Page 61 of Wicked Endeavors

“Did you approach me at the opening ball to investigate me?” she asked, hating the fact that she sounded hurt. “To see if you needed to recruit or stop me?”

“At first, maybe,” said a new voice, familiar and unwanted. Bas Arroyo appeared in the doorway with Teo right behind him, both watching her as if she were a cornered animal and they needed to keep her from attacking. Bas stood beside Noelia, who now refused to meet Marisol’s eyes. “It’s more that I wanted to see what you’d do.”

“Lord Ruiz and my father have their own plans for the witches and their magic,” Teo added. “But it’s not what you think. We couldn’t figure out how committed you were to their cause or what you were getting out of this. We still can’t.”

“The Criterion is going to change Coventry for the better. They actually care about the people here,” Bas murmured. “I’m sorry we lied to you, Leya. I really am. But this close to victory, we couldn’t take a chance on you.”

“Until now.” Noelia had the nerve to sound hopeful, as if these half-baked explanations had done anything but make Marisol feel even more foolish. She stared into the eyes of the boy whom she’d kissed, the one who had made her feel something good for the first time since he’d ruined her life, and she felt the old, familiar urge to slit his throat. Before her stood three liars whom she’d mistaken for friends, and she didn’t know which one of them she was angriest at. She didn’t even have time to figure it out. They were standing between her and the exit.

She drew her daggers.

“Now, wait, let’s just talk about—”

She was on Bas in a second. Noelia jumped aside, and Teo swore, but Bas managed to squirm out of the way before she could plunge the dagger into his shoulder. His hand came up to grab her wrist and yank it backward, forcing her to drop the dagger. She pressed the other one against his throat, only to feel it disintegrating in her grip. Noelia’s reaper magic had destroyed her blade, but it was no match for her rage.

Marisol threw her hand back and, drawing on her morpher magic, transformed the ground beneath Noelia into a pit. The scream as she fell satisfied a cold, cruel part of Marisol. She hoped Noelia had broken something down there.

Her head ached. Blood pooled from her nose. She reached up to wipe it away and lost her balance when Bas rolled them over.

“Leya, I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” he hissed as he attempted to pin her down. “I wanted to help you, but you wouldn’t be honest with me.”

“This is what you call being honest with me?” Marisol hated that her body still felt warm from his closeness, that her mouth remembered the taste of his. She hated that she still wanted the life they’d never had, where the Seawards had never been murdered and falling in love with him was the natural path she’d been walking down. She hated that he had never promised her anything, that she had known there was no future with him, and she was still hurt by his lies. “All of you laughing behind my back, keeping secrets—”

“You”—he grunted as she kneed him in the side—“are literally”—he grabbed her hand before she could carve a hole into his ribs—“wearing someone else’s face”—he slammed her wrist against the ground until she let go of her second dagger—“right now.”

Marisol smashed her forehead into his, breathing through the explosion of pain for the satisfaction of his profanity.

She shoved him off and scrambled to her feet. In that time, Teo had collected her knife. The way the prince was staring at her broke her already broken heart.

“You’re a witch?” he breathed, eyes wide with disappointment.

“No,” Marisol whispered back. “I am so much worse.”

She drew the rondel dagger that Noelia had gifted her and closed the distance between them. Teo was wielding her knife with the comfort of an expert in weaponry, but it was balanced for her and not for him. Every time he was too heavy-handed with a dagger made for light, quick movements, Marisol was able to break his guard. Her world narrowed to this golden-skinned prince and his deceitful mouth, any chance of a relationship gone up in flames between them. He breathed heavily from the effort of just holding her off, and that alone made her want to smile.

“Was any of it real?” he had the nerve to ask her.

She sneered at him. “You tell me, Your Highness. Why did you decide to help me steal what you could apparently have simply asked for?”

He blocked her next strike and then dodged the kick she’d thought he hadn’t seen coming. “My father wanted—”

“Since when do you care what your family wants?” Another strike, and her dagger went flying from his hand. “What about what you want? What about what I want?”

But it had been a feint. With his hand free, Teo reached behind himself to grab soil from a potted plant and throw it in her face. Her eyes watered. Her mouth tasted of blood. He grabbed her arm and flipped her over his shoulder, but Marisol was familiar with the move from hours of training. She twisted to land on her feet, changed her center of gravity, and flipped him.

His back hit the wall. Marisol blinked the last of the dirt from her eyes and pressed her rondel dagger to his throat.

“DON’T!”

Bas was somewhere behind her, but she didn’t dare let his voice distract her. Her eyes bored into Teo’s, and it was so different from their many dances. There, when she had him at her mercy, was the regret and guilt. There was also fear, and there was even affection. Marisol didn’t have to ask again if any of it had been real. Even with her knife dangerously close to ending his life, Teo still looked at her as if she were the world.

“Please, Leya,” Bas whispered. “Don’t. We can figure this all out, the four of us.”

“There has never been ‘the four of us.’ It’s always been the three of you and then me. You killed my person, the one who was always on my side. I thought you—” Her voice cracked, though her grip didn’t waver. She had really believed that she could be friends with these people, that she had found something to care about again. Now, the only thing keeping two of them from hurting her was how close she was to killing the third. They didn’t care about her. Maybe they never had. “You wanted to know what I’d do? Well, this is it. I wanted you to suffer, Bas. I wanted you to suffer the way you’d made me suffer all those years ago, to take from you exactly what you took from me.”

“We shouldn’t have lied,” Bas said. “But we’re all liars. We can decide, right here and now, to move forward knowing the truth. If you kill the prince, that can never happen.”

Teo’s throat bobbed beneath the blade. She wasn’t pressing hard enough to cut him, not yet, but she was fascinated by how weak he was at her hands. She remembered how powerless and foolish she had felt in Cloverdale Hall, and it delighted her to turn the tables this way. To claim some of it back. To not just stew in her anger, but to weaponize it against those who had made her angry.