Page 108 of Bent Out of Shade
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They leftme to stew in a conference room at Lonestar HQ. I wasn’t offered a lawyer, and when I demanded a phone call, the Hawaiian shirt Lonestar chuckled, not unkindly, and said I watched too much television.
By the time Ryann joined me, I’d bitten my nails to the quick, and was on my third run-through of every way I’d blown up my life. I leaned as far forward as the chair bolted to the concrete allowed. “How are Laurent and Emmett? Can I speak to Sadie or Eli?”
The thought of never seeing my daughter again was a physical ache that clawed through my chest.
Ryann slapped a folder with a pen clipped to it down on the table. “You could have avoided this.”
When former magic cop Oliver Anderson had looked at me, all he’d seen was a despised BS, but I’d have taken his derision over the utter impersonality Ryann pegged me with. Her blue eyes weren’t a summer sky, wide in wonder, they were glacial cold and calculating.
Void of magic due to the nulling handcuffs, I reached for anger to cloak myself in, but found only sorrow. “I could say the same thing about you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I stroked a finger over the spot where Vincenzo had bitten me. With my luck, these cuffs worked on only my magic, not the blood oath. “Sabrina was turned against her will and left to fend for herself.” With that one measly sentence, a pressure built on all my tendons and muscles like they were about to snap. I fell to my knees, gripping the table so hard that my knuckles turned white.
Ryann frowned and then grabbed my wrist. “You know,” she said, “you don’t have to do all the hard things by yourself.”
“It wasn’t a choi—fuck!”
She’d dug her finger into the skin and electrocuted me. I collapsed forward onto the table, light-headed and dizzy, my powers still nulled thanks to the cuffs.
“You can speak without consequence now,” she said.
I weakly raised my head. “You broke a blood oath?”
“I’m the head Lonestar,” she said evenly.
Dragging in a breath, I hauled myself back into the chair. “You know what else you are? Powerful and smart. You also bake cookies, which you give away on a regular basis instead of keeping them for yourself, and you know how every single person in this building is doing, whether their kid just won a swimming match or their dog has fleas.” I grabbed the ballpoint pen from the file and dug its tip into the wood, my grip so tight that my knuckles turned white, my eyes locked on hers. “Someone had to be on Sabrina’s side, but you were uttering edicts and threats without a whole hell of compassion. Had you been acting like the person I knew you were, I’d have confided in you in an instant.”
“The prime directive was being threatened. I was doing my job.”
“Yeah, but you’ve never lost yourself doing it before.” I dropped my cuffed hands into my lap with a sigh. “I said I’d tell you everything, Officer Esposito, and I will. What do you want to know first?”
A muscle ticked in Ryann’s jaw. She stood up abruptly, her metal chair scraping back like nails on a chalkboard, and marched out.
The door slammed behind her.
I was too wrung out to care one way or the other. I tipped my head back and counted the perforations in the ceiling tiles, making a game out of how far I could go with nothing in my head except numbers before my worries came crashing back.
Most of the time I didn’t get past ten, so I was annoyed when my winning streak of twenty-three was broken by the door opening again.
A Lonestar wheeled a whiteboard with a jumble of markers on its ledge into the room.
“Do you know how my team is doing?” I said.
“No, but I’m sure Ryann will fill you in soon.”
The old Ryann would have. “Right.”
Speak of the devil… She entered the room and shut the door behind her departing colleague.
Ryann leaned over the table. “Who sired Sabrina?”
“I have no idea.” I crossed my arms, then winced because no one had treated my shoulder yet. “Trust me, Officer Esposito, if I knew, I’d hand that asshole over to you in a nanosecond.”
She winged a marker at me.
