Page 49 of Wicked Heirs

This situation with Alena was done with.

I was removing her as a target.

With the way she affected me, it had become too dangerous to continue on that road with her.

I couldn’t see clearly, rationally.

My good sense had become compromised where she was concerned.

And, as for Tal, this whole crusade had made him all the more unstable. Vicious, even.

He’d attacked her right in the middle of class surrounded by witnesses.

Sometimes he thought that he was untouchable.

He was the only phoenix here, which made him a special case, and he also had the sympathy vote for being an orphan,something he used to its fullest no matter how distasteful. He saw it as the world owing him.

Butit was me who’d intervened when he’d been called into the dean’s office and received his third strike.

I’d had to resort to bribery basically—something beneath me—dipping into my trust in a major way and offering Electi Academy a massive endowment to make the charges against Tal go away.

Given that it was Abigail Rose’s daughter who was in question, there had been even more involved than that.

He had to make a formal apology to her, not get within a hundred feet of her again, which meant he’d been pulled out of certain classes that she was in, which was going to set him back with graduating.

He’d royally fucked up.

So I had to cut the whole thing off at the knees now.

It was done.

As soon as he got down here and ended his flying session, I’d put that into effect.

The notion of flying up there myself had obviously occurred to me, but I resisted. I always did and I always would all the while I was here.

Like him, I could fly extremely fast and I hated being restricted when I was in that headspace, which was whatthe domearound Electi Academy would ensure.

It could tempt me to break the thing, which I now had the ability to do, but it was something I didn’t want them to be aware of.

I had to downplay what I was truly capable of at this stage.

They wouldn’t like it.

For now, the faculty needed to believe that I hadn’t yet come into my full abilities as Dark Fae Prince, that I was still lacking.

Thanks toObsidian,though, where I facilitated being able to let our magic and abilities out to play without their strict protocols, I’d been able to get to that point. If they knew about that, they’d be afraid that I was well on my way to matching the power ofKing.

All in good time.

I looked back up at Talon weaving in and out of the trees, dipping low, before soaring back up toward the stars littering the black sky. It was the dead of night. If he didn’t go to bed soon, he’d only get a couple of hours’ worth of sleep before classes, and Talon didn’t do well without enough sleep, he could barely function. And he became extremely irritable. Given his current state of mind, that would be disastrous.

I was just about to call my magic to communicate a message to him, demanding he cut it short and come down to speak with me, all this avoidance of his be damned, but I was pulled up short by the sight of clouds gathering in his vicinity.

Gathering out of nowhere and certainly not in a natural manner either.

Just over the specific area where he was flying.

Instinctively, I coiled my power, readying my purple flames on either palm.

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