Page 47 of Wicked Deeds

“Why don’t we eat?” I suggested “Gwen can ask her questions afterwards.”

“Sure,” Pinky said easily. “What’s for lunch?”

“Amy’s vegetable lasagna and a few other things. Plus brownies for dessert.”

Pinky’s face lit up. “Oh, yay, Amy cooked.”

I laughed. “I’d take that as an insult, but I agree with you.”

I served the meal, thankful for Amy’s skills. For the first few minutes, we all ate, mostly in silence. Amy’s cooking deserved close attention. When I managed to slow down from scarfing pasta, I asked Pinky about her current project. She’d been working on a movie score on and off over the last year.

“It’s going well enough,” she said. “They’re behind in their primary filming, which makes it more complicated. I’ve got a lot of the score written, but fine-tuning it for the edit is always the hard part. But I’m sure it’ll all come together. It always does.”

If she was like Damon it came together by her pulling crazy long hours for several weeks at the end of the project. But, like Damon, she loved her job, so she probably loved that part of it, too.

“And Ivy?”

“She’s in the middle of an important case, so it’s hard to get much time together right now. Ivy’s my wife,” she added to Gwen.

“Cool. What does she do?” Gwen asked.

“She’s a lawyer. Corporate stuff. I don’t understand most of it, but she’s loves it.”

“Must be useful to have a lawyer in the family,” Gwen offered.

“If you need a lawyer,” I said, “I’m sure we can find you one.”

Gwen paused, a forkful of lasagna halfway to her mouth. “Why would I need a lawyer?”

“If you decide you want to stay, you’ll have to deal with visas and immigration. Which is lawyer territory.” I didn’t know a lot about green cards, other than they were hard to get.

Pinky blinked. “You want to stay in America?”

“I’m not sure,” Gwen said. “But the schools here are great. The colleges, I mean.”

“They are.” Pinky nodded, her tone encouraging. But she slid me a dubious glance.

“I haven’t quite decided what I want to do. I’d only finished my first semester when I, you know, went into the realm.” Gwen put her fork down, reached for her water glass.

“How long ago was that?” Pinky asked.

“A little over four years,” Gwen said.

“So you were eighteen when you went in?” Pinky shot me another look.

I wasn’t entirely sure what she was trying not to say. It would have been useful if she could talk to me mentally like Callum.

Without that, I decided to try to keep the conversation flowing, rather than trying to figure out what Pinky was worried about. “Yep, but, you know, plenty of people take a while to figure out what they want to do,” I said cheerfully. “So Gwen’s got plenty of time now she’s back.”

“And you’re sure you don’t want to go back? To the realm?” Pinky asked.

Gwen visibly shuddered. “Absolutely not. I was trying to get out for a while, even before Aubrey and Maggie came. But I hadn’t finished out my service with Morgain.”

Which was why she’d made a deal with Usuriel, which had been flat-out dumb in retrospect. It could have ended horribly for her if she’d wound up trapped in his court rather than with Lady Morgain.

“You left without your Lady’s permission?” Pinky asked, looking surprised.

“Technically, under the contract, no one without a familial claim can keep her in there,” I pointed out. I’d spent a long time familiarizing myself in more detail about the terms of the contract between the Fae and the Cestis since we’d all returned from the realm. I doubted this would be my last entanglement with some of the Fae Elders, and it was handy to know the letterof the law, even though understanding the legalese made my head hurt.

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