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“I feel likeyourunning this entire place is something you should have disclosed, like an STD.”
“I’d rather have magical gonorrhea than this, trust me.”
I still didn’t move an inch. Heowedme at least this.
He cut me a chilling look.
“Nice try, but if Troy’s wolf doesn’t scare me off, do you really think you could manage it?”
He snorted softly. “You fuck a werewolf and his knot—willingly. Who am I kidding? Nothing scaresyou.” He rubbed his hands over his face, as if he could get his mind working and the words out.
We stood there alone, in silence, for a long moment before he answered. “The Magistrate position transfers in one of two ways. First, the current one claims a successor.”
“And that was you?”
He nodded, a quick jerk of his head that screamed he didn’t like the topic. “The second way is that someone can claim the title by killing the current Magistrate. There must be witnesses that they were the one to kill the Magistrate, and it really just depends on if they can keep their head after they do it. See, some of the time others will stand up if the old Magistrate was better liked, or people suspect it was a fluke, so it is a risk to try that.”
And that made things clear.
“So you were the named successor,andyou killed the old Magistrate, meaning you’re the only option.”
“Until someone takes my head, yeah. They don’t have any rules in place to deal with this because no one has ever not wanted the job before, and without an official Magistrate, they can’t change it.”
“But you don’t want to be in charge here?” I thought about all the benefits this sort of power could give a person…
Grant was a man wholovedpower. How could he turn around and just walk away from the potential here?
“This place,” Grant said, voice soft, “it’s ugly, Ava. It’s diseased. Try to take it and you’ll just catch the illness yourself.”
“Couldn’t you change it, though? Turn it into whatever you want?”
“No. Some sicknesses are too deep to cut out. You have to let the whole fucking animal die.”
I set my hand on his arm when his expression turned dark and cold. Iwishedhe talked to me, that he actually told me what the hell he was thinking. It was like an entire lifetime of sorrow filled his head, but he wouldn’t let any of it out.
He looked down at where my hand was on his, as if he didn’t understand the touch, like it was something he couldn’t come to terms with. “You know I killed the council—you know what I’ve done.”
“So?”
“So, why are you sitting here trying to comfort me like I’m some victim?”
I frowned as I thought about it.
“Because I know you.”
“What do you know, exactly? Last I checked, I keep things from you, I’ve not told you important information, and you’veseensome of what I am capable of.” He lifted his gaze to mine, having lost that humor of his, the way he normally made everything into a joke. Instead, he had an intensity in his eyes that made me almost want to shrink back, to pull away.
I didn’t, though. “I know that when you could have saved yourself in hell, you didn’t. You barred a door and put yourself on the dangerous side of it. I know that you’re going to a place which is the last place you want to be now to help me and to help everyone else.” I held his arm tighter, as if trying to drive home to point. “So I know that if you killed those people, you had a damned good reason for it.”
He said nothing at first, his green eyes locked on mine, before he came forward in a rush and his lips were against mine. He carded his fingers in my hair to keep me still as he kissed me, his body crowding mine until something pressed against my back.
A wall?
Did I care?Not one bit.
I kissed him back, meeting all his urgency and need with my own. I curled my hands in the edges of his jacket, clinging to him, wrapping a leg around his hip.
Hewasgood. I didn’t care how these people saw him, or what he’d done. He wasn’t someone struggling with change, with trying to be anything, but the truth was that whatever he’d done, I believed he had a good reason for it.
