Page 119 of Love Bites Extra Hard

Talon studied Evan for a minute.

He knew a fair amount about the guy, after a long conversation with Porter during the party.

When he agreed, it didn’t surprise me.

Kai stepped out of my old room, with Clementine peeking past him.

“What’s all the pounding about?” she asked.

They both looked like they had just been asleep, too.

“We’ve been waiting around for a few hours,” Stella explained. “This is long overdue, so I’m ready to get it over with.”

Clem smiled. “Give us a minute to change.”

Stella nodded, looking back to us as Kai and Clem disappeared back into their room. “What’s the plan, and how sure are you that it’s going to work?”

We explained it to her quickly, and hope blossomed in her eyes. “Wow. What if we can really kill him?”

“You’ll finally be free,” Talon said.

Tears flooded her eyes, and she wiped them away quickly. “We’ll probably stay with the wolves for a few years. The pack is still healing after everything with Curtis.”

“You should,” he agreed. “You need some space from all of this.”

“More than I realized,” she admitted.

He pulled her in for another hug, and she hugged him back fiercely.

Evan and I gave them space.

We couldn’t understand the intensity of the emotions the siblings shared about the situation. Evan’s had been similar, but Kim was nowhere near as bad as Sylvester. And with the wolves, the situation hadn’t been dragged out the way it was for the dragons.

Kai and Clementine emerged a few minutes later, and we were all quiet as we made our way down to the prison.

“What comes next if this doesn’t work?” Clem wondered.

“We try again in another month or two, after I’ve had more time to scramble his brain with my magic again,” I said, trying to sound more upbeat than I felt.

The last thing Talon and Stella needed was for yet another plan to fail.

“As long as we get another vacation out of it,” Clem said with a wink.

I gave her a quick smile.

Kai tucked her closer to his chest, lowering his lips to her ear and murmuring something I couldn’t hear clearly.

It feltlike the longest walk of my life, but eventually, we made it down to the prison.

Clem and Kai peered into the other cells while we passed, just like I had the first time I was down there. They would realize pretty fast that all of them were empty. The only one that wasn’t, was Sylvester’s.

The tension around us grew thicker as we approached the cell. Kai, Clementine, and Porter all took turns looking inside.

“Wow, that’s a lot of scales,” Clem remarked.

My lips curved upward.

She had no idea.

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