Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
Who the hell was that?
Reece narrowed his eyes at the blonde man sitting next to Briana and Aya and racked his brain trying to remember if he had ever seen him before.
He had a car salesman’s smile and neatly pressed clothes, quite the contrast to everyone else who looked like they’d been sleeping in the same outfit for three days.
At least they hadn’t been covered in dirt.
The guy sat with his legs crossed at the knee, his pressed button-down tucked neatly into his chinos, wire glasses perched on his pointed nose, every line of him clean and precise against the old dining table.
He realized he had seen the guy when Reece and Delainey had entered the house. Reece had been basically in a daze then, too focused on the sudden safety and the food in front of him to think about who was supposed to be there.
Briana stood and gestured at the man. “This is Emerson. He’s a guest of our coven, staying with us for a while. I’m sorry I didn’t think to introduce you earlier.”
“Right,” Reece planted his hands on the back of the nearest dining chair, his fingers curling over the wooden spindle. “I guess it was kind of busy.”
Emerson smiled and offered his hand. “It’s not the best way to meet, but hello.”
Reece had to force himself to take it. Emerson’s grip was firm enough to be polite but nothing more; his palm dry and smooth, a hand that had never done manual labor or held its own in a fight.
He already didn’t like witches. He was getting used to Delainey’s coven by force.
But who the hell was this guy supposed to be?
A stranger in their mix, right after they’d been kidnapped by unknown forces? Yeah, that was great. He loved that.
None of the coven seemed to find it strange, and Briana was vouching for him. Clearly, they had a history. Reece tried to put it in werewolf terms.
If a visiting beta from an allied pack had been around when Cole was injured, would they have included him in the situation?
Almost certainly not, but if the threat had been different, if the pack had been at full strength or they needed the help, there were situations where they might have accepted an outsider.
He looked over at Cole, who shrugged. “It’s her coven.”
Cole stood near the doorway with his arms crossed over his broad chest, his stone-cut face as unreadable as ever, taking up the frame of the door the way an alpha naturally filled any space he occupied.
“It’s not my coven to rule,” Briana corrected him. “We don’t have a leader. It’s not like a pack. We’re all equals.”
Cole shrugged again as if to say, sure, you can think that. Reece had to suppress a smile.
He could feel Delainey champing at the bit to get into the dining room.
He backed up from Emerson and followed her to where they could take two seats.
The dining room was cramped with this many bodies.
A table that might have comfortably seated six now ringed by mismatched chairs pulled from the kitchen.
Serena brought in a tray of cupcakes. Despite the half a pizza he had eaten earlier, Reece was tempted to reach out, but Serena was one of the fiercer members of the coven and he wouldn’t put it past her to poison him through sugar.
“You made these?” he asked, eyeing the tray, two dozen cupcakes in neat rows, half chocolate and half vanilla, frosted with a precision that bordered on aggressive. She didn’t give off the vibe of a kitchen witch.
“Serena stress bakes,” Delainey informed him.
Serena flipped her off and set the cupcakes down with more force than was strictly necessary.
Hugh, Javi, and Mark were already waiting in the dining area.
Hugh leaned against the wall with his arms folded, quiet as a shadow.
Javi had claimed a chair near the head of the table and was tilted back on its rear legs, one foot braced against the table’s edge.
Mark sat apart from the other wolves, a lean man with careful hands resting flat on his knees, his posture still and watchful in the way healers often were.
Hugh reached forward, took one of the chocolate cupcakes, and bit into it with a grin. “It’s delicious. Thank you.”
Serena stared at him with narrowed eyes, said nothing, and walked back into the kitchen.
Reece wondered if there were more baked treats coming their way. Since Hugh had eaten the cupcake and didn’t look like he was about to die, Reece took one for himself and finished it in two bites.
Oh, it was good. Was that a sign she was under too much stress? He couldn’t say he regretted it.
“Now that we’re all here,” Briana said as she, Emerson, and Cole filed into the room, “how about you give us the breakdown again? Then we can figure out how to deal with that.” She nodded towards the manacles.
Delainey slumped back in her chair. “I was getting lunch with Elise a few days ago. We ran into Nico and Reece in the park.” Reece nodded in agreement. “Reece and I walked down the path a little bit and ended up in a quieter part of the park.”
“Why?” Aya interjected.
Why had they done that? Reece tried to remember.
He and Delainey had a tumultuous relationship, to say the least. They should have split up the second Nico and Elise were out of sight. Instead, they had lingered and talked.
Because you wanted to, his wolf reminded him.
Delainey blinked a few times. “We were talking, heading towards our cars.” The coven accepted that. “Then we got jumped. They had magic.”
“But I smelled wolves,” Reece added, since she might not have realized it.
Then he let her continue.
She did not acknowledge him. “We woke up in the weird murder shack in the woods and figured out we had these on.” She held up her wrists.
“We can’t get more than six feet apart. We busted out of the shack, walked through the woods for a few days, and eventually found a road where a good Samaritan picked us up and brought us into the city. ”
Cole gave Reece a look. “Is that it?”
He wondered if Delainey had left out one part on purpose, but they couldn’t ignore it.
“Two rogues found us. They were searching for us, and they might have had something to do with the kidnapping. I can’t imagine why else they would have been in those woods.
They said they were looking for us specifically. ”
“Are they going to be an issue now?” Cole asked.
“No,” Reece said, and he held Cole’s gaze without flinching, his hands flat and still on the table in front of him. “I took care of them.”
He didn’t look at Delainey. He hadn’t mentioned that she had killed one of them, and he didn’t know why. He had killed before, to protect his pack, to protect himself. It didn’t weigh on his soul as heavily as it seemed to weigh on hers.
“How did you figure out the six-feet thing?” Javi asked, letting his chair drop forward onto all four legs with a thud. “Did they leave you a note or something?”
Delainey took that one. “It hurts. If we get too far away, the manacles start burning and it radiates up until we get close together again.”
“But like six feet,” he insisted. “How did you go to the bathroom?”
“Seriously?” Reece snapped.
“What? It’s a serious question.”
“It isn’t relevant,” Aya said, not looking up from the small leather-bound notebook she had pulled from somewhere, her pen already scratching notes in a tight, cramped hand. “I think they had bigger problems.”
“I don’t know that there’s a bigger problem than that,” Javi muttered.
“Can I see the cuffs?” Emerson asked, leaning forward in his chair and pushing his wire glasses up the bridge of his pointed nose with one finger, sounding like every curious witch Reece had ever encountered in his life.
No, the denial was swift and absolute.
Reece was tempted to stuff his hands behind his back. There was something off about the man, or perhaps it was Reece’s general aversion to witches, but he wasn’t going to examine those feelings too closely.
Delainey reached out her arm and let Emerson get close.
Jealousy spiked through Reece.
It was ridiculous. He had no claim on her, no hold over her. There was nothing between them, and there never could be. One stolen night in the woods and a few stolen moments at the bar didn’t mean he got any say in which men could get close to her.
This wasn’t even Emerson approaching her as a man. He was looking at the manacle, touching Delainey carefully, holding her hand to take in the metal around her wrist. It was purely observational. She might as well have been a statue.
The scent of magic suffused the air, sour and new. It hit Reece’s sinuses like vinegar cut with something oily, nothing like the warm rose and fire scent of Delainey’s magic that he had long since stopped noticing.
Reece knew what Delainey’s magic smelled like, and it hadn’t bothered him for a while, but Emerson’s was stinky and he didn’t like it. The scent dissipated after a moment, and Emerson let Delainey’s hands drop.
“I can sense the binding, but I don’t know how to break it.”
Aya and Serena each took a turn after him. Aya spent the longest looking at Delainey’s wrist, and after about twenty minutes she gave Reece a piercing look.
He was forced to reluctantly offer one of his wrists for her perusal. He didn’t like it, but if he had to choose between the coven and Emerson, he would gladly choose the coven every time.
They had a truce. They had a vested interest in not betraying each other. He didn’t want a stranger’s magic playing over his skin.
Aya’s fingers were small and cool against his forearm as she turned his wrist this way and that under the light, her dark eyes tracking the etched symbols the way someone might read a sentence, her lips moving slightly without sound.
Aya studied them for several more minutes. Reece’s discomfort shifted from a general aversion to witches toward something more specific. He felt less like a person under her gaze and more like a thing. She finally dropped his hand.
“I have some ideas, but I need to do a bit of research. Can you guys handle this for another night?”
It wasn’t like they had a choice.
“If we have to,” Delainey said, turning the manacle around her wrist with her opposite hand.
Reece agreed.
He would survive.
Probably.