Page 27 of Bombshell

It stung to hear that he wouldn’t have tried it just because he was my father and was supposed to protect me, but I pushed thesensation down.

Despite being in close proximity with Alexander again I kept getting little reminders of why I left in the first place and I needed to hang on to those before my brain turned into stupid mush.

“We’ll have to keep going with this, ah,instinctualmethod, yes we’ll call it that. I wonder if we can apply this to other adolescent witchlings—just imagine if they didn’t need words to cast spells at all. They would be unstoppable.”

Alexander had clearly moved on from praising me and was fully in scientist mode again as he began to scribble down notes in his notebook, muttering under his breath about the other elements and spells and what I potentially could or couldn’t cast with this ‘new method.’

It was clear he’d forgotten about my presence completely. We hadn’t even been in our lesson for an hour yet.

Rolling my eyes, I reached down to grab my bag.

“I’m going to go see Odette,” I told him and watched as he waved an absentminded hand at me.

“And I’m going to do it while naked and might strangle people with my vines for funsies,” I added, glaring at the man who was now too preoccupied to give me any attention. Typical Alexander Finch.

“Have fun,” Alexander called as he turned fully away from me to the giant chalkboard that lined the entire back wall of the library.

It shouldn’t have hurt my feelings. I was a big girl who could handle myself. I didn’tneedhim to love me, and yet as I crossed through the vast mansion to the east wing where Odette’s rooms were, the same old feelings that plagued me as a child started to tear away at the edges of me. His approval and excitement had nearly made me forget all of those years where I hadn’t been good enough for him.

‘It’s like you got the very worst parts of both of us,’he’d once said to me after a particularly frustrating lesson that had ended with several exploded chairs and zero successful spells.

“Just a few more months then you won’t have to see him anymore,” I muttered to myself as I shouldered my bag more firmly on my shoulder and turned to climb up the staff staircase that would lead me to where Odette’s rooms were.

“See who?” a gratingly familiar voice asked from above me.

There, standing at the top of the stairs looking just as smug as he had when we were teenagers, was James Reid.

James was your typical wizard. Golden-haired, blue eyed, and infuriatingly debonair as he stood at the top of the stairs, leaning against the railing like some kind of Hollister model and trying to block my path.

“Long time no see, Finch,” he greeted and it took everything in me not to roll my eyes as I stomped up the stairs and brushed past him.

Most of the witches and wizards of the North Coast coven avoided the Wharf completely, turning up their noses at what they considered ‘seedy,’ so I rarely ever saw any of them.

But James Reid was a regular at the Dive and I saw his stupid face more often than I liked.

And just like how the local gargoyle clan denied Cash’s existence, James Reid had ignored me in a similar fashion for over fifty years.

“You see me almost weekly, asshole,” I muttered under my breath as I skirted around him and through the door that opened into the opulent hallway that led to Odette’s room.

“Yes I do,” James stepped in front of me again, blocking my path, grinning down at me with the same dimple that had,unfortunately, been enough to charm my stupid, prepubescent self. “But you weren’t back ‘in’ then, Finch, and now you are. So I can talk to you again.”

“You didn’t like talking to me before,” I pointed out, crossing my arms over my chest.

While I was the daughter of the head of the coven it was James who was the golden boy. Hell, I was pretty sure my father regretted not marrying James’ mother instead of mine seeing how talented the younger wizard was.

I never understood why he’d made the choice to seek out a tree nymph or why he’d gone against the coven elders in the first place. Not that I could blame him for not liking James’ mother. Delilah Reid had a dainty and delicate facade that hid a level of vitriol I’d rarely seen from anyone else. Alexander would have probably been miserable with her—just like how she spent the twelve years I lived in the coven making me miserable.

Most people in the coven avoided me like the plague—I was too different and my magic didn’t work so they tried to pretend I didn’t exist—but Delilah? She wanted me to disappear from the face of the Earth completely.

“I was young,” James said with a shrug as he reached out to touch a lock of my hair that had drifted over my shoulder.

When I was a teenager, this move would have done me in. Hell, any attention from him at all would have done me in. I’d nursed the biggest, dumbest crush on this egotistical wizard ever since my father brought me down the mountain and introduced us as playmates since we were soclose in age.

But that was then and this was now. James was still just as handsome as ever and probably had more charm in his little finger than most people had in their whole bodies… but he wasn’t Dallan.

They were the opposite in almost every way and I found that when James Reid grinned at me in a way that I was sure he thought would work, I felt absolutely nothing.

Actually—scratch that—not nothing.

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