Page 26 of The Diamond in the Rough

My parents hadn’t had any more children after my sister. Violette. A sister I’d never met. A sister I was unlikely to ever meet.

I’d asked Ward about it once, and he’d shown me the articles that Mason had found about my family. I knew, staring down at the printouts, faded and a little wrinkledand smudged, that I was supposed to feel something. But I didn’t.

It was better, I suppose, than melting down into an incoherent mess, but I couldn’t help but think that my lack of feeling was some sort of sign that I was broken. Flawed. Irredeemable.

Not that I had any idea what I could do about any of it.

That wasn’t entirely true. There wasn’t really anything I could do about the feelings I did or didn’t have, but I could put some effort into actually improving and—more importantly—controlling my psychic abilities. If I were feeling particularly ambitious, I could also learn to control—not just suppress—my death magic, but I wasn’t sure I was up to that task. At least not this year.

Maybe I’d come back to it once I’d mastered being a psychic. In another decade. Or two.

I pushed myself to standing, my hands on my thighs. A wave of dizziness hit, and I put my palms on the counter to steady myself.

A small child,about two or so, was banging a toy boat against the edge of the bathtub. “Don’t break it,” she warned softly. She was exhausted, but just looking at the child caused a surge of love in her chest.

Gasping,I sat back down abruptly on the toilet seat, my heart pounding.

I didnotwant to be feeling my counter. Part of the reason I’d gotten this apartment was because when I’d tentatively touched the counters and walls and other fixtures, I hadn’t felt anything. Well, I’d felt what amountedto a faint psychic buzzing, but nothing strong enough to push through and actually cause a vision. Episode. Whatever you wanted to call it.

I’d been in the apartment for more than three years and hadn’t had a single one.

And now I had.

As Ward would say, fucking hell.

5

She was gasping for air—

The words werebitter and acrid, and he didn’t exactly understand them, but he knew what they did. Knew what the curse itself meant, even if each individual word was only so much gibberish. Words that wove together threads of magic that would create channels that would draw out power from the unworthy, keeping it locked tight within the stones until a practitioner—like himself—would be able to unlock it.

It wasn’t exactly what he’d promised when they’d asked him to eliminate the senator’s bitch. Or whatever she was. He didn’t know what she turned into, and he didn’t much care. He’d promised Dagget that he would eliminate the bitch. He hadn’t mentioned precisely how he intended to go about that, because he had the feeling Dagget wouldn’t like the fact that he was going to siphon off her magic.

And, thanks to the senator’s busy schedule, getting her to wear it would be easy enough. All he had to do was address it to her from her husband. Unlike so many politicians’ wives, this oneactually seemed to be naïve enough to expect that her husband would remain faithful to her—and she seemed also to be faithful to him.

It had made finding some reason to extort money out of her more difficult. But threatening to expose the fact that she was a shifter while her husband was trying to push through his bullshit pro-monster agenda had done the trick. She wanted to protect him and his political goals—which made sense, he supposed, since if he got his idiot bill through, she and her fellow monsters would benefit.

He didn’t need the money, of course. And he was obviously going to expose her shifter status once she was dead, anyway, but why not make a bit of cash on the side?

He took the necklace and placed in in a red velvet box. He couldn’t forge the man’s handwriting, but he included a small typed note on a fake jeweler’s card: ‘With love.’ It would do the trick.

A slow smile spread over his face, imagining her putting it on, completely unaware that he would slowly be draining away her magic.

Until he took all of it and then left her dead in a hotel room.

The senator would be devastated.

Too devastated to continue his work.

Dagget would be pleased with that.

And he would have her magic, a little more cash, and the world would have one fewer monster in it.

He ran his fingers over it one last time.

I cameout of this one gagging, and warm hands helped me to bend over a trash can as my meager breakfast of a buttered bagel and coffee came back up.

“Would you get a damp towel or something?” I heard Raj’s deep voice say.