Page 6 of A Fury Of Shadows

“So, you’re not living in sin, former queen of my heart?” he said with a deceptively innocent expression.

“Where are you going with this?” Mae asked warily.

Popo side-eyed Cortes and Anya slyly. “In that case, you should have a ménage-à-trois with my Enrique and—mmmph?!”

Sable had smacked the parrot in the face with a wing.

“You totally deserved that,” Cortes told his familiar coldly while Anya flushed.

Derrick grimaced. “How the heck does a parrot even know what a ménage-à-trois is?”

“Don’t look at me,” Cortes grumbled. “That bird was a pervert before I met him.”

“He’s right,” Mae said thinly.

Popo spat out a feather and avoided Sable’s glare.

CHAPTER3

Mae sighedand rubbed the back of her neck. “How about we stop here for the day and resume our training tomorrow?”

A contrite expression dawned on Derrick’s face. “I’m afraid Karin and I will be leaving New York after we have dinner with Bryony tonight.”

Mae stared. “Oh.”

“Alas, our time here is over,” Karin said regretfully.

They’d decided that two members of the High Council would come to New York every week to help with Mae’s training. It had been Karin and Derrick’s turn this time.

“As much as we’d like to stay and knock you about every day, we have to get back to our covens,” Derrick said drily. “Regina and Isabelle will be replacing us from tomorrow.”

“You need to watch out for that Regina,” Karin warned. “She cheats.”

Regina Nox was the High Priestess of the Las Vegas coven, a larger-than-life character Mae had met at the Annual Grand Meeting of covens in Philadelphia. She was close friends with Barbara Nolan, the head of the Chicago coven, as well as the divine allies Mae had yet to meet.

“Enrique told me Vlad is a potential consort for the Witch Queen,” Anya said quietly as they made their way out of the warehouse to the town cars waiting for them.

The unexpected question sent a jolt of surprise through Mae and sobered her up. “He is.” Her belly knotted at the thought of the man she had rejected in favor of Nikolai. “He was.”

Anya’s tone grew apologetic. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. It’s just—”

She faltered. Her gaze darkened as it locked on Cortes’s back. Sable crooned softly and brushed the witch’s cheek with her feathers, no doubt sensing the tumultuous emotions reflected in her eyes. Anya squared her shoulders and finally met Mae’s stare.

“Considering I’m the one responsible for what happened to Nikolai, I want nothing more than for you to break the spell I put on him and bring him back to our side,” she said steadily. “But if you were to fail. If there was no way to rescue him. Would you take Vlad as your consort?” She bit her lip. “The Witch Queen…needs someone at her side.”

Her words brought all of Mae’s deepest fears to life and had her stomach churning with dread. She couldn’t deny that those same questions had crossed her mind. Nor that she struggled to find an answer that would soothe her soul. Try as she might, she could not.

She cared for Vlad. Deeply. And she couldn’t deny the physical attraction between them. But her heart belonged to Nikolai. And she couldn’t imagine that changing for a long, long time.

“I…don’t know,” Mae said miserably.

Anya accepted her answer with a diplomatic silence.

The witch’s question filled Mae’s mind as she said goodbye and collected her Vespa from the underground parking lot of the New York coven.

They hadn’t found any sign of where the Dark Council had disappeared to after they’d abducted Nikolai. The hideouts he’d told them about, including the mansion in Budapest where he’d spent most of his time as an adult while he’d still been living under his father’s roof, had been deserted when the magic community sent their people out to investigate them.

Mae suspected the reason Vedran had gone to ground was to keep her away from Nikolai for as long as possible.

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