Total pages in book: 202
Estimated words: 193561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 968(@200wpm)___ 774(@250wpm)___ 645(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 968(@200wpm)___ 774(@250wpm)___ 645(@300wpm)
“You’re full of remorse right now, now that you’re whole again. The second that necklace left your skin, you were overcome with decades of suppressed emotion.”
“Yes,” she whispers brokenly and I feel her swallow move down her throat against my hand.
“Deep in your core, you wish you could be the girl you were that wanted a family, that fell hard for Graydon. You want to believe with the naivety of that girl you once were that you’ll do better this time with a second chance.”
“Yes,” she repeats. Tears stream down her cheeks.
“The bond was severed for him, but not for you.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll try hard to resist the pull, the impossible to ignore tugging and whispering to you that you want to play. You need to play. You deserve it.”
She winces and tries to back up. But I don’t release her.
“It wants you Soleil. That magic wants you as much as a lover, as much as Graydon used to want you – which you think you crave more than magic itself – but it will never, fucking ever, release its grip on you. That’s what dark magic is.”
There’s a beat of honesty – as long as a heartbeat or maybe two – where her eyes register with knowledge that I’m speaking the truth. Her reaction lets me know with razor-sharp precision that she knows I’m absolutely right. She’ll do it again if she walks out of here with her magic. This is why I was feeling so off coming in. She took it back from me when I was walking in here. It was her first order of business, taking back what was hers. And I further know that in the three decades since she was able to practice magic, she has been no stranger to it. She’s studied it. She’s taught it to other witches. She’s become a full-time coach and scholar, gone to such lengths that she knew if she could get to the day after I mated when I’d come into her magic, she could set in motion several potential plans that might help her win it back. This woman is unscrupulous and beyond dangerous.
“You harmed my mom,” I accuse.
“She stepped in and got my life! Mine!” she defends.
“You threatened my wife. You are a threat to everything I care about, including my sons and daughters.”
She swallows again and I see emotion in her face, agony, bitterness. This woman’s emotions are a bitter, sour brew of regrets, self-loathing, envy, and addiction.
A new voice rings in my mind. Not the voice of the woman in front of me. The voice of the woman my father loved. The woman she was before dark magic burrowed into the nucleus of Soleil Young.
The voice says, “I can’t have my family back, and now that I have my magic back… it won’t be better. It won’t be enough. I no longer have to long for my magic but I’ll still long for more. More magic. More to be who I used to be. Young. Hopeful. Good. The woman who protectively cradled her belly while she grew the most beautiful being that she could fathom – a product of her love with Gray. Please know that I am so, so proud of you. Of the man you are. The leader. The mate. Of the father you’ll be, the coven leader and witch you’ll be. Everything I hoped for. More. But I hate myself. I loathe myself for what I became. It’s so ugly inside me…”
She cradles my face lovingly. “I’ll choose death before I allow you to fasten that chain again. I can’t. I won’t.”
I glare.
“Well,” she shrugs, “do what you must, then. But I will, too. It’s who I am now.”
Heat blazes behind my eyes as I stare into hers knowing if I don’t end this, she’ll hurt others. She’ll hurt me by coming for my power, Erica’s, the rest of my coven, for my children because they are part wolf shifter, part witch.
I have clarity. This might be why Fate bestowed telekinesis on me. Because the day would come when I’d need to pull the knife from Wyatt Meadows, yes, but it would also come that I’d have it to pull that poison from Mom… Carrie… and now to pull magic from Soleil in order to protect everything I love from the woman who grew me in her womb. The woman who made me can’t help what she has become because she’s so fucking weak against the call of dark magic.
“I wish,” she says brokenly, “I wish it were different. That I’d been stronger.”
She’s being truthful.
“Goodbye, Mother,” I grind out as my grip on her throat tightens. And her face crumbles with the word mother but only briefly before her expression hardens. She’ll fight to keep her magic. She’d kill me if necessary. She loves me.