“Stop.”
They stopped.
Every single one of them. Mid-flap, mid-screech, mid-bun.
Forty seagulls, perfectly still, looking at me. The silence was genuinely eerie.
El Soldado didn’t move either, but his smug look told me it was voluntary.
My gaze dropped to my hands—still faintly golden—the magic just below the surface, waiting for me to use it.
Like I just had.
I looked back at the RipTide banner. I looked at the seagulls, every single one attentive—waiting.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Phase two.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chase
Derek hadthe handshake you would expect from a middle-aged white man who inserted himself into everything. Firm, two pumps, eye contact held a beat too long, every time, like we hadn’t met a hundred times before. He was my agent, but had appointed himself my de facto manager, showing up and inserting himself into all of my events these last few years. I shook his hand, and he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “There he is,” like he always did, like I’d wandered off somewhere and he’d personally found me.
“Looking good, Chase. Looking good.” He steered me into the tent by the shoulder. “Big week. Big, big week.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, my mind still back in Tanner’s van.
The tent was enormous, which I’d expected, and air-conditioned, which I hadn’t. Outside, the beach was already loud with equipment—scaffolding, speaker rigs, a generator the size of a small car humming away. The gasoline smell covered up the scent of the beach and put me in a foul—fouler—mood.
I thought about how she’d levitated the wax without blinking, looked at it like it had surprised her, then glanced back at me like I was an afterthought.
Then she’d run from me.
Like I was a footnote in my own van.
Chase Perez was no one’s footnote. I was their billboard, their walking advertisement, but like hell would I be written off like I didn’t hold two world titles. The shark was roiling in my chest, the most I had felt it in months.She ran, she got away.
“—want you to meet someone.” Derek was still talking. I tuned back in. “This is Marina. She’s basically the reason we’re here.”
The woman standing at the center of the tent was not what I’d expected, which was nothing, because I hadn’t been listening.
She was significant. That was the word my brain landed on.
Tall, dark hair silver at the temples, and absolutely stunning. Lean, with golden skin that barely showed her age. Definitely a MILF—well, maybe she would have been if something about her wasn’t sitting wrong in my gut.
She wore white linen wide-legged pants and a wrap top that left little to the imagination. She was smiling, but it was cut by the expression of someone who had never once been kept waiting. She appraised me, and I saw her decide who I was before I’d opened my mouth.
“Chase Perez.” She extended her hand, and I took it, a charge lighting up my sensors—her magic. Now, I didn’t know many witches, but this felt significantly different from the one I now knew intimately—whose magic had been bright and erratic. Marina’s felt cold and immense, like it was watching me from the depths. That was highly unsettling for someone who was supposed to be at the top of the food chain. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Likewise.” El Tiburón grinned. I was technically present.
“Mrs. Torres owns a substantial portion of the coastal property here,” Derek explained. “Very influential in the community. Getting her buy-in was?—”
Torres.
It could have been a coincidence.
But the longer I studied her, the more I saw it. The resemblance to the woman who was taking up a lot of extra space in my mind right now. But despite their similar beauty,they could not have been more opposite, and just the small spark of her magic made me sure of that.
