Proof of Life (The Potentate of Atlanta #4) - Hailey Edwards Page 0,82
her face made her appear older, as if the past week had aged her. “I booked the dining room for a private party and put it under their names. That’s how I cleared the restaurant of patrons.”
Green.
Patrons were only half the collateral damage. “What about the staff?”
“There was no staff present when I arrived.” A certain grimness tightened her mouth. “There were no bodies either. I checked. I’m not sure what Liz did with them before I got there.”
“Liz was present?” I verified. “How did you get my family past her?”
“I spooked her off with a lie about you being on your way to join your family.”
Midas keep the ball rolling when I couldn’t find the words. “What happened next?”
“I drugged the Whitakers and the Pritchards then brought them to the old clinic until I could figure out what to do with them.”
Green.
“Why wouldn’t she have waited for Hadley to join them and then taken them all out at once?”
Midas made a good point, and I lent weight to his argument. “That would have fixed all her problems.”
“I think…” Her mouth stretched thin. “I think she figured out what I was doing, minimizing the damage, protecting Hadley.” She wet her lips. “I think she wanted them as hostages all along, but she was happy to let me believe I was getting one over on her as long as the job got done.”
Green.
That made no sense. “Why not just kidnap them and be done with it?”
“She needed Ares to commit a crime against the pack of such severity it would cut her ties to us,” Midas realized. “When Ares took your family, she violated the trust given to her as your friend and as a pack enforcer. She struck a blow to her beta and his mate. She forsook her vows.”
So that’s what Liz meant.
Not that Ares had shrugged off her pack bonds, but that she had smashed them with a hammer.
“She was isolating you,” Linus said. “She wanted you alone, with no allies and no one to ask for help.”
And once Liz had spent Ares’s reputation down to the last penny, Liz would have killed her. There was no point in adding Ares to the coven’s closet, not when Liz had torched her credibility. That had to hurt.
Head down, she gave no indication she heard, but the hitch in her indrawn breath made me want to hug her. Right up until I remembered how we got into this mess.
She could have killed my entire family. Wiped them out in a blink. The mercy she showed them would leave scars. I was as grateful for it as I was furious about it. “That’s why you left me Boaz’s ring.”
Guilt had forced her to give me hope, maybe even direction. Subconsciously, she must have wanted the truth to come out, whether it damned her, Liz, or both of them.
“We had hostages, so we might as well use them.” Ares’s feet twitched with muscle spasms. “That’s what she told me when she found me at the clinic. That’s when I knew I had been set up since Choco-Loco, the night Boaz and Addie got into town.” She tucked her legs under her. “I made them as comfortable as possible. I left them food and water and buckets for…”
The buckets, and their stench, wasn’t one that would soon fade from my memories.
“You kept them alive,” Midas coaxed, drawing out her confessions. “That matters.”
There was one last hurdle to truly understanding how far this relationship had soured, and I tasted the question on my tongue when I asked it. “Liz is coven, isn’t she?”
The ambiguous phrasing wasn’t intentional, but it worked in my favor.
“I thought at first she was infected. A host.” Ares’s shoulders hunched even more. “It was almost a relief to believe it was curable. That if Ford had survived, she could too.” Tears glittered on her cheeks. “The way she acted, I—I knew she must be coven. That a witchborn fae had… That my mate was…” A sob lodged in her throat. “But it was so much worse.”
Green.
What had Liz told me?
I’m not wearing anyone.
I hadn’t believed her then, not with so much glamour at her fingertips.
“Liz is a witchborn fae,” I realized. “She’s a member of the coven, not a skin or a host.”
“She quit practicing,” Midas said slowly. “Otherwise, we would have smelled black magic on her.”
“I thought she was human.” Ares shook her head. “I had no idea…”