She glanced sideways, regarding him. Why would he forgive cheating so easily?She wouldn’t have; her past actions showed that. She’d left him once for something not nearly as common. Witches broke up with warlocks all the time for cheating, so why would Layton forgive that without a single demand to understand why?
The answer was glaringly obvious.
As was the reason Zeke didn’t ask her to stay.
“Stop the car!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, grabbing the door handle. “Right now.”
Her door flew open and Layton slammed on the brakes. When the car stopped, she jumped out. “Bryanna,” he roared after her.
Not wanting to hear any more of his lies, making her so blind to his real intentions, she ran forward. Layton called out her name again, but when she ignored him, energy vibrated through the air and raised every hair on her body. Her heart hammered as time slowed around her. Now she knew the daunting truth, that Layton would never allow her to leave him.
He didn’t find her out of love. He asked the coven to locate her because he needed her money. Money was power, and without it, Layton was only a typical warlock. As the realization haunted her, a loud whoosh in the air came above her before she lost her footing, tumbling face-first to the ground.
She cried out as her palms scraped against the rocky gravel road. Turning onto her side, she noticed the rope binding her feet and quickly reached to remove it. But Layton’s magic had tight knots she couldn’t undo.
As she fought with one of the knots, Layton’s hard footsteps indicated he approached. “You’ve left me no choice, Bryanna.”
Choice?
At one time, she didn’t have any choices. She never chose to have unruly magic, she never chose to have shitty parents and she certainly never chose to find love with someone only after her money.
What Layton didn’t know, and even to her own surprise, with one decision to leave him, fate stepped in and gave her the taste of freedom. She chose to leave her car when it had broken down, she chose to stay in the car with a demon and she chose to rent a home in Charmstone.
The road to making her own choices led to her left, not to the right toward Shreveport.
Layton squatted in front of her and didn’t hide the coldness or the greed from his gaze. But she’d seen eyes far scarier than the ones gazing at her now and she glared back. “You have one chance to remove the rope and leave.”
“Or what?” He snorted. “Who’s going to stop me?”
“Zeke!” she screamed.
The red car lights faded and Zeke exhaled, fighting against the hollowness in his chest. He and Bryanna had such a short time together and she had forever changed him. Perhaps his original intention had been to save a soul worth saving. Now, at the loss of her, a pain so profound filled him that he could barely breathe.
She made the choice to leave him.
He’d seen the question in her eyes, begging him to tell her to stay, but he wouldn’t. For too long, everyone told her how to act and what to do. He decided not to be one of them, no matter that his heart disagreed. He had hoped she’d see past Layton’s deceit.
She didn’t.
Now she was gone.
He inhaled, swearing he could still smell her flowery scent drifting in the wind around him. While his sense of smell, if he concentrated, did carry into a far distance, he suspected his recollection of her had been forever burned into his memory. She was in a car with Layton, now far away from him.
Turning away from the long, dark road, he looked at Arlo. His friend sighed, sounding more like a grunt. Zeke strode forward to thank him for keeping Bryanna safe during the fight with Layton, when suddenly, he heard his name and froze.
Terrific. He wasn’t only catching whiffs of Bryanna’s scent. Now he was hearing her call his damn name. He raised his foot to take another step forward, but before it could hit the ground, he he
ard his name again.
Arlo tilted his head. “Is that—”
He didn’t need Arlo to finish. The way the ogre’s ears perked up in the same direction that he heard Bryanna’s voice indicated Zeke hadn’t imagined anything.
Pushing off the ground, Zeke did something he hadn’t done since his banishment from hell. The Devil’s punishment wasn’t to strip Zeke of his powers. No, he trapped Zeke in this realm as powerful as he’d been before, forcing him to deal with his innate desires of soul stealing..
Allowing his demonic nature to consume him, he sucked in a deep breath and found that dark place of pure heat. A rush of fire laced his veins as his human body became a thin line of smoke drifting through the air.
In this form, he couldn’t see Bryanna, but he sensed her and she stood out like a pulsing hot heartbeat. The hunger inside of him to prey on such a pure soul created a fierce thirst within him. He swooped down from the sky and instantly retook his human form. His boots pressed against the gravel road and he stretched out his muscles, suffering the ache that had always come when shifting forms.