Neve (Silver Skates #3) - Helen Scott Page 0,35

that she wasn’t about to start crying. I wasn’t good at dealing with crying women, since it usually made me want to hurt whoever made them cry. Somehow, I didn’t think Neve would appreciate me beating the crap out of her father, or maybe she would? Either way, I knew it wasn’t an appropriate response.

We heard her father detail what she needed to say and a hand motion she needed to make. It was unlike any magic I’d heard of before. There was no wand required, no harsh sounding foreign language, just a few simple words, the intent behind them, and a hand motion. Easy. I hoped.

“Neve. You and magic are like oil and water, you need to avoid it if you want to avoid another disaster. You should be thanking your lucky stars that I knew a way to reverse the damage you’ve caused, but I can’t do that every time. One of these days, you’re going to regret being so impulsive and thoughtless. When are you going to grow up and stop being a silly little girl who is more concerned with her parties than anything else in life?”

“Sorry Daddy,” she said, unable to look at any of us.

The man on the other end of the phone grunted and hung up. Neve pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen for a moment. The look on her face was heartbreaking. It was like she was Atlas and she’d just failed at holding up the Earth.

Normally, I tried to withhold judgement on people after one interaction, but hearing how he talked to his daughter, I had nothing but contempt for the man. Had Neve screwed up? Sure, but she didn’t deserve to be torn down like that, especially after he forced her to come to Silver Springs in the first place.

Without saying a word to us, she cast the spell, and when Niklaus and Colden coughed and groaned respectively, her shoulders sagged with relief. She walked to the kitchen and poured herself another glass of vodka before walking over to the door and holding it open for us, as though we were just going to leave now that the spell had been fixed.

Unlikely.

“We need to chat,” Niklaus said, summing up what I thought we were probably all feeling.

Neve sighed and shut the door, walking past us looking completely defeated before she flopped down in the chair, spilling some vodka as she went. My heart ached for her. My instincts as her mate were to make her feel better, whatever that took, but I didn’t know her well enough yet to take on that task without talking to her first.

14

Neve

Great. They wanted to chat. Wasn’t it enough to have my father rip into me so loudly that I knew they could hear everything? Now I had to listen to them yell at me because I fucked up as well?

Ugh.

I sipped my vodka. It was the fancy kind with a honey infusion, so it almost tasted sweet. It still definitely tasted like vodka, just with a little less bite.

“What was that about?” Colden finally asked, looking concerned.

“I told you, I was just trying to help you relax so you could talk to Buttercup without sounding like a weirdo, but—”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean what the hell is wrong with your father that he talks to you like that?”

“He sounded like an asshole,” Niklaus said, his arms folded over his chest like he wanted to punch something.

I could relate.

Sometimes, it took everything I had to stop my anger at my father getting the best of me. I pushed the resentment down and said, “He’s a busy man. As the CEO of Astor Holdings, he doesn’t have time for my childish bullshit.” For a moment, I forgot the occasion my father had rattled off that particular spiel to me, but then I remembered it was my fourteenth birthday. The party had gone horribly wrong with hardly anyone showing up, making me look friendless and uncool, which is the height of disaster to a fourteen-year-old girl.

“This was not childish bullshit. You went to your father for help, and he tore into you like you were his employee not his daughter,” Rory said, his anger scrawled across his face as plain as day. It was almost shocking to see one of the men I’d come to care for so angry on my behalf when this was par for the course with my family.

“Listen, I know a few people in town.