Page 53 of Dangerous Heat

“Yeah. Can you find Mabel and Freya and put them on the line for me, please?”

“You let the witches coerce you into talking to them, didn’t you?” she asked, but she was already moving. The phone moved away from her ear and she spoke a few soft words to Mabel before speaking again. “Remember what I said, Nolan. All in.”

I put her on speaker and placed the phone face-up on the table. We listened to them take the elevator down to Freya’s floor and knock on her door, all beneath the cheerful hum of diner music. She knocked once on the door to Freya’s suite before opening it without receiving an audible answer. When she walked in, Freya’s voice rang out from the living room.

“Seriously, Nolan? You were just here. Haven’t you ever heard of privacy?”

My cheeks flushed as Clara and Elodie looked at me with raised eyebrows. Joanne had disappeared to tend to a different table, leaving us alone now we were all getting along. I shoved more fries in my mouth as a coping mechanism. This was embarrassing. Why had I done any of this, again?

“Oh, you’re not Nolan,” Freya said, closer to the phone now and not yelling. “May, how are you doing?”

“I’m good, but Ama insisted on coming down here all of a sudden. I think we have someone on the phone for us,” Mabel said, audibly excited.

I imagined them both turning to Ama, Freya unsure and Mabel trusting. The sound changed and became louder, Amabella putting the phone on speaker on her end. “Say hi to your mother, May.”

There was rustling, likely from an overexcited witch grabbing the phone, and then her voice. “Mom? Aunt Clara?” she asked, sounding unsure.

“Yes, sweetie, we’re here,” Elodie said.

She glanced up at me and pulled the phone closer, but didn’t try to take it off speaker. Good, because I should really maintain some level of control over this situation. “Oh my gods, Mom, I’m so glad you’re OK. Are you OK? When I was kidnapped I worried you had been too.”

“We’re not easy to kidnap,” Clara said. “No one has tried. We were worried about you. And you, Freya. I can’t wait to hear how this whole thing happened.”

“Worked out in the end, Clara,” Freya said. “You should have trusted my plan when I told you I would get May back.”

“Your plan was dumb,” Caspian said from the background. “She would’ve got herself killed if not for Nolan.”

I didn’t deserve that much credit. Maybe she would have beaten the odds and killed my cousin from within his iron grip. We’d never know for sure, so I couldn’t claim I’d saved her. Clara gave me a faint, thankful smile anyway.

“They don’t need to know that,” Freya said, and the phone moved again. They’d settled in the living room together. “I would have been fine, and it was the best plan I had.”

“I disagree, but I’m making a concentrated effort not to argue with you right now,” Shan said. “Talk to your aunts so I’m not tempted to ream you out again for trying to go it alone.”

“Fuck you, Shan. As if you were being helpful back then. You also can’t say shit about me going it alone, considering what you did.”

“We still would have been the better choice.”

“Mabel, are they treating you well?” Elodie asked, talking over the argument, which hushed immediately.

“Yes. They saved my life from the other guy who wanted to kill me. I’m staying with Ama, and she’s… really nice.” The hesitation in her voice reminded me of just how ‘nice’ my second-in-command had been to her. Sleeping with the enemy may not be the best thing to tell her family about.

“I’m going to need some more information on this other guy who wanted to kill you,” Clara said.

Freya took over to launch into the explanation. Her way of telling the story made me seem almost like a good guy or a hero. It rang false, considering she didn’t think of me that way — she was talking me up in front of her aunts so they would believe the women were safe with me. I hoped one day she might believe it when she told the story like that.

Internally, I berated myself.Bad Nolan. Regardless of what Amabella and Joanne claimed about me and this trip to Hex Sisters Kitchen, I was not trying to get in her good graces or impress her. This was… being kind to my prisoners.

“I do admit you seem safer there than you would be here, even with Joanne’s help,” Elodie said after Freya had gone through a toned-down version of the story, skipping some parts and neglecting to mention they were technically still prisoners. “Are you happy to stay, Mabel?”

“Thrilled. It’s a vacation from normal life.”

“I’m not convinced,” Clara said. “You said there are guards, but how are we supposed to be certain they’ll keep her safe instead of giving her back to this vampire mafia?”

“Staff are heavily vetted,” I said, intentionally neglecting to mention I’d recently had some bad apples in the bunch. They hadn’t been permanent staff, so they hardly counted. “Security is top-notch, especially for the penthouse level where May is staying.”

Clara wasn’t convinced, but raised no more arguments. Joanne and Elodie’s confidence was enough to soothe her for the time being, though I could imagine she’d be looking into my business the second I left the building. I wanted to be out of reach before she discovered my company’s area of expertise.

“Freya clearly isn’t too upset about being at this apartment building. She would fight tooth and nail to leave if she wasn’t happy to stay,” Elodie said.

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