Page 39 of Heart of Thieves

I sense him pulling the trigger an instant before the gun goes off, barely enough time to avoid getting blasted, though the bullet does graze my skin as I vanish. It slams into the stone behind me, sending chunks everywhere.

True to my prediction, Magnus St. James fires off a string of expletives that would make the demon god of curses cry. I pass through him, angling toward Aethera.

And I try not to cast my eyes back to the little cottage on the hill with the two children playing ball outside.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LOLA

I stare at Estelle. “What do you mean, ‘If it was happening to him, too’? You think Nic is going to start killing people he thinks are sinners?”

Estelle shakes her head. “I came to see if his magic was also corrupting him.”

“What would that even look like?” The pit in my stomach gnaws harder.

“Well, with Laurel, the moonshard’s magic seems to feed on her guilt . . . so the worse she feels, the stronger it grows. What does the Liar’s power feed on?”

“Secrets.” I push my glasses up my nose with shaking hands. “And the lies people tell to cover them up.”

“So the more he lies, the stronger his power would grow. Have you seen him recently?”

The barrel of his gun pointed my direction flashes across my memory yet again. I close my eyes, tipping my head against the inside of the wardrobe. “He tried to shoot me last night. Laurel was there.”

“Laurel?” Estelle’s brows rise. “How did you know it was her?”

“I saw her in one of Nic’s secrets once.” A thought occurs, and my eyes fly open. “Wait. Do you think it’s possible he’s under Laurel’s control? That she was using her magic to make him shoot me?”

“It’s possible.” Estelle frowns. “The people under her control behave like puppets. Their movements are all jerky, and often their expressions won’t match the situation. Did you notice any of that with him last night?”

I purse my lips, thinking back to the moment the gun went off. He was a ways down the street, but I recognized him instantly, his scar glowing like a beacon across his stony face. He looked as though he were righting himself after having lost his balance, but his movements were steady, his arm holding the gun purposeful in its angle. There hadn’t been terror in his eyes—only a grim-faced resolution hinting at a return of all those walls I thought I’d broken through during the tournament.

Maybe I never did. Maybe he never had a fortress guarding his heart. Maybe that was his magic, slowly choking the humanity out of him.

Maybe Nic’s gone, and the only thing left is the Liar.

“No,” I whisper, meeting Estelle’s eyes, throat closing over. “It seemed like he was fully in control.”

Estelle purses her lips and presses a hand to my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Lola.”

Tears bite at my vision, but I blink them back. I will not cry for him, not when he was clear from the beginning that he was a villain, that he was a liar, that he did not have my best interests at heart. This is not the same as it was with Enzo, who lied but seemed to care for me. I don’t know where Nic stands. I don’t even know who he is.

Or who he was, if his magic has truly taken over.

What are he and Laurel up to? Is he helping her hunt down sinners? Is that why he tried to shoot me?

And if the magic has taken them over, how long before Enzo succumbs, too?

What will it do to me—to my heart beating in his chest—if it does?

“We have to stop it,” I say. “We have to get that blasted magic out of them.”

Estelle sighs, mopping both hands over her face. “I know. That’s why I’m looking for them. I just haven’t been able to come up with a way to do it yet.”

I shove out of the wardrobe and start pacing, adrenaline zinging through every limb as my thoughts whir. “Enzo’s been trying to create his own moonshard to break his curse. What if we do that? Use a moonshard to cast new magic that could nullify the power that’s already there?”

Estelle sits on the lip of the wardrobe, propping her chin on her hand. The lines around her eyes deepen with fatigue, and the daylight streaming through the window highlights the redness in the whites of her eyes. “I don’t know, Lola. Fighting cursed magic with more magic? Seems like a recipe for destabilizing it further.”

“Right.” I resume my pacing, tearing my hands through my curls. Then I halt as my brain lands on another idea. “Wait. A moonshard is made by channeling starlight into a shard of raw voratium, right? And Nic, Enzo, and Laurel are starblessed, which, according to everything I’ve read, means they’re essentially stars. What if . . . what if we used lumenoring equipment to channel magic from the three of them into a new shard? One that’s stable enough to hold it?”