Nico the guy she would have fallen in love with in another life.
Damn it.
Whatever temptation she was feeling, Nico had to be feeling it tenfold. After all, at leastshehad gotten to come.Serves him right, a nasty part of her thought. If he wanted to walk away, he got to deal with the frustrating consequences.
Nico wasn't in the room, and she had a feeling he wasn't coming back. His control had to be beyond frayed. And if last night was anything to go by, he was going to go find somewhere else to sleep.
Which meant this was her chance.
A look at the clock on the nightstand told her it was close to midnight. Hopefully, no one would be around to question her. She darted her head out into the hallway and didn't see anyone.
Step one, good.
But would anybody be in with Cole? Nico had slept in the room with him last night. What if he was doing that again?
Hesitating would only make this worse. She took a deep breath and walked down the hallway and carefully opened the door only an inch, praying the hinges didn't creak. She only saw Cole.
Step two, success.
She closed the door behind her and rushed to Cole's side.
This time, she didn't waste any time waffling over what to do. Elise sent the biggest jolt of magic she could manage into him and immediately found the silver that was still living in hissystem. She got to work attacking it methodically. One cluster here, another cluster there.
She could feel Cole's hands getting sweatier by the second, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that the bandage on his abdomen was covered in an ugly black fluid.
Good. Good. That had to be good. Please let it be good.
She closed her eyes again and poured even more magic into the werewolf alpha. It was too much, she knew almost immediately.
If another witch had been with her, they would have pulled her back from the edge before she could lose herself in it, but Elise was already feeling a little bit reckless. She had to get this done tonight. If Cole was better, she could go home.
She hoped.
She found more silver, and this cluster was smaller. That had to be a sign of progress. If she was only finding smaller clusters, it meant the worst of it was gone, and hopefully this was some kind of poison that relied on a critical mass to succeed.
She could barely feel her own body now. She thought about opening her eyes to check the wound again, but she couldn't tell the difference between her own eyes or Cole's, and she decided not to worry about it.
She didn't know how long she had been in there. She hurt, but it wasn't a physical kind of pain. Her magic was stretched beyond its bounds, and she was doing far more work than she had ever tried before.
There were still small pockets of silver, mostly resting in Cole's guts, but she could do this. She could see the end.
She just had to keep working at it.
She might have been able to do that if a hand hadn't clamped on her shoulder and torn her away from Cole. The grip was as hard as iron, and the fingers dug in hard enough to leave bruises. He yanked her backwards so hard that she stumbled.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Nico's eyes blazed yellow, and she knew she was caught.
Chapter
Seventeen
Elise wrenchedout of Nico's grip and stared at him with wide eyes and an open mouth. Her bottom lip trembled, and her shoulders were drawn back like she could somehow make herself seem bigger. If she was a wolf, he would have said she was bristling.
But she was the furthest thing from a wolf you could be.
He was frozen, confused, and more than a little deceived. He could still feel the heat of her skin on his hand. The whole room smelled like magic. That magic was coming off of Cole.
And Elise.
