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“Sweeney,” Cohen warns, like he knows what I’m doing. Merritt lets out another grunt of pain. I shut the connection down before snapping the spell. I gasp in a breath when I do, because fuck, that hurts. Then I snap the tracker spell. And finally, the protection spells.
I’m sweating and trembling from the effort and the pain. “It’s done,” I mutter, cracking open my eyes to find Cohen watching me closely. He nods once and then turns his attention back to Merritt.
I watch as the wrinkle in her brow eases, and her breathing returns to normal. But her eyes don’t open and she doesn’t wake up from whatever Cohen’s done to her.
“Why isn’t she waking up?” I ask, looking back at Cohen. His hand lifts, some kind of dust on his palm, that he blows directly at my face. I jerk back, but not fast enough to avoid the particles of whatever it is. They creep into my nostrils, my lungs.
I cough, trying to dislodge the dust, but it doesn’t go anywhere. “What the fuck?” I slur, just before darkness rushes in and I pass out.
I wake up in the dark. I’m not sure if it’s that I’m in a room with no light, or if I’ve been out for so long it’s night. The air from my lungs doesn’t go anywhere when I breathe out, clinging to my face, and that is when I realize it’s dark because I have a hood over my head.
I try to move to pull the fabric off, but my arms don’t move. I can’t feel anything holding them down. No rope, or metal handcuffs, no satin strips of fabric, but when I try to move them again, they still don’t go anywhere.
“Fucking magic,” I grumble. Somewhere nearby, a deep chuckle echoes. Actually echoes, so the space I’m in must be relatively large and empty.
“I’m glad you’re awake, Ro.” Cohen.
I blink against the black fabric, and memories come rushing back to me. “Oh, you asshole, I’m going to kill you.”
There’s the sound of footsteps coming closer, and then the hood is pulled off my head. I blink at the sudden light, willing my eyesight back as quickly as possible. When it does, I find Cohen standing over me with a smug look on his face. What he has to be smug about, I have no fucking clue.
I glare at him for a solid minute before I look away, taking in our surroundings and trying to figure out where the fuck we are.
A cave.
That is the answer. Though where exactly this cave is, I have no idea.
The walls are dark gray stone. They look man made, smooth and not rough like a natural cave. There are lit candles giving off flickering light, but it doesn’t reach the far wall, so I’m not sure how big this cave actually is.
Behind Cohen, I can just make out what looks like broken wooden boxes and, oh, holy penguins. Bones. Human, I think, but I’m not sure.
A shudder works its way over my body and I hope like hell I won’t end up like the owner of those bones. Decaying in a dark cave with no one aware of where I breathed my last breaths.
Cohen shifts, drawing my attention back to him.
“How long was I out?” I ask. If he answers and he’s truthful, I can get an idea of if I’m still on the island, or if he’s somehow taken me across the water.
He doesn’t answer, so I look back at him. He’s just watching me. His icy green eyes inscrutable. “What?” I snap when I can’t take the silence any longer.
He sighs and runs a hand down his face. “This isn’t the way I wanted this to go, Ro. Not in the slightest.”
“Oh, and how did you see kidnapping and abduction going, Cohen?”
“Aren’t those the same thing?”
“You brought me here to chat semantics?” I scoff, tugging at my arms, even though there’s nothing to loosen, no way for me to escape until he wills it.
He sighs, drags a chair over so it’s facing the one I am magically strapped to and sits, leaning forward so his muscled forearms are braced on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. He’s shed his security guard shirt, so he’s just in a white tee and navy slacks.
Tattoos cover both his arms. There’s a giant snake curling up his arm, with its head resting just at his wrist and its tail disappearing under his sleeve. I can see the runes burned into his skin. The number of them rival what I know Gideon has, but where Gideon has blended his into larger tattoos, hiding them in the negative space and swirls and lines of his tattoos, Cohen’s are blatantly runes. No attempt to hide them. I already knew he was a witch, but this just confirms it even more.
he must be a member of Hand and Tomb.
“What do you want, Cohen?” I ask.
His ice green eyes run over me. “You. I want you.” My heart stops before it begins to beat double time, and I’m not entirely sure it’s from fear. What the hell is wrong with me? He holds my gaze as his simple statement sinks in, then he looks away. “I want you to reach your full potential.”
There is no reason at all that his words shouldn’t make me shiver in fear and not with an entirely different, entirely inappropriate emotion.Sweet baby kittens.
