But his parents didn’t care about that. The Khatri family had been at the top of the magical world since Silas’… some-number-of-greats-grandfather Bhawani Khatri had figured out how to trap spells in runes in the late 1800s. His invention had taken the guesswork out of magic, and it had catapulted him to the top of his coven in Jaipur. His son took his innovation with him and moved to New York, instantly gaining control of Noctis and leaving the rest of the world begging at his feet for the thing that would make magic actually usable.
Since then, the Khatris had been expanding their influence across the magical world, using the threat of having to return to the dangers of old magic and the promise of continued advanced rune development to keep covens under their thumb. What had started as a passion project, a thirst for knowledge and understanding of a power that was so hard to grasp, warped over the years into a relentless demand for more. And Silas was expected to want that too. The objective with Aestas wasn’t fairness—it was a hostile takeover. Silas was going to keep pounding Sylvia with magical code violations until something stuck.
“Anika,” he said, remembering the other huge development from the day. “There was an unsettled witch at their coven meeting.”
Anika’s cell phone dropped out of her hand, clattering onto her desk in New York. “Holy shit. And the building didn’t like, explode or anything?”
Silas shook his head. “She was just a kid. She wasn’t some evil demon monster.”
Anika paused, processing. Their parents—everyone in Noctis, actually, and in the other covens Silas had visited—talked about unsettled witches like a horror story waiting to happen. A dangerous threat, a blight on the witch community. Silas hadn’t given much thought to it until he was sixteen and an unsettled witch blew up a subway car full of people inBrooklyn. He still remembered the haunted looks his parents had worn in their eyes for the weeks it took to buy their way out of the mess. It didn’t matter that the witch had never been a part of Noctis—they were still blamed by every ordinary who knew enough to point a finger.
“Well, shit,” Anika said.
Silas chuckled. “Yep. You should’ve seen the way the Aestas number two looked at me when I said I’d never met an unsettled witch before. It was like she thought I was some backwoods hick or something.”
His mind settled on Katherine, whose facial expressions seemed to run the gamut from disgusted glare to furious glare. It was rare that someone was brave enough to call him on his shit, and he found it deeply attractive. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Katherine was all thick hair and curvy hips and gorgeous eyes that sparked just so when she was dressing him down. If this were any other city, he’d have asked her to dinner after the meeting, charmed her, invited her back to his room. If this were any other city, he’d already be kneeling in front of her, her hands fisting in his hair while she came on his tongue. He wanted to see her undone. Wanted to be the one to undo her.
But this was Aestas’ Executrix, and there was the aforementioned problem of her staring daggers at him every time he opened his mouth. A problem that would only get worse once she confirmed he was, in fact, trying to take over her coven, just like she suspected.
“Well, glad someone could finally read you correctly,” Anika said.
Silas laughed. “I miss you, Nik. I miss New York.”
“Oh, please. LA is so much better than New York. Have you spotted any celebs yet? Deuxmoi says theBachelorpeople are always at…”
Anika’s words washed over Silas as he pulled out his phone, shutting off his notifications so he could avoid a check-in from his parents as he flipped through the list of flights out of LA that he couldn’t book.
“I really, really don’t like him.”
Katherine paced her apartment, ignoring the eye roll Fiona gave her over FaceTime. Fiona had done her level best to convince Katherine tocome out and have some of that “fun” she’d promised, but Katherine had stuck with her adamant no. A small bar with a few people in it was the most Katherine could handle. Even though it had been years since she’d settled, the sheer terror of being in crowds lingered.
Still, Fiona always pushed, always called her from the alley behind the bar or the bathroom of the club to remind her that the option was there, if she wanted it. The choice to go out and actually live the life she fought so hard for.
Katherine couldn’t bring herself to do that.
Right now, Fiona was climbing one of the titular hills in the Hollywood Hills, in the hopping part of the bar hop. Tess had accepted Fiona’s mumbled invitation to go out, and she was currently walking a few feet ahead of Fiona, chatting animatedly with some of the other coven members about a recent Netflix horror show.
“She went home and changed into a Valkyrie outfit, Katherine. A goddamn Valkyrie,” Fiona had whispered reverently at the start of the call. Katherine had grinned, happy for her. Fiona loved to be in love, and Tess seemed less likely to screw her friend over than the “artist” who’d left her last year to “find himself” using his parents’ money to rent a yacht in the Caribbean. And if Tess did wind up breaking Fiona’s heart… well, Katherine had risked doing old magic for a spell to make the artist’s eyebrow hair grow at ten times the normal speed, and she’d happily do it again if she had to.
“You’ve mentioned the Silas dislike.” The amusement in Fiona’s voice was clear—and fair, Katherine knew, considering she’d been doing nothing but complain about Silas for the whole five minutes of their call. “And yet you can’t give me one reason why.”
“I’ve given you like, twenty! The biggest of which is that he’s definitely trying to take over Aestas. And also he has weird hair.”
“He has gorgeous hair, and he is not trying to take over Aestas.”
Katherine walked to the kitchenette at the sound of her microwave beeping, reaching for the take-out container of shrimp fried rice she’d reheated. She hissed as she pulled it out, the plastic burning her fingers. More heat was the last thing she needed right now—even this late at night, it was still sweltering.
She’d spent the evening doing research on Silas Khatri, although she hadn’t learned anything she didn’t already know. He was Vikrant and Nina Khatri’s only child, shot out of the womb thirty years earlier directly into a life of privileged perfection. His new duties had not been officially announced, but when Katherine texted an acquaintance in a coven in Madison she had been tersely informed that yes, Silas had done their yearly visit as well; no, he had not been a massive dick; and yes, it was very annoying that Katherine was texting her about business on the night of Halloween. Didn’t she know that everyone was out havingfun?
Katherine could have fun. She just chose not to.
“Why is he here then, Fi?”
“To check in on us, like Noctis does every year.”
Katherine put her phone down on the counter as she rummaged around her drawers, searching for a clean fork and settling for a semi-clean spoon. “Divakar checks in on us every year,” she said, in between bites. She’d overheated it to the point where she couldn’t taste anything other than the general flavor of salt. “The son of the heads of Noctis does not check in on us every year.”
“Chill,” Fiona said. “On both this and the speed you’re eating that fried rice. You’re gonna choke.”
