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“You should go,” I said. “Both of you. Before Jacqueline decides friendship is contagious.”

“It is,” Audrey said. “Unfortunately, there’s no cure.”

She handed Carolina a bottle of water before lowering herself to the floor beside her. The contrast between them was almost absurd: the coven heir crackling with barely restrained magic and the human woman in an enormous gray sweater who refused to be intimidated by any of it.

“When I discovered Mack was my mate, I thought the supernatural part would be the problem,” Audrey said. “It wasn’t. The real problem was believing I had to become someone else to deserve the life he offered.”

Carolina swallowed. “My mother says I’m nothing without the coven.”

“Your mother sounds like someone who needs everyone else to feel small so she can feel important.” Audrey’s voice softened. “You’ll still be you if you leave. It’ll hurt like hell, and you’ll miss people who don’t deserve to be missed, but you won’t disappear.”

Carolina looked at me.

“Neither will he,” Audrey added. “Not if the people in this room have anything to say about it.”

Mack stood and lifted a compact black case from the gear bag he’d dropped near the broken door.

“Audrey, stay with them. I’ll secure the building.”

“Bossy bear.”

“You like it.”

“Occasionally.”

He kissed her forehead and went to work.

For the next hour, Mack positioned ward emitters around the apartment while silver lines of protective magic crawled across the walls. Audrey cleaned the blood from my forehead and wrapped the worst of my injuries. Carolina never released my hand.

Outside, Arrhythmia continued moving as if a High Priestess hadn’t declared war on a vampire living above a laundromat.

Inside, something had changed.

Jacqueline had power.

We had people.

I found myself wondering whether that might be stronger.

Chapter Eleven

I didn’t knock.

By dusk, Logan was settled behind Mack’s rebuilt wards, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I hadn’t openly walked into the coven house since the night of the gala, when I’d grabbed Logan’s hand and run from my mother into the October darkness. Since then, I’d slipped into the library and stores whenever I could avoid her. A week of stolen nights with Logan, three days of unanswered messages, and one brutal morning watching the curse she’d cast eat him alive from the inside out. I was finished sneaking through my own home.

I was done being helpless.

I pushed through the front door, not needing to pause as the wards recognized my blood, my magic, my right to be here even if my mother had decided I no longer belonged. I marched into the parlor where I knew she’d be waiting.

Jacqueline Fortman sat in her high-backed chair by the fire, a cup of tea steaming in her hand, a book of ancient spells open in her lap. She looked up as I entered, and her expression didn’t change. Not surprise. Not anger. Just cold, perfect composure.

“I wondered when you’d come crawling back,” she said, turning a page.

“I’m not crawling.” I stopped in the center of the room, my spine straight, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. “And I’m not back. I’m here to demand you lift the curse.”

She laughed, a sound like crystal shattering. “Demand? You demand? From me?”

“Yes.” My voice shook, but I forced it steady. “From you. Because what you’re doing is wrong. It’s cruel. And it needs to stop.”