“You don’t understand.” He leans back and stretches his legs in front of him lazily, as if he suddenly holds all the cards. Then he levels a gaze on me that spears straight through my throat. “I know you can see them.”
The room goes so quiet you could hear a feather fall.
The second his words slam into me, blood pounds in my ears. Under me, my legs lock. I wrestle down a lump in my throat. “What are you talking about?”
He tucks his arms behind his head. “I figured you’d try to play this off, but here’s the thing: No one mentioned a word about ley linesuntil you showed up. Then you appear, the ley lines are a problem, and somehow a roll of police tape ignites in your hand.”
“I told you, the sun.”
“There was no sun,” he snaps, so hard that I clamp my lips shut. Stone drops his hands and says in a low, dangerous voice, “I know what you are, Coco. And I know what will happen if people find out. Some things don’t go over well in small towns, do they?”
They don’t. People get kicked out. Shunned. Worse.
Much, much worse.
I lift my nose. “You know what I think?”
“I can’t wait to hear this.”
“You’re delusional. You’ve hit a roadblock and can’t accept that maybe you have to change something in order to fix the resort. Instead of doing what you need to, you’d rather railroad, threaten, and destroy me.”
“Destroy you?” He laughs. Darkness flashes over his eyes when he adds, “How can I destroy someone who doesn’t even matter?”
His words slice me in half. He must see my reaction, because he flinches, and for half a second his gaze flicks to the lambicorn. The creature whimpers softly, brushing against his boot like it felt the wound, too.
Stone shifts in his chair like the floor beneath him has tilted. But then he blinks, shakes it off, and turns back. It makes me wonder whether his words were so harsh that they hurt him as well.
“You can see the lines and you don’t want anyone to know. But I know because you can’t hide from me.”
Beneath my feet, the earth pulses, shudders. I reel my emotions back in and shake my head. “You don’t see anything about me.” I rise. “You’ve had your fun. You’ve shown up. You’ve drunk some water. Time to go.”
His jade eyes sparkle with victory. The emotion is so thick it makes a knot clog up my throat. It takes every ounce of willpower I have to tamp down the fear churning like a tide in my gut.
Stone rises. He towers over me, signaling a reminder of exactly how small I am. I don’t feel physically threatened. I’m not worried for my safety. But he is big, powerful, and rich.
And I’m a shadow in his path.
He slides his hands into his pockets. “If you don’t pull the paperwork and tell city hall you made a mistake,” he warns, “then I will make sure everyone in town knows what you are.”
I fold my arms, trying to muster every ounce of false bravado bouncing around in my body. Trust me, there isn’t much. “It’s not true.”
“Right. And that’s why you don’t have that spell book over there.”
“That’s just a . . . that’s a . . .”
I can’t find an excuse becauseall the wordshave disappeared from my head.
He nods. “That’s what I thought.”
Stone moves past me to head out, but before he reaches the door, he turns. “You have until tomorrow morning. Thanks for the water.”
He pulls a dollar from his pocket and drops it on the bookcase. His jaw flickers briefly as if he’s weighing this choice. But then he leaves with the lambicorn following close behind.
I flip the lock and slide the chain back in place before collapsing into the chair and dropping my head in my hands.
What am I going to do? If he tells, I’ll be a ... No, I can’t think about it.
But of course I have to think about it. That’s what we do, consider all the terrible consequences, tell ourselves somehow it makes things better to know the worst in any situation.
