“This one?” She points to me. “Does she matter to you?”
She moves closer to me.
He bares his teeth as he struggles against the binds, veins protruding from his throat and his arms as metal-on-metal clangs ominously. If he wasn’t Jase, I’d be terrified of him. But she doesn’t look afraid, seems confident in the way she’s restrained and disabled him. When she takes another step toward me, Jase growls a deep, guttural noise.
I swallow while she squats beside me, still looking at him. Now there’s a smirk on her face.
“Maybe you should tell me where they are to keep me from harming hairs on this pretty head, hm?”
“Where what are?” he demands.
She reaches out and toys with my ponytail. I shrink at her touch, but there’s nowhere to go.
“Hands off. The artifacts are in my bag,” he grinds out, and the sound of metal-on-metal sounds again clanging as he tries to break free.
His binds don’t budge.
“Those things in your bag are decoys,” she states.
Jase looks at her like she’s delusional before he spits, “Bullshit.”
“I’m telling you… those are meaningless trinkets from the Young Coven’s ridiculous little shop, containing zero magic and no ties to my family whatsoever. I want my ancestor’s wand and that cauldron and I want them immediately.”
“I brought what I was given,” Jase clips.
She stares at him in an assessing way for a second, then yanks on my ponytail hard, making me grunt with pain.
Metal strains against that pole as Jase again does his best to pull free.
“Jase! You’ll hurt yourself!” I warn.
His eyes flit to me and he growls again. A long, low primal-sounding growl that feels like it has all my hair as well as all my nerve endings standing on end.
She snickers and looks about to say something when a phone rings. She straightens up and pulls the ringing device from her pocket, grimacing and touching the screen. When she puts it away, it almost immediately starts ringing again.
Her mouth tightens before she glares at us. “Not a word or you’ll be sorry.” She answers, “Can I call you in a couple minutes? I’m smack dab in the midst of pruning some very temperamental shrubs and–” She’s cut off by a loud female voice I clearly hear on the other end of the call. “Alta! What are youactuallydoing right now? Do not lie!”
“Why would I lie to you?” she asks, stepping away from me, climbing the stairs. “But honestly, I’ll call you back shortly. I just need a couple of moments.”
I strain to listen as she gets farther away and still clearly hear the voice on the other end. “Tell me you’re not interfering with that wand Aviva unearthed.”
My eyes dart to Jase’s. He also heard that.
She doesn’t answer right away so the voice speaks again. “Alta, you’re toeing the line and my patience is thin. Explain what you’re doing and why. Does this have to do with Eduardo?”
Alta doesn’t answer but her face changes to distress and I can tell she’s trying to think of an answer on the fly.
The woman on the phone’s voice is fading but I make out, “It’s too dangerous. We’ll find another way. And this is a direct order. Do not lay hands on it. I’ll deal with The Collective to have our property returned to us. Just release them. We don’t need additional problems with the Youngs.”
“It wasn’t with them. They carried decoys,” Alta says and she’s about to disappear through the doorway, so I scream my loudest, “Help! She’s kidnapped us!”
The woman sprints with surprising speed down the stairs and backhands me, hard, fury radiating in her eyes as the back of my head hits the pole behind me and fully rings my bell, making my vision blur.
Ow!
The loud and murderous roar that comes out of Jason is his wolf, though it’s not his wolf there chained against that pole.
My eyes are squeezed shut as I take a minute with the radiating pain until I hear the thunderous bang with a near-deafening reverb and see the beam he’s attached to has hit the floor.