Page 23 of Choosing Jenny
“Yeah, he pulled my dress strap up for me. It was weird.”
Mal’s jaw flexed. “Not weird. Not for Rex. He initiates physical contact as soon as possible when he has someone alonewith him, so he can make him touching you feel natural. It’s one of his manipulation-slash-flirtation tactics.”
“Nothing about that man feels natural,” I said in a flat tone. “And I feel dirty just by being near him. Not aroused, so he failed at manipulating me.”
Tiger glanced at Mal. “He truly thinks he could get you to murder us?” he asked quietly.
Mal nodded. “He has no reason to doubt it, considering our past. Wouldn’t be the first time he had gotten me to…do things I shouldn’t.”
I stared at him, but only for a second. “Unless you feel like telling us about them, there’s no point in rehashing the past,” I said, truly not wanting to know those things. “What we need to do is focus on what’s in front of us. Justice wants my sister’s allies, and Rex wants you.”
“And I want Rex dead,” Tiger grumbled.
“In which case…” I looked to Mal. “We need to kill the palace magician, so how do we do that?”
Mal let out a dry laugh. “You know, I don’t think Rex or Justice fully thought through how fragile their immortality plan is, when it hinges on the life of one man. Noc Prisberd.”
“Definitely poor planning on their part,” I said with a wicked little grin. “So what do we do?”
He smiled, his eyes finally flashing with purpose. “First, we go to Halla.”
CHAPTER 8
Mal
Iexhaled and ran a hand through my hair. “I have a confession to make, and I need it to stay between the three of us.”
Jenny nodded, looking to Tiger. “Of course.”
He nodded, as well. “Whatever you say is safe with us.”
I hesitated. This wasn’t easy. Not even a little. “It’s something I’ve always lied about. But now that I have the two of you, it feels silly to keep lying about it.”
They remained quiet and I paced the floor, stalling, but I was still filled with the overwhelming urge to tell them everything. Even this. “I have always told everyone that I remember nothing of my life before I was found by Justice in the rubble of my village during the war. That all my memories start when I was twelve. That even the executioner and the palace magician could not extract my memories from me, that my amnesia was true.”
“Yes,” Tiger said, his brow lifting in curiosity.
“There is one thing I remember,” I admitted quietly. “Only one. I recall my father, or at least I think it was him, saying one thing, over and over in my life:Don’t stop in a storm.”
“Was he a mystic?” Tiger asked.
I stopped my pacing. “I don’t think so. I want to say he was a sailor or maybe a smuggler or something. But what he meant by it was, when things are bad, you don’t stop where you’re at. You don’t give up. You keep going until things are good again. I kept that from the executioner and the palace magician. I’ve kept it to myself for sixteen years, because in some weird way, I felt like if I kept my father’s words safe, then he was safe, and maybe if I held onto that strand of him, I could follow it back to who I was supposed to be.” My voice cracked, and I shook my head. “I’m a sentimental fool, sometimes.”
Jenny smiled and gently rubbed my back. “I get it, though. Like if you could keep that memory hidden, then you kept your father safe from them.”
“Yeah,” I said, and cleared my throat. “My point is, we are in the storm. Rex, Justice and Noc, they are the storm. So, we need to keep going. Sometimes, in a storm, you can’t fight the waves or the wind and you have to go where they take you. Well, this wind is taking us to Halla. We don’t know what Sarah has planned right now, which means we could be in the middle of conducting a scheme against Noc Prisberd, while she’s organizing her own plans for her war, and that could fuck everything up. So, we need to know what’s happening on Halla before we can take out Noc.”
Jenny crossed her arms over her chest. “Sarah is not planning a war.”
“You don’t know what she’s planning, Jen,” I said gently, but firmly. “That’s why we need to go to Halla to find out. Noc is the most powerful magician for at least two planets, possibly more. It’s not going to be easy to take him out.”
Someone knocked on Jenny’s door, startling the three of us. She answered it, and all my friends were there, with Surge in front.
He smiled kindly. “We thought, perhaps, there was a discussion occurring that could require our assistance—”
“I can’t believe you were fucking that animal,” Discord said as she stormed in, cutting off Surge. “Seriously, Malice. I know he’s your type, but for fuck’s sake, he’s gotten so much worse. If you start up with him again—”
“Relax, Discord,” I said, interrupting her tirade. “That’snevergoing to happen.”
