Page 66

A chair scraped behind me. River had given up pretending not to listen, and I felt his attention settle across the laundromat, that strange distance he'd carried all morning gone under something sharper. Predatory.

"What did they write?"

Sissily paused. Barely a second, but long enough for dread to curl through my stomach. "It says… She is spoken for."

For a moment I forgot there was supposed to be a response. The words lodged somewhere under my ribs, unsettling, while the laundromat carried on with insulting normalcy. The fan sweeping lazily from side to side. A saxophone drifting out of the old radio. My clothes tumbling behind glass.

Then the temperature dropped.

"Hazel?"

I swallowed, suddenly aware of how tightly I was holding the phone. "I'm here. Give me a second."

"Do you have any idea what that means?"

"Maybe."

Behind me, River hadn't moved at all, and somehow that bothered me more than the message did.

I had three answers and I hated every one of them. The Fae, which would mean one house had decided I was an heir, which meant the other had decided I was an abomination worth killing before the paperwork got complicated. Destin, which would mean a nine-hundred-year-old vampire had publicly staked some kind of claim on a witch standing inside his territory, and sooner or later I'd have to find out exactly what he believed he'd purchased.

Or something with a three-year head start on this game and a name nobody said out loud.

"I actually don't know what that means, girl." The lie wasn't quite large enough to qualify as a betrayal of trust between friends. I hoped.

"Call me when you do."

"I will."

"And Hazel?" The exhaustion in her voice softened something inside me. "Try not to get murdered before dinner. Amber made lasagna."

A laugh slipped out despite everything. "I'll do my best."

"Your best is historically terrible, you know that right?" She hung up before I could argue.

For a moment I stayed against the washing machine with the phone in my hand, staring at nothing. Then I became aware of River standing in the middle of the laundromat with his entire attention fixed on me.

"What happened?" The quietness of the question was deceptive.

I slipped the phone into my back pocket. "The Council sanctioned me." His expression barely changed. He'd heard enough of the conversation to know that already. "And apparently someone was eager to call dibs."

That got him. "Who?"

"Nobody knows. No seal, no signature, nothing anyone can trace. Whoever did it found a way onto the network without leaving so much as a supernatural fingerprint."

"They called dibs on what, exactly?"

I opened my mouth, then hesitated. I wasn't sure why until I looked at River and realized some part of me already knew he wasn't going to like the answer.

"Me." Even saying it aloud felt ridiculous. "The message was three words. She is spoken for."

River didn't react. Not immediately.

He simply went still, his expression giving me nothing while something far less controlled moved through the room around him. Cold crept across my skin, subtle at first, then sharp enough that I rubbed my hands over my arms.

"River."

His eyes met mine. The temperature dropped another few degrees.