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)
Kierse shivered at the words. Her Graves wasn’t this person anymore. It was disorienting to see him bring back out the scary motherfucker she had first met.
He looked at the room as if he would personally hunt down and kill every person in attendance. Memorize their names and faces and enact his retribution.
She wanted to turn and leave, and to their credit, a few people did. Mafi and Rio were among them. Smart. Get out while they could.
Jason stayed, dragging his second, Maya, closer to the action. Kierse’s stomach turned, and for a moment, she and Maya connected. Maya had a grimace on her face as if she, too, didn’t condone this.
But most stayed. They stayed, and they cheered.
Kierse couldn’t leave. And when Graves saw her standing in the crowd, he almost faltered. His enmity doubled over at the sight of Lorcan at her back. As if he was supposed to have gotten her to safety. Graves should have known better. Lorcan couldn’t keep her away from him.
“A pretty speech,” Amberdash said. “But you won’t live to hurt another fly.”
Graves fully faced him. “You better kill me, Gregory, or you’re going to deeply regret your actions today.”
Amberdash waved his hand with a deathly smile. “Begin.”
Ithra threw a punch in Graves’s direction. Kierse gasped as he dodged out of the way of the first throw. The troll teetered forward, but though she was massive, she was more dexterous than her kind and came back up swinging while Hunder latched onto Graves’s arm.
He used more magic, shattering the wrist with a flick of his hand. Hunder roared in pain. The bones in troll’s bodies were so massive that they were practically hard as stone and nearly impossible to break.
“You can do better than that, Ithra. Surely that’s not the reason your son left your side and called you an arrogant monster.”
Ithra roared and lunged for him again, but Graves was nimble and had been practicing fighting skills for literal centuries. Plus he knew each of these people. He’d worked with them and blackmailed them and forced them into submission. They could get licks in, but they could never be him.
Graves popped a bone in her ankle, and Ithra screamed, tumbling to one knee. The entire building shook. Everyone took a step back as glasses of champagne shattered around them.
While Graves may have typically had endless magic, drawing on it while the amulet was present was like walking through wet cement. He was so much more powerful than her, so much more powerful than everyone, and even he could not fight against the amulet.
Another figure stepped out of the darkness to help control the fight. This was a hulking goblin the likes of which Kierse had seen guard the entrance to the Goblin Market. She didn’t know what he thought he could do against Graves that a two-ton troll couldn’t.
But he was in there, clamping a metal band around Graves’s wrist and then swinging a fist into his face. “Fuck you, Graves.”
Graves staggered back a step. “Brix, I should have known.”
Then he met Brix with his own fist. It connected hard with the goblin. Graves swept his feet out from under him, and Brix collapsed back onto the balcony floor. Graves stood over him, his magic flaring as he shattered the cuff into pieces.
“Still mad that no matter how many officials you fucked along the way, you were never delivered a promotion?”
“Fuck. You,” Brix said.
Graves kicked him in the stomach. “Or was it that you were skimming money under the table and working with the humans to carve out your own piece of Tribeca?”
A gasp went up through the crowd. Dealing with humans was tantamount to working with the enemy. After all, this was a group of the Men of Valor, who believed that monsters were above humans. Anything but food or cattle or employees was beneath them.
Lorcan snorted. “He’s doing what he does best.”
“Provoking and shaming him into action?”
“Pissing people off.”
“Or should I mention the human woman that you bought an apartment for in that new area of Tribeca, too?” Graves kicked him in the face, sending his head back hard.
Another stutter of disbelief from the crowd.
But Ithra and Hunder had marginally recovered, and they came forward, Ithra catching him with a punch to the stomach that sent him hurtling back a half-dozen feet, colliding with the metal barrier of the balcony. He slumped forward with a controlled cough before rising slowly to his feet.
Brix was still down, but another figure appeared then. This one Kierse recognized as the shifter Fury. He couldn’t shift at this moment, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to get his licks in.
“Fury,” Graves said, running the back of his hand across his split lip. The blood smeared down his chin, and he looked practically sinister as his gray eyes smoldered. “What a lovely surprise.”