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“I’ve seen no indication that there’s any conscious affinity. She deserves to know.”
“I deserve to know what?” Rose asked. Her fingers tensed around mine.
Lady Northcott sighed. “One of the enforcers who was with you during your interviews yesterday was bothered by something your father said during your interview, about our success against the demon depending on you. She asked permission to speak to him again this morning. That interrogation was conducted under truth compulsion while you were on your way to the confrontation.”
“And?” Rose said when the older woman hesitated. “My father’s been trying to guilt me into thinking the way he tried to bind me into a toxic consorting was necessary, not a crime. As if I’m any different from the other witches the Frankfords’ faction has wrung dry.”
“Oh, but you are,” Lady Northcott said. A shiver ran under my skin at her tone. “You’re one of the most powerful witches I’ve seen in my lifetime, Lady Hallowell. When I consider how little time you’ve had to hone your newly emerged abilities, probablythemost powerful.”
“I come from two strong magical families,” Rose said.
“You do. But it’s more than that.” Lady Northcott hesitated, and then pushed on. “Your father shaped you for this sort of greatness from your very beginnings. You were conceived under the influence of that demonic magic.”
Chapter Nine
Rose
Your father shaped you from your very beginnings.Even hours later, Lady Northcott’s words rang in my head. Wandering around the bedroom of the hotel suite the Northcotts had set me and my consorts up in wasn’t helping me escape. Everything around me was a reminder of the fears I’d provoked in the Assembly officials. They hadn’t felt safe letting me stay in the building with them anymore.
I forced myself to come to a stop on the hardwood floor and dragged in a breath of the lightly freesia-scented air. The tap of Kyler’s fingers against his tablet carried from the suite’s living area. After my initial shock had worn off with the comfort of my consorts around me, I’d encouraged him to go back to his research. He was looking for any records that might relate to the circumstances of my conception and birth. Gabriel had gone to join him with one of the laptops we’d borrowed.
I should be out there too, searching for more information that might help, doingsomethingto combat the demon’s threat. But my legs balked at the thought. What if I’d already hindered our progress there more than I’d helped?
My father had told his interrogator everything. He’d had to, once they knew the right questions to ask. He’d had demonic power in him when he’d gone to my mother the night I was conceived. He’d planned the timing; he’d sent that unnatural magic into her womb to encourage a child to grow—a child who’d have even more capacity for magic than any witch should. He’d kept encouraging it, with little boosts of power as he touched my mother’s growing belly, until just a few weeks before I emerged into the world.
Apparently he’d said he’d done it to free witching kind from the influence of the demons. He’d hoped that a witch with the enhancement of demonic strength would be able to seal the portal and prevent the Frankfords from ever reopening it. Maybe he’d told himself that was why he was doing it at the time, to get around any guilt he should have felt. I wasn’t sure I could believe he’d ever meant to attempt that plan once he realized how much he could enjoy the extra power himself.
Even if hehadmeant to go through with it, he’d planned to enslave me to a consort who didn’t give a shit about me and then force me into following his scheme, rather than telling me the truth and asking for my help like a halfway decent human being.
“Rose,” Seth said softly where he was sitting at the edge of the king-sized bed. He held out his hand to me. “Do you need to talk some more? Or just sit with me. You know you’re not in this alone.”
A pang ran through my chest, all the love I felt for him tangled with my horror at what I’d discovered. At what I’d allowed him and the other guys to bind themselves to. But it wasn’t as if I could hide my distress from him. I sat down next to him and leaned my head on his shoulder, as much for him as for me. His arm came around my waist.
“Maybe it would have worked,” I said. “What we tried this morning. Maybe if I hadn’t been there, if the demon hadn’t sensed that I had some kind of connection to it… Maybe the magic I sent into the mix actually worked against our purpose, since I didn’t know my spark might be tainted.”
“The demonic power from those two guys who went with you helped you push the demon back,” Jin pointed out from the armchair he’d settled into. “Any of that influence in you probably helped too. Maybe in this one case, it’s not a taint, it’s a bonus.”
“And there can’t be that much in you,” Damon said, stopping in the middle of his own restless pacing to fix his gaze on me. “I know what that monster feels like, being close to it. I’ve never gotten even the slightest hint of that feeling from you.”
“That just means the influence is buried deep. Or so merged with my spark it wouldn’t show unless I tried to bring it out.” I bit my lip. There was something in me, something twisted, strong enough that the demon had noticed from thirty feet away.
“It came at me, but it didn’t hurtme,” I said in a thin voice. “As if it saw me as an ally, not an enemy.”
“It doesn’t matter what it thinks,” Damon said. “Youknow you’re going to take it down. Fuck it and the whole Assembly.”
Seth gave him a chiding look and nestled me closer against his brawny body. “You know now,” he said. “You didn’t realize before, but now you can use that power to your advantage. Turn it against the demon. You won’t run out of magic the way the men who stole some of that power will.”
“If the Assembly decides to trust me enough to let me get involved again at all,” I said. “If the influence I’ve grown up with even works that way. Those men were regular people who took a little of that energy into themselves. I wasmadewith it. I…”
I was a monster too, wasn’t I? Some element of that creature that made my stomach turn and my nerves shiver ran through every particle of my being. I restrained a shudder now.
“You,” Seth said, soft but firm, “are still exactly the same woman I fell in love with. Nothing we found out today changes that.”
I looked up at him, needing to see the honesty of that statement gleaming in his gray-green eyes. He traced his fingers along my jaw and kissed me.
There was no reluctance, no hesitation in that kiss. His mouth met mine with all the hunger and affection he’d always shown me. It was a relief to lose myself in that heat, in the trickle of desire that turned into a flood as his tongue teased past the seam of my lips and his muscular chest brushed my breasts.
Damon was never one to be left out. As I fell deeper into Seth’s kiss, the mattress shifted at my other side. Damon’s hand came to rest on my waist, his lips brushing my bare shoulder.
