Change of Heart (The Potentate of Atlanta Book 3) Read online

  “You got it in one.” I started walking. I couldn’t help myself. The urge to flee was too strong. “I’m Amelie Pritchard.”

  “That’s not possible.” Midas whipped his head toward the cottage. “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “This is not nothing.” A growl twitched his upper lip. “Explain this to me.”

  Not enough, not enough, not enough.

  The balance was tipping away from me, and I couldn’t hold tight enough to stop the seesaw of his emotions, let alone mine. I tried to answer him. I did. I opened my mouth and everything. But nothing happened. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t wreck this unexpected and beautiful thing between us. I might have to bear the fallout, but I refused to pick up the sledgehammer and smash through it on my own.

  Midas palmed his phone and punched in a number I didn’t have to see to anticipate.

  “Linus,” he snarled into his cell after he mashed the speaker button. “Explain this to me.”

  “You’ll have to elaborate.”

  “Amelie Pritchard.”

  The two words hit with the force of a hurricane and swept away all my silly hopes and dreams. I really ought to know by now not to pin my happiness on anyone other than myself.

  A long pause lapsed before Linus asked, “Can I speak to Hadley, please?”

  “Hadley doesn’t exist.” Midas squeezed the phone until its case cracked. “What have you done?”

  “Hadley will want to tell you herself.” His voice went soft. “Harm her, Midas, and I won’t be forgiving.”

  Shock zinged through me that Linus thought Midas would hurt me, but it fused my lips together instead of loosening them in Midas’s defense. I had betrayed him. I hadn’t meant to hurt him, but I had known it was going to happen eventually. Only I was too selfish to carve him out of my life before I got cut too.

  Ending the call, Midas stared at me until the weight of his scrutiny forced me to sit on the sidewalk.

  Unable to stomach looking at him, to see the hurt I had etched onto his features, I stared at the cars whooshing past.

  Midas didn’t say another word, just turned and walked away from me.

  Not enough, not enough, not enough.

  I hated when my mother was right.

  Nineteen

  No matter how fast he ran, Midas couldn’t escape the truth.

  Amelie Pritchard was his mate.

  Not Hadley Whitaker.

  The implications terrified him for myriad reasons, starting with the first time he set eyes on her.

  “Your friend smells wrong.” Nostrils flared, he drew in Amelie’s scent. “The beast is tempted by her.”

  “The beast?” Grier looked back at him. “Your beast? You? When you shift?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “It’s in our nature to put down injured or sick prey.”

  Prior to Hadley, he hadn’t let himself be alone with females of any species. He hadn’t known how far to trust his instincts. He’d let his guard down with her, she’d earned it, and he’d begun to believe she was safe with him.

  But that was Hadley.

  And Hadley didn’t exist.

  The scent of Amelie filled his head, and he searched every scarred corner of his soul for signs the beast had marked her as prey. He found nothing, but he didn’t believe himself now that he knew the truth.

  Shadow child.

  Finally, he understood what others meant when they referenced her shadow. She was a dybbuk, a creature her own kind hunted and executed for good reason. They were killers. Every single one of them, and she was no exception.

  Midas hadn’t been in Savannah when Amelie Pritchard went to trial for the murders of several vampires. He hadn’t been there when she was stripped of her family name, inheritance, and personal assets. He hadn’t been there when she was left Amelie Madison, her middle name promoted to surname, and she lost everything. But he had heard about it. The scandal rocked the Society, and it was all anyone talked about for months.

  Talk was too polite for what they had done, picking her apart thread by thread until Amelie unraveled.

  They fashioned her into a monster, but there had to be more to the story. Grier would have stood for her childhood friend no matter the personal cost, but Linus? He was more brains than heart with anyone but Grier. He wouldn’t have vouched for Amelie, taken her under his wing, if he hadn’t believed in her ability to change for the better and learn control of the thing she had willingly become through one of her kind’s darkest rites.

  The beast in him had wanted to hunt Amelie then, and given his violent history, he didn’t trust its silence on the matter. Until he was certain he wouldn’t harm her, in either form, in any form, he couldn’t be near her.

  That same inner predator rebelled at the notion he could hurt her, but Midas knew himself better.

  He needed to think, and to think, he had to get away from her.

  Already he could tell he was making the biggest mistake of his life in walking away, but it was worth it to protect her. She might never forgive him, might hate him forever, but she would be alive, and he would have one less black mark on his soul.

  Twenty

  “I warned you, kid.” Bishop sat next to me on the curb. “I told you to stay away from him.”

  The fae was who he meant, not Midas. I couldn’t put my finger on his name, my thoughts slid away from recalling it, but I had known because I had invoked it. Too bad I couldn’t sweet-talk what’s his name into erasing, say, the last hour of my life too.

  Shards of my broken heart scraped against each other while I breathed, and the relentless hurt reminded me that a magical lobotomy wasn’t the solution. It would only delay the inevitable, and I couldn’t live through this again.

  “You also told me his name.” I kept staring at the same reflector in the asphalt, waiting, waiting, waiting, but Midas didn’t circle back. Even to yell at me some more. “You knew I would use it.”

  “I’ll pay for it too, but I can afford it.” He wrapped a brotherly arm around my shoulders. “It will be worth it, if you find the coven.” He let me rest my head against him. “I’m sorry about Midas.”

  “I didn’t expect us to last the whole six weeks.” I shut my eyes to hold in tears. “This is easier.”

  “A clean break might be for the best.” He rubbed his cheek against my hair. “I’m still sorry.”

  “Yeah.” I barely recognized my voice. “Me too.”

  Most of me had gone numb, but enough common sense remained for me to worry how Bishop might appear through my newly opened eyes. Thankfully, when I worked up the nerve to check, he was as always. Unchanged. My hindbrain grasped that didn’t mean I was seeing him for what he was, only that he was powerful enough to keep up appearances.

  That wasn’t terrifying at all, really. I didn’t need to change my pants after that revelation. Nope. Not me.

  “We’ve got a few hours left until dawn.” He stood and helped me up too. “Might as well get started.”

  Grateful to have anything but Midas to think about, I didn’t argue. “We can use the standard grid pattern.”

  We used it to locate missing persons mostly, and it covered the entire city as well as the nearest suburbs, should we have to push out our search area.

  “The fae,” I said as we walked to our starting point. “He’s Blithe’s son, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah.” Bishop massaged his nape, but he only made the reddening splotches worse. “I’m the reason you got into this mess, and I still can’t tell you the half of it. Suffice it to say, he wouldn’t have acted on his impulse to meddle in your affairs if he hadn’t spotted us together.”

  “Does he think we’re an item?”

  “You’re beautiful, powerful, and deadly.” Bish chuckled under his breath. “You’re definitely my type.” He let his hand drop. “He would have picked up on that when you dropped me off on his doorstep.”

  Happy for a chance to shine the spotlight on someone else’s private l
ife, I plowed ahead with a frown. “You’ve never made googly eyes at me.”

  “Firstly, I’m not a googly eyes kind of guy.” He elbowed me for insulting his technique. “Secondly, even if I had been interested, I could see what this job meant to you, and what it meant to Linus for you to succeed. That decided it for me before my hormones entered the equation. I made a mental note you were hot when we met, but then I got to know you, and I set it on fire then scattered the ashes.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  Smoothing his hair back, he struck a pose. “Is it because I’m not blond?”

  Platinum was a shade of blond, but I didn’t correct him. He was being ridiculous for me, and I loved it.

  “No.” I threaded my arm through his. “It’s because I really needed a friend, and you’re a good one.”

  “Back at you.” He patted my hand. “I didn’t know how much.”

  The first grid gave us nothing. The second and third was more of the same. We knocked out the fourth and the fifth as the sun rose, and Bishop ordered me to stop and get some rest. He walked me back to the Faraday, but I couldn’t bear to face Hank or the others. I wasn’t sure if it would be worse if they all hated me on sight or if they acted like nothing was wrong, when absolutely nothing was right.

  Turning instead down the familiar alley, I used the fire escape to climb up to my old apartment. The glass was still missing in the windows, and much of the floor was questionable, but the bathroom was in okay shape.

  I climbed into the tub with a towel for a pillow and wished harder than ever I would wake to find my life was nothing but a bad dream.

  Twenty-One

  “It’s been five days,” Lisbeth said, tucked behind her monitor once again, her true identity safe with me. “We’ve hit the grids hard, repeatedly, but we’re not making any headway.”

  Five days since Midas walked away from me.

  “They must be shifting locations nightly,” Anca murmured. “How else are they avoiding detection?”

  Five days since he saw my true face and couldn’t stomach the truth.

  “We’ll have to scan the hot zones again.” Milo rubbed his jaw. “You’ve marked four or five?”

  Five days since I discovered I only thought I had hit rock bottom.

  “Six,” Reece corrected absently, flicking new reports onto our screens for review. “As of last night.”

  Five days since I no longer saw my new life as a second chance but as yet another mistake in a long line of them I suspected began with my birth.

  “A day off wouldn’t hurt,” Bishop said, his nose an inch from mine. “You could use a break.”

  Blinking him and the room into focus, I struggled to replay the last five minutes of conversation. I had been following along, honest. But I couldn’t have told you a single point we hit up until he called me out.

  “Milo’s right.” I worried the silver ring on my finger, a habit I thought I had kicked. “We need to hit the glamoured storefronts again, see if we can shake something loose.”

  The Clairmont pack hadn’t lost a single member thanks to their absolute loyalty to Ayla Clairmont and her ban until further notice on recreational activities outside their high-rise den.

  The Loup Garous were down five members, that Garou would admit to, which meant there were more.

  Three necromancers were dead.

  Four gwyllgi were dead, all of them exposed after the drugs hit the streets. As if the teens hooked on life support weren’t enough of a cautionary tale.

  The fae were fine, and so were the witches, and so were the humans.

  Two vampires were dead because they got high off their food sources, and the frantic humans, who had been taken without their consent, killed the vampires when they came around and found they had been gnawed on like chew toys.

  There were other deaths, other hospitalizations, but the coven had yet to swoop in for their coup d’état. Coupé de ville? I seriously ought to sign up for Duolingo.

  All in all, it felt like I had torpedoed my new life for absolutely nothing.

  Midas left the city the night we gained the sight, and I had yet to spot him at the Faraday since. The pack hadn’t gone out of their way to interact with me, which told me they knew we had broken up, and it was ugly, but their indifference also helped me continue avoiding them.

  Linus called a few times, but I had stopped answering. Addie called too. Usually after I missed a call from Linus. I was starting to think the sheer volume of recipes my sister was in dire need of at my new all-time low meant Linus had clued her in to my breakup if nothing else.

  Even Midas had texted me. Once. I erased it without reading it and blocked his number. I wasn’t strong enough to hear his voice yet, let alone his reasons for breaking every promise he ever made to me.

  I knew them all. All my flaws. All my mistakes. All my shortcomings.

  One wrong word from him might tip the balance between Ambrose and me, and that could be far more deadly than a broken heart.

  “I’m going with you.” Bishop rose from his squeaky chair. “You shouldn’t be out there alone.”

  After he killed the monitors with a frustrated slap of his palm, I confronted the elephant in the room.

  “You’re worried—” I couldn’t say his name. “You think he’ll expose me.”

  Had he any choice in the matter, he would keep my secret. I truly believed that. He was a good man, and he would do that much for me. But he also had a duty to his people, and he’d just learned what manner of monster ruled the city after the moon rose.

  “I bet he ran straight home to his mommy and cried into her skirts.” His jaw flexed as he fought to hold back other comments on Midas. “She’s going to show up at some point, butt hurt her son couldn’t handle a woman with a past—like he’s got room to talk—and if she comes armed, I don’t want you facing her alone.”

  “You warned me.” I was force-feeding him the argument I would have had with my mother—how right he had been, how stupid I was, how I should have listened to him—but I couldn’t put down the damn spoon. “I have no one to blame but myself.”

  As usual.

  That line ought to be my theme song. All I had to do was set it to music.

  “You did what you thought was right to save the lives in your charge.” Bishop jabbed me in the shoulder with his pointer. “The rest, as much as I hate to say it, goes with the territory. Sacrifice for the greater good sucks. That’s why there’s not exactly a waitlist to fill Linus’s shoes.”

  “I lied to Midas about who I am.”

  “No, you lied to him about your name.” He kept poking until he got me out the door. “You watch too many B movies to be a great actress.”

  “They’re classics.”

  “They’re just old.” He locked up behind us. “Black-and-white doesn’t equal quality.”

  The brutal assault on the one thing holding me together struck me mute.

  “Besides, no one getting paid as little as you do would do what you do to maintain a cover.” He shepherded me onto the sidewalk. “You’ve got your own reasons for doing this, but so did everyone else who ever held the title.”

  “I don’t mind getting outed.” Karma had circled back around for me again, and I had to live with that. “I do mind my family getting dragged through the mud for it.”

  The Pritchards had disowned me, so they didn’t have to worry about me bringing shame to the family. I did, however, worry about the Whitakers. Addie wasn’t immune from gossip, and her reputation would take a serious hit if my cover got blown.

  The Ambrose-fueled killing spree I went on in Savannah, as Amelie, was the whole reason she wound up engaged to Boaz in the first place. He needed her last name to wash his clean. Now here I was, splashing mud on the Whitakers and endangering Addie’s best shot for an advantageous marriage.

  “We’ll shield them as best we can,” he promised. “You’ve got the funds now to take care of yourself and your family, if it comes to that.”
/>   The click in my head as the pieces fit together left me wary. “Do you think Linus knew?”

  “That you and Midas would split?” Bishop watched me to see how I took the hit, but I let it slide off me. “I doubt his actions have much to do with that possibility. It’s not how he’s wired. He’s more logical than emotional, which is not to say he doesn’t care. He just thinks linearly for the most part.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “More than likely he anticipated your identity would leak one day, and he wanted to protect you as best he could from the fallout.”

  I was being paranoid. Probably because I wasn’t sleeping. The king-size mattress was propped in the hallway, free to anyone who wanted it, but the new futon I had hauled up into the loft smelled like plastic and made weird crinkling noises when I shifted my weight. The tub in my old place was more comfortable.

  And there I went again, letting my thoughts circle the drain. I really ought to invest in a stopper.

  “You want even or odds?” We no longer hit streets in order. “I have a good feeling about evens.”

  The hot spots, as Milo called them, were businesses or apartments that weren’t what they appeared to be. Not all of them were sinister, as I found out after charging in the first few with swords blazing. But others left me with an overwhelming sense of darkness, and those were the ones we labeled and patrolled. Not that it had done us much good so far.

  “Evens it is then.”

  Bishop and I hit spots two and four without any luck. Two got marked off the list when we bumped into the Unseelie fae couple who lived there. I’m not sure which shocked them more—that I could see their true faces or that I could tell their home from the brick wall it pretended to be.

  Ambrose got antsy near our last stop, and his stomach grumbled. Daring to hope we were finally making progress, I dipped a hand into his core for a sword, just in case, and as I drew it, he glanced over my shoulder.

  “Hadley.”

  Heart thundering in my ears, I whipped my head toward the voice. “Ares.”