Page 69 of Venomous Lies
“You’ve seen me?” I rumbled, my curiosity getting the best of me.
“I saw him at the greenhouse. The magick took over, then you collapsed. He was watching over you, and he completely ignored me and Wells,” he replied darkly as he finally pushed off the wall and started to walk toward us.
“What makes you think that was me?”
“With those tattoos?” he replied as he arched his brow. “Who else could it be?”
My gaze immediately swept him from head to toe, registering for the first time that he was standing there in just sweatpants and nothing else.And given the look of things, he doesn’t have boxers on underneath either.
My attention immediately snapped back to the incubus. He had come to a stop beside Isla, though he was staring at me, a challenge in his gaze.
But I didn’t care about that right now. No, at the moment, the only thing I could focus on was him having seen me before.
How could he see me?Whycould he?
A wave of power slammed into the room.
Books, plants, glass flew everywhere, and we all hit the ground, trying to protect ourselves.
Echo and I reached for Isla at the same time, dragging her under the heavy table as she cried out.
Flashes of purple sparks ignited, and I instinctively knew that Isla’s mate was searching for her.
That reunion will not be happening here.
Whatever issues she was having with reaching him, it was evident that the bone fae was having no such struggle.
“You have to leave. Now,” I said hoarsely, my urgency clear as my volume increased. “And I’m very sorry, but this is going to hurt.”
Without giving them a chance to think about what I was saying, I focused on the feel of the room, shoving aside the power building, and used every bit of mental control to shut them out. At the end of the day, I might be in Isla’s mind, but this space…
This space wasmine—a declaration I thundered into the void before the power fell away.
In its wake…silence.
The room as a whole looked as if it had never been touched, though their presence lingered in the spots of blood on my bed and the hint of sex in the air.
Bricriu was formidable.
It was a truly fearsome mate that my beastie had bound herself to. Hopefully, the others that found their way to her side were equally as gifted because my witch would need all the help she could get.
A problem for another time.
Laughter escaped me, but there was no humor in it. Now, I was back to solitude, and the silence had never felt so jarring.
The first time I had touched Isla’s skin, if this counted, was when she was injured and out of it. I flexed my hands, remembering the softness of her as I lifted her—a fleeting moment that I could only hope she’d remember.
Those few seconds would probably have to last me a lifetime.
With a roar, I whirled around and swept an arm out, knocking all the books and papers off the table in a fit of rage.
She’ll never know the self-restraint it took for me to not magickally lock her here so that I could keep her to myself. Or better yet take over her body so she was locked up inside like I had been for the past nineteen years.
But as much as I wanted to taste freedom again, I couldn’t imagine looking in the mirror to see her glaring back at me.
The moment she hit puberty, my awareness of her had shifted, my inner magick lighting up in a way that had only happened once before.
Mate.
