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“Please, Dominic. Just leave it alone.”
I could feel tears building in my eyes, and this time when I yanked my hand away from his, he let me go. He knew that this was it, the end of my rope, and I appreciated that he could respect when the conversation was over.
Walking away from Dom and his protection was one of the hardest things I’d had to do in recent years, but it was for the best. I had to remind myself that I hated him, after all.
Dominic Kent was taking my home away from me. He was the reason I might have to sever my connection to the magical world by moving away from The Hollow. He was technically my competition for the wildcard seat. And he was a brutal vampire, I could feel it. Sense the danger on him. He’d seen things, done things—things I didn’t want to be associated with.
But as the tears fell down my face while I pressed open the back door to the ballroom, I couldn’t help but think it all felt wrong.
I stumbled out the emergency exit of the event venue, to my surprise finding a sprinkling drizzle coming down from the sky. It hadn’t been raining earlier in the evening, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything except the way Dominic’s touch felt against me in the last few minutes.
I stood in my strappy red dress, my high heels, my curled hair, letting the rain wash away the makeup I’d so carefully applied. It was just a light mist, but it was enough to soak me through, to drive me to shivers with the chill in the air.
I was just turning back to head upstairs and flop into bed when I felt a hand reach out, touch my shoulder. This hand didn’t have the warm possessiveness of Dominic. It didn’t have the safety attached to it, the somehow already familiar comfort that radiated between me and the vampire.
This touch felt cold, clammy. I whipped around. I recognized the elf’s face. He was one of the paparazzi who’d been crowding me earlier. One of the reporters Dom had warned to stay away. The elf grinned, raised his camera, took a close up shot of my face.
“Hey, baby,” he said. “Just thought you might want to come up to the room with me for some more personal photos.”
“Get lost,” I said, feeling a shudder of disgust. “I told you that I have no comment.”
“No, but you might want to comment on this photo before I run it.” The guy flipped up a phone, showed me an image on it.
The image was me when I dumped that stupid pink drink down my throat as I tried to quell the magic that’d been bubbling inside of me. The only problem with the picture was that the glow on my hands was visible. That electric violet, a clear sign that I didn’t have my magic under control. Combine that with the image of me throwing my head back and downing alcohol like it was oxygen, and it wasn’t a good look.
I wasn’t concerned with my reputation for the campaign. I was concerned, however, that this picture leaking into the public could cause problems for me and my family. Witches who repressed their magic were not looked upon favorably. Witches who repressed their magic like I had a habit of doing had been known to disappear.
“Run it if you want.” I feigned nonchalance. “I don’t care. I told you, I’ve no interest in the campaign.”
“That might be true, but this wouldn’t only sink your campaign. It could get your license to live in The Hollow revoked. Permanently. Plus, a little Googling turned up some interesting results in your family tree. Your mother died of suspicious causes. You wouldn’t want to end up like her, now would you?”
“Is that a threat?” The voice came from over my shoulder.
I could feel Dom’s presence behind me. But this wasn’t his battle to fight. It was mine.
I raised my hands and faced the reporter. “You want me to stop repressing my magic?”
The reporter’s eyes widened a second before it was too late. Before the magic shot out of me with the force of a thousand suns and pinned him to the wall.
The reporter’s camera crashed to the cement—glass shattered, plastic crunched. His phone shot out of his hands and disappeared into the blackness before landing some twenty feet away.
“How do you like my magic now?” I asked, feeling my chest heaving with the weight of the magic coursing through me. “This is what you asked for, isn’t it?”
“Trixie.”
The sound of Dom’s voice was soothing, calm, a touch hard. It wasn’t judgmental which, when I stopped to think about it, was something.
I pictured myself through his eyes in that moment—my hair damp, slicked down from the rain. My legs exposed in a power stance as I teetered on ridiculously high heels. The tight red dress wrapped around my body, tighter now that the rain had molded it to me like a second skin. I must look wildly bonkers with light pouring out of my hands.
Yet I couldn’t stop. It didn’t feel like I had any control over what I was doing. My willpower was too weak to stop the force of the magic bowling me over. I felt like I was no longer in my body—like I was looking down on the situation, watching myself pin a helpless elf against the wall like he was nothing more than a pesky fly.
But this reporter wasn’t harmless, was he? He’d tried to blackmail me. Threatened to expose my magical repression which could cost me my life. He’d pressured me to come up with him to his hotel room to do only Fates knew what in order to buy his silence. He wasn’t harmless, to me or other women.
That knowledge caused my magic to flicker and blink. But instead of stopping, it burned out of me, stronger, harder, faster, the light changing from a silvery glow to a burst of white so pure it was impossible to stare at directly. The color white was an understatement. The only way to describe this was unbridled, uncontrolled magic.
“Trix.”
Dom was at my side then, not touching me, but so close his breath tickled my ear as he leaned down to whisper in my ear.
