Because he didn’t sell the drugs to Lily. No one did. Lily snapped, just like Sylvia said.
Oh god, oh god, oh god.
The glass clattered to the floor. Katherine pushed herself up, her body a distant thing. Her vision finally cleared enough for her to see what they had done to the apartment—it was destroyed, blood and glass and mistakes everywhere. Byron lay there, his hand on his neck, his breathing heavy with pain.
She was Aestas’ Executrix. Charged with upholding the laws of the coven. Being fair. Just.
This… this was none of those things.
She walked toward the door. Byron made a half-hearted attempt to follow her, but he couldn’t manage to stand.
She forced herself to leave. To walk out without looking back. To walk away from a mistake that she’d never be able to leave behind.
What the hell had she done?
There were people screaming at him to stop, but Silas ignored them.
He’d gone straight from the hotel to Libertad’s headquarters at El Sereno Coffee. The home of Niles’ coven was closed, but that didn’t matter—one cut and he’d blasted the lock off the door. There was a teen behind the counter restocking cups who made a move to stop him, but Silas froze him in his tracks before the boy even had a chance to light up a rune. He blasted through the paltry wards on their spell library with a spell no one outside of Noctis even knew existed.
Libertad’s spell library was tiny—a converted storage closet, with one thin tome sitting on a folding table in the center. It couldn’t have held more than a few dozen spells. Less than the spellbook that sat in his pocket.
This was all Libertad had.
Silas pulled his caster out of his pocket.
He briefly registered a banging on the door behind him, but he didn’t turn. There was no way anyone could get past the block he set up. No way they could even begin to challenge him.
His spells were simply better. Nothing to do with him, or his magic. Just with the things he had been handed.
Katherine was right about him. Niles was right about him.
He was a puppet in his parents’ games.
So he’d play his part. Do what he’d been told to do since the day he arrived here.
He cut into his palm. Pulled the small spellbook out of his pocket and pressed his bloody hand to it. Felt the spell zip up into him, suffusing his body with power.
And then he pressed his palm to Libertad’s spellbook and set it on fire.
The heat of it singed his skin, reminding him of the hotel fire. It felt so long ago, despite the fact that his lungs still burned from smokeinhalation. A different world, one where he thought he might be able to get people on his side. Where he thought he might deserve to have an ally.
All of that had burned away in that fire. In the fight he and Katherine had after.
He pressed his palm harder into the book and thought of flame. Thought of the heat coming under that door and the fear that he was going to die.
The screaming outside continued.
And the book burned.
It hurt, this spell. He hadn’t realized it would, the first time he used it. It was at a coven in Dallas, an offshoot made up of a dozen children from rich, magical families who decided that they didn’t want to have to follow someone else’s rules anymore. Silas felt so righteous when he went, so sure of what he was doing—which was why his parents had chosen that coven to send him to. They knew he’d need that justification the first time he was subjected to this.
He’d done it dozens of times since.
A spellbook was made out of a life of magic, sacrificed to benefit the greater good. Destroying it meant ripping that sacrifice to shreds. Ripping thatlifeto shreds.
The magic that had scented the air of acid pressed on him, sizzled along his skin, slashed at him with imaginary knives. He gritted his teeth, forced his hand harder on the book, and it burned, and burned, and burned.
This should hurt.
