Page 61 of Seduced
She can’t hurt me. We’ve made sure of that.
“What did you do?” she demands. “Where’s my magic?”
She looks down at her unbound hands in disbelief. Since my bracelets were made to be taken off at times, they’re not the tight shackles the witches use for punishing their own kind for misusing magic. So we’ve had to improvise. I taped the bracelets onto her wrists with several layers of duct tape, careful not to constrict her blood flow. If she tries to take it off, it’ll take her long enough for us to knock her out if we have to.
“If you remain calm, we won’t have to restrain you again,” I tell her. “You can use the bathroom, and there’s food.”
Alice glances at the low table beside her. A bowl of Ty’s chicken noodle soup stands on a platter, along with Mrs. Hobb’s bread roll, a cup of coffee, and a spoon. No knife, of course. I patted her down earlier to make sure she had no other weapons hidden in her clothing.
For a moment, I think she might knock the food over, but she seems to think better of it. If her backpack and camp were any indication, she and Cameron weren’t well-prepared for living in the Alaskan wilderness. It’s a miracle she survived this long, actually.
Alice sits on the couch and lifts the bowl of soup to her lap. She eats quickly, and I can tell she likes the taste, even though she’s trying hard not to show it. Ty’s cooking is exquisite. I thought the food might mellow her out a little, make her more susceptible to finding a peaceful solution. If she keeps snarling at me, I don’t know what I’ll do.
When she’s done, she shuffles to the bathroom. We removed anything she could use as a weapon, including the mirror, and nailed shut the window, so there’s no way out. She rattles around for a while, then comes out looking more sullen and defeated than angry.
“Are you comfortable?” I ask her.
She glares at me and lifts her taped wrists. “What do you think?”
I cringe. “Well, now you know how I felt all the time.”
To her credit, she drops her head in her hands and doesn’t snark back. The loss of magic must be weighing on her.
“Listen, Alice,” I say, using her full name instead of my childhood version of it, “we need to know: did you report back to the coven that there were dragons here?”
Her face is unreadable. “Why?”
“We need to know if more attacks are coming,” I tell her, going for full honesty. I glance at Aiden, and he nods—we agreed on this earlier when we discussed our strategy and options. “If you’re the only one who knows about the clan, things will be much easier for both of us.”
She presses her lips together, then shakes her head. “I didn’t tell anyone. The cell reception is shitty here, and I didn’t want to alert anyone until we had hard proof.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, even though I’m not entirely sure I believe her.
“What hard proof?” Aiden asks. “Photos?”
Alice glowers at him. “That wouldn’t have been enough to mobilize the witches. I was going to bring back that dead dragon’s head.”
She means Ward. She’s right, of course—a photo could have been manipulated, tampered with, but real, tangible proof would have been incontestable.
“Did you kill him?” I ask in a small voice.
“Yes,” she replies.
Her voice is completely devoid of remorse, and I even catch a flash of smug satisfaction flit across her face.
“Why?” Aiden demands.
She lifts one shoulder in a careless shrug. “We found his boat moored a couple of miles up the coast and thought it would make a good place to sleep. It seemed abandoned from a distance. We came on board and found it empty but stocked with food and such. Then Cameron noticed a shape swimming toward us. It was a dragon, so we killed it.”
“Him,” I correct her, fury rising inside me. “You killedhim, Alice. His name was Devlin Ward, and he was aperson.”
She glares at me. “So was Cameron. You used to love him, remember?” Then she casts a sly glance at Aiden. “You wanted to marry him.”
My stomach churns, but I won’t let her break my relationship with my men, not when it’s so much stronger and purer than my connection to Cameron ever was.
“Cameron tried to kill me.” I straighten in my chair, pushing my shoulders back. “Like you did earlier. You both failed. So tell me, what will you do to stay alive?”
For the first time, a glimmer of fear enters her gaze. “You wouldn’t kill me.”
