Page 121 of Heart of Thieves

Nic raises his eyes to meet mine, and they’re glassy and full of an emotion I’ve very rarely seen on him. Rage.

“Laurel,” he says through clenched teeth. “This is not what the gods want. Paol was a good man.”

“If he was good,” Laurel says simply, taunting with my voice, “then I wouldn’t have had power over him.”

Nic shakes his head. “That’s not true.”

But Laurel is already turning me away, scanning her army with my eyes until she lands on a shadow off to the side. One I recognize instantly with a bolt of terror.

Soren stalks forward on disjointed limbs, nostrils flaring with panic. I shudder as Laurel jolts my hand out to pull the pistol from his belt and offer it to Nic. He takes it with a shaking hand while still supporting Paol’s body with the other.

“Hold that for me, will you, love?” my mouth coos, and my vocal cords ache with the effort of resisting.

My magic rises yet again, unbidden, and the world swims, the Warthington priest’s rasping breaths roaring in my ears.

No. Not again. Not like this.

Yet no matter how hard I try to stop my fingers from moving, they rise to my throat, fishing among my pendants until they find an empty one. My arm jerks forward like a puppet’s to press it to Soren’s collarbone.

But then pressure releases in my eyes—and only my eyes. I can move them.

I immediately meet Nic’s gaze, pleading. Begging my mouth to scream at him to stop this, my hands to pull the gem away from Soren’s skin, my body to run. Nic stares at me, jaw working, a vein pulsing in his jaw as his hand tightens on the pistol, which he keeps pointed at the cobblestones. I see the whirring of his mind in the lines around his eyes, the unblinking, piercing stare, the furrow in his brow. He realizes exactly what Laurel is doing the moment I do.

She’s using his own compassion against him. Whatever the reason is that she cannot control his body the way she’s taken over mine, she wants to make him bow to her whims all the same—and she knows draining one of my own Tentacles of their soullight will break me.

And Nic will never let me break.

It’s cold. It’s cruel.

Shoot me! I want to shout. I will come back. Soren won’t!

Magic blossoms inside me, and Soren’s nostrils flare as his skin where my voratium rests against it begins to glow a faint, pale green.

Please, I beg Nic with my eyes as tears sting at their corners, wishing I could scream it aloud, terrified I’ll never be able to again. Help me.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

LOLA

Terror clamps a fist around my heart as I ripple through the crowd, noncorporeal with Enzo’s magic. I vanished the instant Nic told me to hide a few minutes ago, and when it became clear Laurel was going to toy with us, I slipped through the motorcar’s door and skirted the crowd to get a better angle on the scene.

First, I tried to access Laurel’s magic. I figured all I needed to do was cut off her control over Enzo and the others, just like I’d cut off Nic’s illusions in the past. How hard could it be?

But as soon as I opened myself up to her magic, it became clear this would be far trickier than I anticipated. I’d understood both Nic’s and Enzo’s magic a lot more before I first tried my hand at it; Laurel’s was utterly foreign to me. No matter how hard I tried to clamp down on it, it slipped through my fingers, icy, slimy, wrong.

Then Paol jerked forward out of the crowd, and Laurel used Enzo’s fingers to press voratium to his chest. Panicking as Enzo’s terror ballooned in my chest, I reached for Enzo’s magic to cut it off, but as soon as I brushed the glow of his power, the Unbreakable Lie erupted in my veins. The more desperately I grasped at it, the more feverish it became.

And then Paol dropped, and Enzo’s pain razed through me.

I’m still wobbling now, staring at the scene ahead, scrambling to figure out how to fix this as Enzo’s mouth makes words that sound utterly foreign in his voice, as Soren is puppeted forward, as Enzo’s terror bleeds into madness that has my whole body shivering.

Enzo presses empty voratium to Soren’s skin.

No. I cannot let this happen. Cannot let her break Enzo like this.

I grab for Nic’s magic, dragging it in with everything I am.

The Unbreakable Lie roars ever louder inside me, holding the power captive.