Page 60 of Cruel Revenge
“While Subira was pregnant, she didn’t perform magic, not wanting the flow and power of it to impact the twins. She couldn’t save me until after the twins were born. I refused to miss the birth of my children. I found my own escape. I madeit home to my mate and wife to watch my twins come into the world.”
“You are being sparse on details,” Heath pointed out, catching how Hasan was telling them broad strokes of a story that was certainly more interesting than they were getting.
“There are some things I will take to my grave. Not even Subira has heard them, and she never will, which means no one else will ever hear them.” Hasan grabbed the spike, then ripped the second out of the wall. “She is as Kushim and I have said. A cruel woman. A sadist with a god complex.” He looked at the spikes, his gold eyes radiating fury. “The reality is, Jacky should have died, but this witch likes pain too much. She played with Jacky, and when she was out of time, she hadn’t done enough damage in her mind to justify ending the torture early with a death.”
“How are we supposed to combat a witch powerful enough to throw us around and torture us like this?” Heath demanded. “How did you?”
Hasan met his gaze, no more heat in his eyes but cold fury.
“I took her by surprise while she was in a vulnerable position. She didn’t redo her control spell in time to contain me, thanks to her own distraction,” Hasan answered, a sick-looking smile spreading on his face. “Since that won’t help us this time… that is all you need to know.”
Heath inhaled, taking all of what Hasan was feeling and decided he was going to end his line of questioning about Hasan’s history with the witch. There was a sickness in those emotions Heath had encountered similar before. Like an old festering wound smelled terrible, Hasan’s emotions were pungent and pointed to a disease that could be fatal.
“How did she curse you? I saw the pictures of the witches and the moon cursed from Alaska. They had runes and shit carvedinto their skin…” Landon trailed off, probably catching the same spike in Hasan’s anger that came from Landon’s questions.
“She painted it onto my skin. This was before anyone really understood the silver weakness of moon cursed, so she would have been unsuccessful in carving it into my skin. Would have healed scarless. So she painted it and had to repaint it every… few days, I believe. It was some time ago, and some days of it blurred together.” Hasan started walking away. “If this is all, I shall head outside and check on the women.”
Once he was out of sight, Landon made a noise.
“The women. Like he reverted to a few thousand years ago,” he muttered. “Grunt caveman energy.”
“He wasn’t a caveman,” Heath said dryly, not finding the same humor Landon was getting. Without the conversation with Hasan, with nothing to focus on, he was hard pressed to find anything to think about except for the smell of Jacky’s blood, and worse, the faint scent of Carey’s fear still lingering in the room. “I believe we have everything we need here. We should go.”
“Wait.” Landon held up a hand, moving toward where Carey must have sat with Courtney. He was sniffing the air and paused at a chair that wasn’t knocked over.
“What is it?” Heath asked, watching his son with a frown. Heath had footage of the room, and he couldn’t stay in here too long. He couldn’t linger on scents without becoming distracted by the pain Jacky must have been in or considering how afraid his daughter had been or still was, wherever she was.
“Courtney smelled desperate,” Landon said softly, kneeling next to the chair. “It’s faint now, but she smelled desperate.”
“Jacky explained that,” Heath pointed out. It wasn’t new information, so he was uncertain why Landon was interested in it now. “What are you thinking, Landon?”
“There are different types of desperate. Well, different reasons people will feel desperate, and it changes the way it smells,” Landon explained softly. “There’s desperation to fix a relationship because you love someone. Right. We’re feeling desperate because we want to save Carey. The assumption would be that Courtney felt desperate for the chance to have a relationship with her daughter, and this was her only chance.”
“The assumption, but not the reality?” Heath crossed his arms. Werewolves could smell so much more than werecats. It could be finicky, thanks to the fact that there were so many smells in the world, and it was easy to miss something. Landon was focusing very hard on one individual, who hadn’t been there for hours. He had to catch and ignore every scent that wasn’t her. There werehundreds.
But Landon was clearer minded than Heath, and Heath was grateful that his son was handling this better than himself. At that moment, Heath found it difficult to smell anything other than Carey and Jacky in the room.
“Fear.” Landon tilted his head to the side while he closed his eyes. “Envy. Insecurity. Frustration. Anger… Righteousness.”
That made Heath snap to attention.
“Excuse me?”
“She knew the witches were going to come for them,” Landon decided softly. Landon’s eyes opened, and he turned his wolf eyes on Heath. “She was practically happy about it when the witches finally showed up. That’s my theory. We’ll have to watch the tapes. As much as I know we all love Jacky and I would fucking die for her, I need to draw my own conclusions. She wasn’t in the right headspace. She wasn’t from the moment Carey would have brought up her biological mother. Certainly wasn’t while sitting in this room.”
“Landon—” Heath wasn’t going to hear this talk about the woman he was marrying.
“And you should have taken that part seriously. Jacky wasn’t in her right mind, and she still isn’t.” Landon continued.
Heath rocked back. He knew that. He knew it better than most. Jacky was fragile from the moment he learned of Courtney, had clearly been since the moment she learned of it as well from Carey. She was unsteady, her relationship with Carey threatened by therealmother. And Heath saw that it had come from her curse, amplifying real emotions into something bigger.
Landon walked closer to him, eyes narrowing.
“And neither are you,” his son said, a menacing tone in the words. “Which is why you thought it was a good idea to leave Jacky bawling her eyes out when she nearly died and just wanted to know she still had you.”
“I…” Heath could think of a thousand answers to that. He gave the most honest one. “I can’t allow myself anything. I’ll break. If I break, who knows what I’ll do.”
“How long are you going to keep this up?” Landon asked. “Because it’s only going to make things worse for however long you feel the need to keep it up.”
