Grave Destiny (Alex Craft, #6) - Kalayna Price Page 0,1

in surprise, realizing what he was offering. Apparently it wasn’t that he wouldn’t tell me how to contact the high court, it was that he couldn’t. But he’d just offered me a way to put him in my debt and force him to tell me.

“What will this case involve? And who should I expect to bring it to me?”

“You won’t be able to miss it.”

“Why is that not reassuring,” I said, but I was speaking to empty air. He’d hung up.

The bell on the door chimed while I was still staring at my phone. I jumped to my feet. This can’t be the case already. But we hadn’t had a client in weeks, and I couldn’t feel Rianna’s magic—or any magic—so it wasn’t her. I rushed around my desk, shoving the phone in my back pocket as I hurried to my office door. I pulled on my gloves in quick, practiced motions—the scars drew too much attention. Then I forced myself to slow down and smile before I stepped into the lobby. I didn’t want to look desperate.

Normally—or at least the more recent normal—Ms. B would have been in the front office to greet potential clients, but while she showed up exactly on time each morning and checked for messages and appointments, she’d started leaving for the bulk of each day. Not that I faulted her. Sitting around an empty office was boring at best, and downright depressing in truth. Rianna wasn’t in the office today either, as we’d taken to alternating who got the discouraging task of minding the office each day, so that left only me. Which, if this was the case my father wanted me to work, could be a good situation. Or it could be a very dangerous one.

A man stood just inside the door, his gaze scanning every inch of the room. There was a stiffness to his posture, an attentiveness to the way he efficiently searched the space, that spoke to the fact that he wasn’t admiring the furnishings but was looking for threats. I forced my smile to hold and kept my own posture nonthreatening. After all, people were often jumpy when dealing with grave witches. Then the man’s attention focused on me, and my smile froze, turning brittle. The greeting that I’d been about to utter caught in my throat, tangled with a knot of fear that lodged at my sternum before melting down into my stomach.

It wasn’t that the man looked particularly threatening. In fact, if I was honest, he was rather attractive. Tall, with dark hair pulled back from a well-angled face. The dark suit he wore looked ridiculously expensive and expertly tailored over his obviously muscled body. He carried no overt weapons nor any trace of magic, though one hand was suspiciously close to his waist as if a twitch away from an unseen sword. He smiled as our gazes met, striding across the room without hesitation now that he’d determined there were no hidden threats.

Or perhaps he’d been searching for potential witnesses.

“Prince Dugan,” I said, forcing myself to stand my ground and not flee back into my office. My fingers itched to draw the enchanted dagger hidden in my boot, but I didn’t. The prince of the shadow court wasn’t my enemy—and I didn’t want to make him such—but he wasn’t exactly a friend either. He definitely had to be the case my father wanted me to work, though I had no idea how he’d gotten here so fast. I’d literally just gotten off the phone when the bell on the door had chimed.

“My lady,” Dugan said, inclining his head ever so slightly toward me. His ground-eating stride took him to a spot less than a yard in front of me before he stopped. He smiled again, but there was little warmth to the expression. His lips moved, but his eyes were weary, guarded. Not hostile, though, and he didn’t try to close the last bit of space he’d left between us.

The professional smile I’d been clinging to shattered, giving way to a suspicious frown as I studied him. The afternoon sunlight streaming through the front window seemed to shy away from him, or maybe it was that the shadows in the corners of the room reached out toward him. I wasn’t sure if that was a passive effect of being a prince of the shadow court, or if he was using glamour to draw in the shadows like a cloak, even in the light, but it was