high, I leave the Scarlet Room and almost bump into Elle in the hallway.
“I was just looking for you.” She smiles and tosses her strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder. “I’m heading over to the school to pick up some paperwork and was wondering if you wanted to come along for the drive?”
I look back into the Scarlet Room and see Dmitri licking his lips. Gross. “I’d love to get out of here for a while.”
Elle and I leave the castle and get into the back of a Range Rover with two members of Edmund’s pack in the front.
On the drive to the school, I send Ash a quick text telling him I’m with Elle, and then she fills me in on her plans to open a second school. Her eyes light up when she talks about her work. She’s truly passionate.
When we turn down the unmarked laneway to the school and drive across the covered bridge over the black-water lake, I marvel once again at the beautiful location. We come to a stop at the entrance of the school that resembles a gingerbread house, and Elle and I exit the car and head inside.
“Come on. I’ll show you my office. It’s right down the hall. It’ll only take me a minute to gather up the papers I need,” Elle says.
I follow her down the hall and into her office. I stop short, stunned at who I see there.
Franco Rossi.
“I heard you were looking for me, Queen Seraphina. That you had signed my death warrant. Well, here I am.” Franco spreads his arms out wide, his dark eyes shining with hatred.
Immediately, the frosty sting of his power that I remember so well abrades my skin while the slippery tentacles of his vampire mind control try to penetrate my brain and take over my will.
Without hesitation, I pull on my power, and it rockets to life. I throw my hands out and launch my energy toward Franco, beating him back several steps and snapping the tendrils of his magic. Then he drops to his knees as if ducking out of the way of something.
My energy slams back into me full force, smashing the back of my head against the heavy timbers paneling the wall and my world goes black.
I come to facedown with a sharp pain shooting through my shoulder. My blazer has been removed, and my blouse is half-off. Turning my head to the side, I see a man I don’t know standing over me. He’s dressed as a doctor—masked and in scrubs.
“There.” The doctor drops a tiny object into a nearby stainless-steel bowl with a ping. “You were right. She was wearing a microchip.”
Franco comes into my line of sight and picks up the bowl. “You won’t be needing this any longer. But I can use it to send your husband on a merry chase across the planes when he notices you’re missing.”
The doctor stitches up my shoulder, and I feel the pull of each stitch. He obviously didn’t bother with any freezing before he cut me open. At least I have my wits about me. Time to start using them. I sit up on the examination table, pull my blouse closed and glare openly at Franco. “What happened to me? What did you do to my magic?”
“Nothing.” Franco shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly. “I didn’t do anything to your magic. It is as it always was. You’re very powerful. I knew that you must be, and that I probably wouldn’t be able to suppress your magic again.”
When Franco and Nicky kidnapped me, they’d used a bracelet armed with a suppression spell to temporarily render me powerless.
“So we had to figure out something else,” Elle says, coming to stand alongside Franco. “With Franco’s knowledge of your power, I was able to create a binding curse specifically for your magic and place it on the school. The curse won’t allow your magic to escape. If you use your power, it will continue to ricochet until it dissipates on its own.” Elle glances around the room. “As we’re in a cement-walled subbasement, that will take time and destroy everything in its path, including you.”
While I was kidnapped, Franco used his vampire magic to enter my mind for a short period of time before I was able to push him back out. That must be when he learned enough about my power to help Elle create the curse. Turning inward, I look for my magic and find it with no problem. It’s right there—a raging inferno inside of me. But the binding curse on the school makes using my power extremely dangerous, like throwing a grenade into a room and then walking in right behind it. I might kill whoever is in the room, but I would kill myself, too.
“If you attempt to leave, my binding curse will enact, and you will be in excruciating pain. You are imprisoned here. Imprisoned, ironically enough, by your own power.”
Keep your head, Nina. Panicking is the worst thing you can do. I give Elle an appraising stare. “You’re obviously not human.”
“No, I’m not. I’m a witch. Black magic,” Elle says in her sweet, little-girl voice.
Fucking black witches. “Why are you holding me here?”
“It’s just business. It’s nothing personal for me.” Elle smiles brightly as if that should make a difference.
“And you’re working with Franco Rossi. Why?” I ask.
“Enough with all this talking,” Franco shouts. “You don’t have to tell her everything, Elle.”
“What difference does it make? She’s never leaving here. She might as well know why.” Elle focuses her attention back on me. “Franco and I are like-minded. We have a mutual goal. We want the same thing.”
“Which is what?” I ask.
“You.” Elle tips her head in Franco’s direction. “Franco wants you dead. And I want your blood. You see, Edmund told me about the feud between your family and the Rossis. Edmund gets chatty after sex.” Elle giggles. “I saw an opportunity to capitalize on this information, and I took it. I have ambitions, and so does Franco. The enemy of your enemy is your friend and all of that. So I contacted Franco and we struck a bargain.”
“What kind of bargain?” I have to keep her talking while I try to use the mate bond to contact Ash. In my mind, I can see the suspension bridge that symbolizes our communication channel. The bridge stretches out over the chasm into the mist, but there’s nothing on the other side. I scream into the chasm, but the binding curse reflects my voice back to me.
“Franco and I are both in the business of human blood. He needs it to live, and I need it to fire my spells. It takes a lot of blood to maintain the concealment spell that hides my witch nature so I can appear human.” Elle absently touches the small gold medallion hanging around her neck. “That’s where my idea for a school for girls originally came from. Luckily for us, human society throws lots of young women away. Women nobody ever looks for. I’d been getting girls from various sources for years but then started working exclusively with Franco. He’s not opposed to kidnapping young women, trafficking them to further his own objectives, as well as keeping some to enjoy himself.”
I know what he is capable of all too well. “You and I aren’t enemies, Elle. We didn’t even know each other until a couple of days ago.”
“You’re right. We aren’t enemies. You’re simply a means to an end. A way for me to get what I want,” Elle says.
“Which is what?” I ask, trying the mate bond again. The binding curse adds a painful pressure to the shouts echoing in my head.
“I want to earn a spot in a coven. I’ll be the first in my family to get one. My mother and aunts never made it into a coven and are just low-level witches. My original plan was to pose as a human, seduce Edmund and then kill him—gaining respect and notoriety. Killing a member of the Council of Seven would be a major coup. But fate is cunning, and it brought you to me, Nina. You accepted Edmund’s invitation and fell right into my lap. You’re a powerful enchantress queen. You’re on the council. You killed your own father, a demi-god and Zeus’s son no less. You killed Silas Duke and then you killed Thane, fae royalty. Your profile is much higher than Edmund’s. You became the bigger fish.”
“So it was me or Edmund? One of us has to be sacrificed so you can join a coven?” I don’t know a lot about black witch covens but I do know there are only a handful of them, and each resides on its own sovereign island on the preternatural plane. The covens rule over all other black witches Earthside.
“Yes, each coven only has thirteen witches. A witch can’t apply to become a member until one of the thirteen dies of natural causes or is killed. There’s a spot open right now in the Stirling coven, and witches all over Earthside are vying for it. I need to do something spectacular to get noticed. Killing you would be spectacular.” Obsession glitters in Elle’s cornflower-blue eyes. “There’s only one time a witch can be accepted into a coven, and that is on the most important day for us—October thirty-first. On Halloween, I will stand naked before the Stirling coven and present a chalice of your blood to them as an offering. If they accept it, and I know they will, I will vow to be loyal to them for the rest of my life, and in exchange, I will gain all of the illicit knowledge and power that comes with being a full-fledged black magic witch.”
“No more talking. I want her dead, and you want her blood. Let’s get on with it.” Franco advances on me. “I’m the one carrying out the death warrant now, Seraphina. Does that amuse you? It certainly amuses me.”
I leap up onto the examination table, hands raised. “If I’m dying, I’m taking all of you with me.” I throw just enough power at Franco to knock him off his feet, giving him another taste of what I can do. Hopping down from the table, I hope the majority of my power will miss me when it bounces back. It hits me in my newly-operated-on shoulder and my heart pounds loudly in my ears from fear and pain.
Franco gets up from the floor and looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. “I can hear the blood pumping through your heart. I can sense the extra blood volume in you. You’re pregnant.”
I keep my hands raised but say nothing. Please no. I call for Ash again using our bond, and the pressure in my head blooms into an agonizing headache.
“She’s pregnant. I’d stake my reputation on it.” Franco points at me and looks between Elle and the doctor. “That would change our plans.”
“A rapid blood test will tell us for sure,” the doctor says before jabbing a needle into my arm and withdrawing a small amount of blood. He walks over to the counter, his back to us as he works.
“Let me get a taste of her blood. I can confirm in an instant if she’s pregnant,” Franco yells.
“No, her blood isn’t for you. It’s for me. You get her death, and I get her blood. That’s the deal,” Elle shouts back. “I don’t trust you not to drink her dry and leave me with nothing.”
The doctor turns back around to face us. “The pregnancy test is positive.”
I stop breathing and press a hand to my flat stomach. I’m pregnant. Joy erupts inside me and then is quickly crushed by reality. I’m carrying Ash’s baby, but I’m captured, my blood and body trophies for my captors.
Elle claps her hands. “This just keeps getting better and better. Two for the price of one.”
“New plan. We hold her until the baby is viable. Then we cut it out of her and I keep it as a replacement for my son.” Franco flicks his gaze to Elle before turning back to me. “You took everything from me. My son. My territory. My rule. Now I’m going to take everything from you.”
“We can hold her until the end of October. That’s six months away. Then we kill her. I need her blood for the ceremony on Halloween night, whether the baby will live or not.”
“Deal.” Elle and Franco shake hands while I vow silently to protect my baby, no matter the cost.
