Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
This wiped out the last year of his life. All the work he’d put in. All of his friends. And of course, the love of his life.
Only he and Lorcan seemed to remember what had happened. Their bond and god magic kept them from believing this deeply rotten fiction.
Graves stopped at the entrance to the original United Nations building as Kierse and Lorcan passed through security. Edgar waited at the entry point, guarded and certain.
“This arrived for you, sir,” Edgar said, slipping him a missive.
Graves turned it over to reveal an ouroboros, the symbol of the warlock guild. He cursed under his breath. “Just now?”
“I brought it as soon as it arrived. I knew you would want it.”
Graves tore it open and skimmed the interior with a growing sense of unease.
“Bad news, sir?”
Graves grit his teeth. “They’ve called a meeting,” he said, stuffing the card into his coat pocket. “After three of my kind have…gone missing.”
There was no accusation in the letter, but if the elders were getting together, it was never good. And he didn’t have time to deal with them while he was trying to break the geas.
“Thank you, Edgar,” Graves said as he released his butler and headed into the convocation.
“Identification,” the guard grunted.
Graves showed his ID and slipped inside as he watched Kierse follow Lorcan to the building entrance. He threw discretion to the wind and hurried like a black cloud across the snowy exterior promenade. Monsters and men alike jumped out of his way.
He caught the door Kierse had just stepped through, holding it the rest of the way for her. He breathed in deeply, smelling the scent of her magic—Irish wildflowers—like a particularly potent shampoo-and-conditioner combo. He hadn’t appreciated the scent enough, that was for goddamn sure.
“I think you dropped this,” he said, low and inviting.
Kierse turned then, the guarded thief on display. “Those tricks don’t work on…”
The unspoken me died on her lips when she saw who was before her. Her enemy. It revealed the predator underneath. There she was.
He pushed the ruby pin she had stolen from the head warlock of Paris into her hand. Another token that he hoped might trigger a real memory, slip under the defenses of the geas and get her back if even for a minute.
She took the pin in her hand. A puzzled look crossed her face, and she opened her mouth as if to say something, but then Lorcan was there again.
“Kierse?”
Kierse looked up from the pin, putting it back in Graves’s hand. “Doesn’t look familiar.”
She followed Lorcan inside. The door shut in Graves’s face, and he could only see the back of her head through the distorted, darkened glass.
Graves blew out on a long, cold breath and stared out across the East River in despair. Three weeks without her. Three weeks of this heartbreak. He couldn’t anymore die for her sacrifice than she could die for his.
“Get it together,” he ground out to himself as he pushed forward into the room, bypassing the lounge and taking up his seat inside the assembly.
Lorcan and Kierse were halfway down the auditorium already, seated side by side for the final vote tally. There was a rumble of disapproval through the city at where the peace talks had broken down. The influence that Amberdash had even though he no longer had the Stone of Fal.
But Graves couldn’t bring himself to care. Not when he had more pressing issues at hand.
He had known they had stepped into “The Wooing of Etain.” Had felt the story wrap their greedy hands around him. Still, he couldn’t have predicted this.
One kiss and the spell was supposed to be broken. Not trap them into this hell. How could he besiege the castle for a hundred years when she didn’t even remember him?
He’d read every version of the tale in every language it was currently written. Searched for ways for him to win here. And there was no good answer.
Not that he hadn’t earned this ending.
The tarot cards had been clear—turn away from your present and suffer the consequences in the future. He’d lost Kierse just as Rosetta predicted. Lost everything in the end.
To win her back, he was going to have to be a different man.
A better man.
The man she had believed in.
And if that meant entering the literal bowels of hell, going through the trials, and regaining what was once lost, then so be it.
He would do it. For her.
“The votes have been tallied,” the Secretary-General called out across the chamber. The room was silent at the proclamation.
Nothing was going to stop him.
The Secretary-General cleared his throat. “The final vote count is as follows—”
Graves might have clocked that the stone telling her there was a way out of this was a trap. But he was going to walk into the trap if it meant there was a way to end it.