“Sylvia wanted me to investigate to see if it was a rogue witch.”
“She’s already ruled out that it could be anyone from Aestas?”
“She has no reason to believe that anyone from her coven would do something so horrific.”
“What about that other coven? Libertad?”
Katherine blinked, trying to keep her face neutral. She didn’t want to throw Niles under the bus, but she knew it would help. Libertad was on Noctis’ radar already. It should have been easy to shift the blame, but when Katherine tried to form the words, she couldn’t do it. It was a bridge too far.
“It’s possible, but unlikely,” she said. “From everything I’ve seen so far, I don’t think this had anything to do with magic at all.”
Silas fixed his gaze on her, his deep brown eyes boring into hers. He had light crow’s-feet, Katherine noted with satisfaction. Although they just made him look even more handsome in a sophisticated type of way, which wasn’t fair.
“Interesting” was all he said. Katherine tried not to let his obvious suspicion faze her. He was disarming, but she wasn’t easily disarmed.
This was a game, and she’d win.
Silas knew he was losing.
He’d been losing since he woke up at six that morning, his phone open on Google Flights, taunting him as it asked if he was still interested in purchasing the first-class window seat back to New York he’d been eyeing. He’d let himself picture it for a moment—sipping a glass of champagne as the West Coast faded into the distance—before he finally made himself navigate to his notifications.
The news alert woke him up faster than his morning Red Bull ever could. The five missed calls from his parents made it clear that he was already behind the ball. A massive terrorist attack in Sylvia’s city? Ifthere were any connection to magic at all, this would be the nail in her coffin.
And he’d found a bag of altum stuffed in one of the mall’s trash cans twenty minutes earlier.
It wasn’t good. He knew that there had been a recent Aestas arrest of a witch selling altum and that he’d been sentenced the night before—so it was possible that the drugs were a remnant from his sales. But the fact that altum was here—that this mess could have been caused by an ordinary with a dash of unsettled magic taking it and snapping—was more than enough evidence for his parents to put together a case that Sylvia didn’t have control of her coven or her city.
And then, of course, there was Katherine. He could avoid telling his parents that he’d caught Aestas’ number two sniffing around the scene of the crime, but he couldn’t avoid the shock of suspicion that it raised in him. He believed her when she said that Sylvia had sent her to investigate, but he didn’t believe that she hadn’t found anything. Even if she hadn’t spotted any altum yet, she had to suspect it—she’d done the arrest herself, and there was no way a woman as smart as her didn’t know exactly what was going on in her city. The furtive, stressed expression on her face, coupled with the dark circles under her eyes, suggested that she knew a lot more than she was letting on.
Which brought him to the other way he had lost today. He’d pulled her into this tight space in an attempt to throw her off guard, only to get hit with an Uno reverse card when he realized that this close, he could smell the citrus scent of her conditioner, could see the pink that rose in her cheeks as he questioned her.
What he needed to do was stop thinking with his dick and start thinking of her as a suspect. For all he knew, Katherine and Sylvia could be making and selling altum together, using the arrest as a red herring. There was a long history of witches turning to altum when their powers started to fade. It didn’t give them any actual strength, but it gave them the psychological kick that their magic no longer could. This could’ve started as a way for Sylvia to cope with getting older, then spiraled out of control.
Or the arrest could have been a Band-Aid, a way to make it seemlike they had the situation under control when it was actually a much bigger problem. If the witch they’d sentenced yesterday was one of many, this would be disastrous.
All of which meant that Silas needed to shut down his attraction for Katherine if he wanted to find out the truth.
He needed Katherine to work with him. To tell him everything she knew so that they could take care of this problem together, in a way that would let Sylvia have a smooth exit and ensure that Katherine didn’t get taken down with her. Silas knew his parents would want him to clean house after he took over, especially if there was any evidence of wrongdoing. If Katherine worked with him, he might be able to save her job and keep the transition as clean and bloodless as possible. Except there was no way Katherine would believe him if he told her that outright, so here they were, playing a game where he was already missing half his pieces.
“It looks like everything here has been picked pretty clean by the cops,” he said.
Katherine nodded in response, the motion shaking her hair and setting free a fresh burst of lemon-scented torture. “LAPD,” she said. “Too damn efficient.”
“Well,” he replied. “We’re going to have to break into the police station, then, aren’t we?”
Her hazel eyes widened. He could practically see the gears working in her head, trying to find a reason to say no—but this, he knew, was going to be his win. There was no way the altum he’d found was the only bag of the drug that had been here. There had to have been more, and once they spotted it in the police’s evidence, she’d have no choice but to admit to him what she knew. He could convince her that they could work together to solve this problem.
He kept his eyes locked on hers, watched them narrow, sizing him up. There was something about the way she looked at him that made him feel both big and small—like she could see every piece of him, good and bad. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
“Sure,” she finally said. “Let’s go break into a police station.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Katherine sat next to Silas on the bench outside of the police station and tried not to panic.
She knew she had no real reason to be anxious being here. There was no price on her head, no bounty out for her capture. Her case had become old news years ago. It hadn’t even warranted a Wikipedia entry.
Those, though, were logical thoughts, and if panic responded to logic, the world would be a much happier place.
