suggested about the level of spying they now faced.
“But as you’re obviously not planning to exercise your coverture rights,” Hickok added, “why put it in writing in the first place?”
Because he’d had power over Beatrix before, and he repeatedly abused it. Got her fired. Gave her little choice but to work for him. Forced her hand so she would break the law, day after day, risking arrest on his behalf.
Making her turn over her last shreds of self-determination to him with a Vow was the most egregious example, but it was hardly the only one.
Hickok was looking at him with her head cocked, waiting for an answer.
“No one should have that much power over another person,” he said quietly. “If we do …” He swallowed. “If we do, we’ll discover sooner or later that we’re not nearly as good as we think we are.”
As Hickok scribbled this down, Beatrix put her arms around him. “My God, I love you,” she murmured.
