Cliff snorted, the corner of his mouth tugging upward. “Yeah, I’m full of surprises. I can also knot a cherry stem with my tongueandparallel park.”
“Quite the catch. You know, it pains me to admit how well you wear this suit. You really blend right in around here.”
“If you’re fishing for compliments, you’re gonna be waiting a while.” He dipped her with exquisite timing, making me gasp in tandem with Delilah. I barely caught his muttered words by her ear. “Drinking virgin blood is a little bit of a turn off.”
She rolled her eyes as he straightened her back up. “Let me guess. You’re into the goodie-two-shoes type. I’ll bet you’re a dog person, too. Can’t function without constant affection and validation.”
“Sweetheart, you practically put a collar around your boyfriend’s neck before we headed out. I think you’re projecting.”
Try as he might to seem disinterested and annoyed, I had a feeling Cliff was enjoying the back-and-forth. It reminded me far too much of his conversations with Gwen, how their teasing quips wavered dangerously between easygoing and murderous. I wondered if he had ever known anything else.
The glamour surrounding me shivered suddenly like a tether being pulled. I searched overhead until I found Ben. He had drifted even higher up, scanning the room from a perch on one of the chandeliers.
“I’m sure Lee’s fine,” I told him, flitting up to his level and finding a place to land across. “I’ll bet he can take care of himself. He certainly seems resourceful.”
“He is, it’s just—” Ben shook his head distractedly. “In a place like this, surrounded by these types of people, he’s practically defenseless.”
I snorted at the idea that someone like Lee could ever be truly vulnerable. “He and Jon will be able to snag some weapons once they reach the loading bay. They won’t be defenseless for long.”
“That won’t matter.”
And then I recalled what Delilah had told me in the hotel room. “He doesn’t like to use guns?” I asked slowly.
Now that I thought about it, his lack of weapons in the storage roomdidseem strange, even if he had a fairy companion to defend him. He knew as well as anyone how dangerous a confrontation would be, yet he had no way to defend himself.
“But how could he have qualms about weapons?” I asked. “Didn’t he murder your captors?”
Ben paled, and though he wasn’t looking at me, he clearly wasn’t looking at anything else, either. He stared blankly at the dance floor below, making my curiosity curdle into suspicion—and then ultimately into grim understanding.
“He didn’t mean to kill them, did he?” I whispered, horrified. “He was compelled to.”
Although the music and chatter continued to fill the grand ballroom, the space between Ben and me became wrapped in static silence for several long beats.
Ben sighed, breaking first. “I would have admitted the truth back in the hotel room if he hadn’t insisted on taking the blame. Your hunters can sneer at him all they want. He doesn’t give a damn what sort of atrocities they think he’s committed. But… But he knows that I—” He cleared his throat. “I haven’t forgiven myself, even if he thinks I should stop dwelling on it.”
Goosebumps prickled the skin beneath my sleeves. “What really happened?”
“I could never compel either of my captors. Not when they had those cuffs—and theynevertook them off. Definitely not around me. All of my attempts deflected off of them, and I learned swiftly what happened if I tried.” He shuddered, blinking hard. “So long as I did what I was told, they mostly let me be. I compelled anyone they pointed me toward—altered memories make people forget they were being scammed, forced unsuspecting rivals to happily hand over fuel for blackmail, and—and worse.”
He paused, searched my face.
“Then, one night, they stayed at the office later than usual. They were angry, trying to navigate a scandal that was about to break. One of the compulsions didn’t fully take effect because I was so exhausted. The higher these assholes climbed the ladder, the more people there were to control. To get rid of.” Ben shook his head mournfully. “ I messed up, and they hurt me—my wings. Not too much. Not enough to make me useless, but enough to warn me against messing up again. They were too distracted to notice their security measures being disabled that night. Someone broke in.”
The barest smile touched his lips. “And then, there was Lee. He thought the office was empty and that he’d be able to swipe everything he was hired to take. He had no clue what he was walking into, but he did carry a handgun for self-defense. The moment he pulled it out to warn my captors against trying anything, I unleashed myself and took control of him. One of them tried to charge him and got multiple shots over his body. The other tried to run and went down from one shot to the side of his head.”
I thought back to Lee’s easy smile in the hotel room as he took full credit for the deaths. “It looked like a murder-suicide,” I croaked. “The wounds told a story.”
Ben nodded. “The bodies needed to be arranged a bit, but yes. The two of them were known to be volatile, after all. With the scandal brewing from my botched compulsion, their empire was standing on shaky ground. The media ate up the spectacle: how they bludgeoned their way to the top, only for one of them to lose his mind when he saw how far the inevitable drop was.”
He went quiet again while it all sank in for me. I should have been disgusted by the confirmation that he could take full control of another person’s will, whether he was sorry for it or not. But I couldn’t stop imagining what he’d been through. He’d been desperate, and he was lucky that he hadn’t swapped his two captors for someone worse.
Someone who would have handed him over to Eros.
“Lee knew what you did, and he forgave you,” I said, more statement than question.
Another brittle laugh. “Things were rocky and complicated at first, of course. Between finding out that fairies are realandthat one of them forced him to commit double-murder, he had a lot to work through. But here we are, all the same. Except he won’t touch another gun to save his life.”
I cleared the tightness in my throat. “He’s with Jon. He’s safe.”
