Page 31 of Mage Massacres

I had no fucking clue.

Palmer’s office was tidy, the complete opposite of any space I’d ever seen him work in. We found nothing. But, of course, that was the case. We were just searching all the areas on the top floor while the Lynch siblings did the hard work.

I’d seen the old records room before we moved everything to the new building. No fucking thank you. I wasn’t keen on sifting through dozens and dozens of filing cabinets. They weren’t even in alphabetical order. The records were filed by registration date and divided up by where you lived.

Because that made tons of sense.

I rolled my eyes at myself, wanting to say this was not my circus… But godsdamnit. It was about to be my circus and my monkeys.

“Why are you thinking about the circus again?”

Stone caught me off guard with his question. His lapis eyes glimmered as he raised a brow at me.

“Hmm?”

“That’s the second time you’ve thought about the circus today. Earlier, you were humming that weird tune they play, and just now, you were thinking about circus monkeys. Do you really want to go to the circus?”

“Absolutely not,” I confessed, horror widening my eyes. “Clowns freak me out.”

His answering grin was equal parts charming and infuriating. “I know. I’m just trying to figure your thoughts out.”

“You and me both,” I muttered as we moved from Palmer’s office to mine.

“Do you need to be distracted, Kitten?”

“Yes,” I commented absently, not hearing the seduction in his tone until I’d spoken. “No. I mean, yes, but when we leave here.”

He smirked, swaggering forward with silent footsteps. “So, no?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

I squinted at him, then peeled open a box to peek inside. “Yes.”

Stone backed me against the empty bookcase. His fingers burned a trail from the outside of my thigh to the waist of my tights. His breath skated across my neck as he leaned in, his whispered words sending shivers down my spine.

“Mean it when you tell me no, and I’ll stop.”

His lips caressed the column of my neck before his teeth scraped my skin. A thin trickle of blood began pooling at my collarbone.

“Fucking incubus,” I swore under my breath.

“Not an incubus,” he corrected. “Doesn’t matter how many times you say it; it’s still not true.”

That was an unintentional lie. He was an archdemon, so he had to have a little incubus in his line somewhe— “Fuck, Stone. I can’t think.”

“And?” he asked as he pushed my tights down inch by inch. “Were your thoughts about telling me to stop? Because that’s not what I was hearing.”

“No. They were about—”

“Telling me to keep going?” he guessed, his smirk back in full force.

I nodded my head, running my tongue across my teeth. “I see what you did.”

“Can you see what I’m going to do?”

His question shifted my train of thought. I hadn’t been using my entire arsenal of powers, not that I ever did. I needed to broaden my view of the problems at hand.