“My boys took him out to the streets, shot him down.” Gunn takes a step back. “Cross me again, and Ben will be next. Win’s outside, guarding this door in case you get any crazy ideas like running.” He opens his door. “Stay, heel, Joan. As soon as this is all over, you and me, we’re done. And maybe you and your family get to walk out of here—final offer.”
The world’s spinning, crashing—
And then Gunn shuts his office door.
Lord, I think I’m hyperventilating.
Alex is gone.
Gunn has my family.
The Feds are moving in.
There’s no way out of this.
A tight pop of air winds its way up my throat and comes out again in a strangled sigh. I close my eyes and see Alex’s face. Alex, who trusted me, who believed in me, who made me better than I ever could have been alone.
I push out of my chair, spend the next minutes frantically pacing, anger, rage, my family . . . guilt . . . longing . . . Alex.
Something snaps inside me—no, breaks.
Like a gauntlet’s being thrown down.
Gunn will pay for this, for all of it.
A man like him deserves to lose everything.
I close my eyes, like I can literally snuff out the rage and the pain, and let cold, hard reason rise from the ashes. Gunn said Alex was working for McEvoy. He never mentioned the Feds.
Which means he still doesn’t know they’re coming.
I think about Alex’s sting, the plan we made in his cocoon of magic, perched on that fire escape like we were looking out on a whole new world. Get D Street and Gunn in the same room, he said. Lock them up until the Feds arrive and take them down. I think through it, carefully, calmly, and detached, surveying it for holes.
Because I don’t want the Feds taking Gunn and his gangsters down.
I want them gone.
I want it to be my hands that do it, that strangle the life out of Gunn.
The beginnings of an idea start to tease at the corners of my mind. And then it all comes together quickly, in images that I don’t seem to conjure but that conjure themselves, like a trick that’s sorcering on its own, in the dark folds of my nature.
The last time I let my magic take the wheel, steer me where it thought I needed to go, I ruined everything. But I’ve grown since that cursed night in our cabin’s clearing. I’m in control of my power. And I’d rather die than go down without a fight for my family, for Alex.
For me.
I straighten up and walk out of Gunn’s office with my head held high. Win Matthews is in a chair outside in the hall just like Gunn promised, watching Gunn’s office with a long, lean pistol in his hands. The gun’s now pointed right at me.
“What do you need?”
“Bathroom.”
He waits a minute before he starts to rise and says, “Afraid not.”
But as he stands, he drops his gun, just a sliver, and I thrust out my hand and command his weapon. The silver pistol flies out from his fingers, and I wrap both of my hands around it and call to the ends of the hall, “Surround.” Two thick sheets of glass erupt out of the floor, block both entrances to the hall.
Win quickly spins around, takes in his cage—the two long cinder-block walls of the hall and my two manipulations trapping us inside the corridor. He looks at me, slowly raises his hands. “What do you want?”
“Show me where my family is.”
“That’s not possible.”
I thrust the pistol toward him. “Now. I’m not playing.”
Win shakes his head but raises his hands a little higher in surrender. “Gunn would kill me.”
I take the safety off the pistol with a click. “At least you’ll be alive to worry about it.”
“They’re upstairs,” he finally concedes, “in Tommy’s room. The door is spellbound.”
“Take me.”
Win walks slowly in front of me toward the back stairs, as I train his gun at the back of his head. When we’re a few feet away from my manipulated wall, I release it, spiral it away into dust.
“Move,” I whisper. “It’s safe.”
We take quiet steps up the stairs, then follow the upstairs hallway. Win nods to a door on the left. “This is it.” But the door has no handle.
“Damn it, Tommy.” I keep one hand on the gun trained on Win’s forehead, and with the other, reach out to where a doorknob should be. Like a cat raising its back to be petted, the doorknob arches out of the wood and appears, and I grab it.
But as I begin to turn the knob, Win lunges for me in one hot rush, fumbles for the gun, brings us both crashing to the floor. The pistol goes flying between us, and Win dives on top of it, his hands fumbling with the trigger as I crawl away from him, scramble backward toward the door. He points the gun at me—
“Flip and fire!”
Win’s gun twists around in his hands, wrangles out of his grip like a wild animal, and shoots him in the face.
I collapse back on the ground, panting, turn away from the red gory mess in front of me. Lord, I think I actually might get sick.
I close my eyes, whisper my words of power, and slowly lower my hand. The floor planks below me answer my magic, curl up like pieces of ribbon, and slowly accept Win’s body into the floorboards.
I rush to open Tommy’s door, and find Ben and Ruby huddled on one of the beds along the wall.