Chapter Twelve
Silas Khatri had been in LA for three hours, and he was already tired of it.
He paced around the downtown hotel room his parents had booked for him, wearing a suit his parents’ money had bought for him, talking to his best friend who—as much as he hated to admit it—his parents had picked out for him.
They’d chosen Anika because her parents had clamored harder than all the other parents in Noctis, because they had sold her as the smartest, sweetest, most supportive kid there.
It was true at the time, but she’d been two.
Sweet was not a word anyone would use to describe her at thirty.
“Oh my god, pace around that room one more time and I will get on a plane, fly to LA, and duct-tape you to a chair myself.”
Silas forced himself to stop and look at Anika, who was currently magically projecting herself from her New York City office onto the armchair in his hotel. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t taken the one comfortable seat—that you can’t even feel—I wouldn’t be pacing.”
Anika chuckled, her curtain of dark hair swaying as she laughed. “No, you’d still be pacing. It’s a foundational element of your reluctant-prince vibe.”
Silas resisted the urge to move his feet again, instead leaning back against the room’s large desk. “You know, we could just FaceTime like normal people.”
“Yeah, but we’re not normal people. We’re witches.”
“Really wishing I wasn’t right about now.”
“Oof. That bad, huh?”
Silas paused, then gave in and resumed pacing across the room, ignoring Anika’s groan. “They hate me, Nik. And I’m supposed to, what? Find some bullshit reason to kick the head of their coven to the curb and say, ‘Hey, I’m in charge now’?”
“Yes. Precisely that.”
Silas sighed. Anika had been listening to this same speech for months now, as Silas traveled across the country, going from coven to coven to perform Noctis’ yearly check-ins.
Those visits had been fun, easy. He wasn’t supposed to take over—those covens were all run by relatives and allies of his parents.
Due to the length of Sylvia’s tenure, Aestas was the only significant coven that was not, in some way, under Khatri control.
He’d always known Los Angeles was the end of the road. From here on out, he’d follow the path he had no choice but to follow, give up his own dreams in place of the ones his family had foisted upon him.
His class would be starting up again in a couple weeks.
This year’s group of students at Noctis’ witching school was a riot, filled with a level of attitude that only New Yorkers could manage to acquire by ten years old.
(On the first day of class, one of the kids had honest-to-god said, “Hey, I’m walking here!
”) Finding ways to make witch history and policy interesting enough to get them to sit down and listen had been the highlight of his summer.
He’d been studying the witching world his whole life, but he hadn’t realized how much he would love sharing that knowledge.
How much he would learn from them in return, expanding his own worldview by absorbing others’.
But that was done. It was time for Silas to step into the shoes that felt far too big for him, to buckle down and get serious.
He’d tried his best to delay it as long as possible, twiddling his thumbs in his car down the road from Aestas, searching for a reason not to show up to the meeting.
He’d been hoping that if he got there late enough, he would miss it, but he failed on that front (story of his life), and had instead been forced to parade himself in front of the whole coven. Just like his parents wanted.
He knew he should’ve been more forceful with Sylvia.
No coven’s wards were perfect, but Aestas’ were in far worse shape than he’d expected.
He actually did have cause to threaten her position, which was exactly what he was supposed to do.
But sitting there, in the office she’d occupied for so many years—surrounded by pictures of her with her coven, happy, safe, well taken care of—he couldn’t stomach it.
But he would have to eventually. There was no way for him to get out of this. On paper, he had all of the breeding, education, and knowledge of a great coven leader. His parents had made sure of that, raising him with the best of the best that money could buy.
And all of that had amounted to … him.
He didn’t have the heart to tell his parents that their only child had, despite their best efforts, turned out decidedly average.
That if you took away the trappings of the money and the Khatri name, there wasn’t a fair and just leader like his father, or a cunning strategist like his mother.
There was just a pretty smile and a dimple that distracted most people from actually listening to whatever nonsense was spewing out of his mouth at that particular moment.
He was an average man, and he wanted to live an average life. But average wasn’t an option for a Khatri.
All Silas could do was make sure the transition was as smooth as possible for Aestas.
The coven didn’t deserve to suffer through a power struggle.
He would show Sylvia that he was reasonable, someone she could trust with her people, and then present her with the idea of retiring.
He wanted this to be a peaceful changeover, not a coup.
“This is just difficult,” he said to Anika. “They’re doing just fine as is.”
“And they’ll do fine when you take over too. Besides, didn’t your parents say their coven head was some sort of monster?”
A power-hungry maniac had been his mom’s exact words.
Sylvia had once been a part of Noctis, and her exit hadn’t been a peaceful one.
From the hushed way his parents and other older members of the coven talked about her, she’d been a hellion.
But that was thirty years ago, and the calm, level-headed woman he’d met tonight seemed nothing like the hothead she’d apparently been in her youth.
“Well, if she was, she’s changed. I don’t want to kick her out of her job because she was a shitty person when she was a teenager.”
“Silas,” Anika said, her tone harsh. Silas flinched.
He understood how hard it was for her to listen to him complain like this—she would kill to be in his position, as she told him near daily.
He’d happily pass over the reins if he could.
She was much better suited for it than he was.
But it didn’t work that way. Silas was stuck here, and Anika was stuck climbing the ranks of Noctis’ management team, angling for an eventual Bookkeeper appointment.
She couldn’t understand what it was like for him not to have a choice in the matter.
“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “You’re going to put on your big-boy pants, man up, and make that coven fall in love with you, just like every girl you’ve met on this little cross-country road trip of yours.”
Silas flinched again. He’d always had a thing for pretty women, but as he’d inched closer to his forced future over the past few months, he’d gone a bit overboard.
A new woman—or women—in every city, a whirlwind of sex and sex and more sex, followed by the stress of trying to figure out how to tell them that they couldn’t be anything more, only for them to come to him and say it first. He was fun, they’d said.
But they knew this wasn’t going anywhere.
That’s all he was. A good time.
How was he qualified to take a leadership role from someone who had actually earned it?
“They’re different than Noctis,” he said. “Like, show-up-to-a-coven-meeting-in-a-suit-and-you’ll-be-laughed-out-the-door different.”
“You own T-shirts.”
“Three. I own three T-shirts. And my mom tries to throw them out every chance she gets.”
“Silas Khatri. Are you nervous that you’re not gonna get invited to sit with the cool kids at lunch?”
Silas flipped Anika off, then started pacing again. She sighed, picking up her cell phone and scrolling through it as he talked.
“I hate that I have to find a way to kick this woman out of her coven when she hasn’t even done anything wrong,” he said.
Sylvia had seemed calm and capable, and she’d responded well to his critiques and promised to fix them.
So she’d let her wards lapse—who cared? It hardly mattered anymore, anyway.
Ordinaries had moved past trying to burn them at the stake decades ago.
Hell, in a place like LA, an ordinary could walk in on a witch mid-spell and assume it was something for an upcoming movie.
But his parents didn’t care about that. The Khatri family had been at the top of the magical world since Silas’ …
some-number-of-greats-grandfather Bhawani Khatri had figured out how to trap spells in runes in the late 1800s.
His invention had taken the guesswork out of magic, and it had catapulted him to the top of his coven in Jaipur.
His son took his innovation with him and moved to New York, instantly gaining control of Noctis and leaving the rest of the world begging at his feet for the thing that would make magic actually usable.
Since then, the Khatris had been expanding their influence across the magical world, using the threat of having to return to the dangers of old magic and the promise of continued advanced rune development to keep covens under their thumb.
What had started as a passion project, a thirst for knowledge and understanding of a power that was so hard to grasp, warped over the years into a relentless demand for more.
And Silas was expected to want that too.
The objective with Aestas wasn’t fairness—it was a hostile takeover.
Silas was going to keep pounding Sylvia with magical code violations until something stuck.
“Anika,” he said, remembering the other huge development from the day. “There was an unsettled witch at their coven meeting.”
Anika’s cell phone dropped out of her hand, clattering onto her desk in New York. “Holy shit. And the building didn’t like, explode or anything?”