Page 32 of Nightmares and Numerology

But I could feel the thought churning in her head. She’d think about it, even if she ultimately turned me down. She wanted Anthony, and the idea of being with him was tempting, even if I could only offer her a few hours at a time.

“You’re mated. I don’t think Angelo would care for another man touching your body. Even if I’m in the driver’s seat, it’s your neck that’s still getting a hickey. Not to mention how it would look to everyone else.”

“Like I had two boyfriends.”

“Right.”

“Angelo said he’d do it if I wanted it. Of course, he’d prefer to share me with another woman. You know, typical man. But if I really wanted to, he’d share me—you—with another man. I thinkhe has to be the one to pick who, though.”

“Because you’re a sexually submissive woman. God, it’s such an embarrassment to be attached to your fantasies.”

“You’ve never wanted to be tied down?”

“No,” she replied, a little too quickly and forcefully.

Then a barrage of images hit me without warning. I had to white-knuckle my thighs as the pictures washed through my mind.

Rope. One length of enchanted rope was all that kept me from freedom. Murrain was taunting me, leaving freedom so close yet still so impossibly out of reach.

Terror slid like an icy blade between my ribs, stopping my heart for a moment too long. Pain blossomed across my chest seconds later, a phantom echo of a very real blade that had plunged into Indie’s body during the week Murrain had tormented her.

“How many times did he stab you?” I asked in a small voice.

“Too many to count,” she said, her tone flat and exhausted. “He handed me over to a Reeper for torture. Not Simon, thank the goddess, but still a Reeper. He came up with a lot of creative ways to hurt me. I healed, of course. I wished at that point I couldn’t. Death would at least have been the end.”

“How did you escape?”

My stomach turned. I couldn’t feel the emotions she was suppressing. I probably didn’t want to know if the mere mention of it made her nauseous.

“I’ll take that secret to the grave… or whatever else is waiting when this half-life is over. I’m not telling anyone how I did it. I refuse.”

I didn’t try to dissuade her. It was her trauma, and she’d deal with it her way.

“Why did you come to my shop?” I asked for the umpteenth time. I’d asked variations of the question for months, and shedodged almost every time.

“Because I finally tracked down my mother’s second journal.”

And this was something I’d never heard before. And it surprised me—not so much that Murrain had hunted down her mother’s journal, but that she was admitting as much.

“She had another one she kept from her days at the Academy,”Indie continued.“She met Murrain there—at the Academy. They were close. She joined him, and later I did the same thing. But the difference is, she got out. She survived long enough to pen another book of shadows—the one she had to keep from Murrain. That book has her most powerful spells.”

“Where is it now?”I thought back.

“It ended up in mundane hands somehow, and I tracked it halfway across the country before I found a lead.”

I was pretty sure that’s what had led her to me and my store. I was also pretty sure that Rodney had bought the book at some point and failed to label it correctly. He’d always done things like that. He’d bring in inventory without consulting me and then expect me to do the organizing. I was a firm believer in the adage: everything has its place.

“The point is, you have an opportunity, Lydia—you have the opportunity to be happy. To live an amazing life with the man you love. Don’t waste it like I did.”

She was right. Again. Yes, the situation looked bad. This mating thing had been an accident, but it was going to completely alter the course of both Angelo’s and my life. Mated pairs had certain rituals they performed to keep a relationship healthy. I had to learn more about them before my magic spiraled out of control again and made everything worse. Because as far as I knew, there was no way out of this.

Unfortunately, I needed to go back to the coven house. Talking with him about this might be painful. It could bepersonally devastating for me if he wanted space to think about things. But the uncertainty was what would bring the house down around my ears. If Angelo wanted to leave, I’d let him go. If he didn’t want me after what I’d done, it would hurt. At the end of the day, though, I’d survive it—at least, I hoped I would. I’d survived Rodney’s petty cruelties. Oddly, I trusted Angelo to treat me more fairly.

And speaking of Rodney... Was I going crazy, or was I hearing his voice? I almost preferred that explanation—that I was losing my marbles. At least going nuts came with a wide spectrum of good drugs and four-point restraints. It would be a lot more fun than confronting my husband. Soon-to-be ex husband, with any luck.

“Lydia.”

I turned toward the sound and paused when the accompanying visual and emotional gut punch hit me. It wasn’t just seeing him, though that was bad enough. He was the last person I wanted to confront on a residential street. We’d get in a shouting match, and someone would call the cops.

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