Page 35 of Enchanted Shadows
He whipped around, finding the women on the balcony.
His magic had been the reason the volume in here was so loud, so he immediately turned it down. “Wren!” He gave her a smile that I didn’t much like. One steeped in condescension, like he was dealing with a child and not a woman. “Oh look, you brought your whole little team.”
“If things get ugly,” I told Miles as I took a sip of the shoddy beer, “don’t let me murder him. It will only rile the rest of the loyalists and the team doesn’t need that. None of us need that.”
“If you can’t, can I?” His eyes tracked Bram as he gestured for Wren and the girls to come down.
Thankfully she was smart enough not to use her power to go over the balcony to the floor where he was. Because part of her team was not Enchanted, women like Jessina, Zara, and Elsie, she took the grand staircase down. Miles and I moved in, still back far enough to blend in, but close enough to hear what was going on.
“How’s training, baby?” Bram asked my sister loudly. “Snuck out, huh? You’ve always been a rebel.”
What an interesting choice of words.
“How’s sleazing around behind my back?” Wren fired at him.
So they must have been back together then. For the third or fourth time. I forgot how many.
He reached for her, but she took a large step back. “I just missed you.”
“You missed me? That’s why your tongue was down Gretchen’s throat?”
The woman in question was at least smart enough to vanish.
“Wren. Don’t be a prude. Come on. You were going to be gone for months at a time.”
“Bram, I never want to see you again in my life.”
Music to my damn ears. Looking at the rage and hurt on my sister’s face, the fists she had clenched at her sides, I wished this wasn’t a lesson she had to learn on her own. That it hadn’t had to come to this. That she hadn’t had to see it with her own eyes.
“We aren’t done. We never are.”
“We are now,” Wren urged.
“And does your big brother know you’re here right now?”
Wren didn’t say anything. Just glared.
Bram’s eyes went wide before he gestured with a hand. “So you thought you’d leave to come spy on me, bring the girls with you?”
“We’re a team. They wouldn’t let me come without them,” Wren explained.
Bram tipped his head back and laughed. The prick laughed. “That’s cute. Hey, Novak. You hear that? Gone a month and they think they’re trained.”
Zara and Molly moved in; Molly grabbed Wren’s arm and pulled her back. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. You saw all you needed to.”
Novak moved in and stopped Molly, two others completing the four-pointed diamond around the women. “Nah. Stay. Have some fun. Let’s seehowtrained you are.”
“I already trained Wren in the art of s?—”
He never got to finish that statement. Zara moved fast,throwing her entire weight behind the punch and driving up toward his nose.
A cracking noise was heard just before blood began gushing everywhere. It was violent and bloody. I didn’t know what it said about me that I was damn proud of it.
“Uhh,” Bram yelled. “She broke my damn nose!”
“You deserved it,” was Zara’s simple answer.
“Make them pay,” Bram said to Novak and the others. “And someone get me something for my nose!”
