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“Maddox,” she shouted, waving her hands through the pale smoke. “Maddox! Where did you go?”
“Where you can’t touch him.”
Evangeline went still at that unwelcome female voice.
It was light and clear, almost cheery, despite the force behind the words. Power underlined the statement, reverberating through Evangeline’s skull. She couldn’t even be sure that the words had been spoken out loud, or that she had heard them in her head.
She couldn’t see anyone. She had no clue who was there with her, especially since it wasn’t Maddox.
But that voice?
Evangeline knew it almost as well as her own. It was the voice in the back of her head that often warned her about trying too hard to remember. After all, some things were best forgotten.
She clenched her fists. The same voice used to follow her in her dreams, inevitably turning them to nightmares. Right after her accident, it endlessly mocked her, causing setback after setback in her mental recovery. Eventually Evangeline had to make a choice: her memories or some peace.
So for three years she dealt with the nagging sensation that there was something she forgot. As soon as she gave up, the voice disappeared.
Was… was this what it was all about?
Maddox.
Evangeline gasped, taking in a lungful of the dense purple smoke. The gasp became a choking fit that left her short of breath and extremely dizzy. She tried to fight her way through it.
Where was she? What was going on? Last thing she remembered, Evangeline had gotten so hungry that she asked her captor for a meal. She made sure it wasn’t laced with a sedative by telling him to taste it—but it wasn’t in the steak.
It was in the water.
She stopped pushing at the smoke.
Holy shit. The bastard had drugged her again!
Was this a dream? It had to be. Coming up with a fantasy where Maddox groveled and begged her forgiveness? A dream where she gave in to her insane urge to touch the deranged shifter? A nightmare where the mocking voice reminded her again and again that she was worthless and should’ve died in the crash
?
Evangeline felt the old, familiar anger returning. For too long she’d done everything she could to claw some independence back. Nobody—not her parents, not Adam, not Maddox… not this bitchy voice—was going to take that from her.
“What is this? Who are you?” she demanded. “Why can’t I see you?”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
No shit. “I don’t want to be. Maddox kidnapped me. I want nothing to do with him. I only want to go back home!”
A disbelieving scoff echoed all around her. “What do you think you’re playing at? I can tell when you lie. Sure, you want to go home, but despite everything I’ve done to you, you still feel the connection. Don’t deny it,” the female voice snapped when Evangeline was about to do exactly that, “I know better. Are you trying to take my mate away from me?”
Mate? What mate? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maddox is mine. You’re wasting his time. He only gets one mate and that’s me.”
The voice seemed to grow closer. Or maybe it was just louder.
A heartbeat later, the smoke parted like the red sea, revealing a statuesque beauty with straight black hair, caramel-colored skin, and a pair of wicked purple eyes narrowed in obvious hate.
Evangeline could have forgiven the purple smoke. But the eyes? There was no denying it now. The voice that haunted her these last three years might belong to her conscience or even her battered self-esteem. But since it just manifested as a Para, she was beginning to understand that it might be more than that.
She was dealing with a witch.
“Look at you,” the female witch sneered. “A knock-off version of me. Do you really believe that he could ever love you when I exist in his world?”
