Page 12 of Trick Me
“Watch where you’re throwing things,” he growls.
“I didn’t exactly aim,” I say, but the words come out uneven.
He doesn’t answer. Just turns, fury coiled tight in his shoulders, and walks away. People scramble to get out of his path.
“Charming,” I mutter, more to fill the silence than anything.
The woman doesn’t laugh. Instead, she watches him go with something like satisfaction.
“Oh, that one has lessons to learn,” the woman murmurs, more to herself than to anyone else. Her eyes cut back to me like a blade slipping between ribs.
“Now, dear,” she says. “Look at your peel.”
I turn, heart hammering harder than I want to admit, and step to where it landed.
The shape the peel has taken has me tilting my head to the side. Curled just so, a perfect, elegantC.
Not a coincidence. Not an accident of gravity. Deliberate.
“She got aC,” someone calls out.
But the woman has already turned her back. She’s speaking to someone else, her shawl catching the candlelight as the crowd tightens around her once more.
Who was that guy?
Rude, sure. But honestly… if someone had chucked an apple peel at my brand-new dress, I’d probably growl too.
I rub my arms, trying to shake the chill.
Across the ballroom, I spot Sera.
She’s laughing, twirling in Rich’s arms, looking like the kind of carefree I haven’t felt in years.
For a moment, I just watch her.
Then I square my shoulders.
No more weird magic games.
No more fate or tricks.
I came here to have fun… so damn it, I’m going to.
Chapter
Two
ASH
“Vittu helvetti!!Damn it!”
The Finnish curse rushes past my lips and ricochets off the bathroom walls with enough venom to strip paint. I’m scrubbing apple juice from my jacket.
“?‘Send Ash to find his mate,’ they said. ‘The stars have spoken,’ they said. Well, the stars can take their prophecies and shove them up their asses. I knew I shouldn’t have attended. I have too much to do back home with the pack, and you sure as fuck can’t rush finding your mate.”
Every surface around me gleams with the kind of perfection that only magic can maintain. Gold fixtures that never tarnish, mirrors framed in silver so pure it sets my nerves and wolf on edge. We’re not weak to silver in the way some may think, but pure silver stillmakes my skin crawl, some ancestral memory of when it could actually hurt us.
Koi fish swim eternal circles on the tiles, scales shifting between copper and gold and colors that shouldn’t exist. Seaweed painted in the corners sways in an invisible current, reaching up toward a ceiling painted to look like the surface of water seen from below, complete with filtered sunlight.
