Witch In Charge - Celia Kyle Page 0,32
pockets and swayed from side to side. Suddenly, the presumption of it made her feel small and pathetic.
“Nobody’s ever tried to set me free before.”
“Really?” It seemed impossible to her that there was no one who would go out of their way for him. Couldn’t they see what she saw?
“Well—” He shrugged and let out a rueful chuckle. “—nobody, except that Kalliope Le Blanc. I got royally screwed there.”
Kelly’s eyes bulged out, and she let out one of her unguarded, mawkish laughs.
“Is that what that was about?”
“What?” It dawned on her that he had no idea she had eavesdropped on his conversation in the dining hall that day.
“Nothing! Forget it. So…what happened there?”
“Not a damn thing. The witch heard I was cursed and said she was an expert curse breaker, so I saved up ten large to secure her help. In the end, all I got was an empty wallet.”
Kelly tried to picture what ten thousand dollars in a wallet might look like. Then, she wondered where exactly a gargoyle would keep his wallet when in his stone form. Ronun had started walking again, so she banished those little detours. His pace was more leisurely, which made their little moonlight stroll feel just a wee bit romantic.
Which she welcomed.
“How did this whole curse thing go down anyway?”
“Cora didn't know the full story, huh?” He raised an eyebrow at her and she shrugged in response.
Quiet fell over them. It felt as though he was trying to decide just how much he would share.
“It goes back generations,” he said at last. “One of my ancestors was Prince Erodicus. Real piece of shit. Got up to all kinds of things you might call…”
“Shitty?”
“I was going to go with ‘inadvisable,’ but yeah. You’re probably closer to right. Anyway, he got up to something particularly foul.” At this, he cut his eyes to her, though his face remained unreadable. “So bad that not only was he cursed, but his whole line was cursed too.”
“Woah. It must have been really shitty.”
She'd heard of multi-generational curses before, but they weren't all that common and this was the first time she actually cared for someone who was affected by one. They arrived outside the main building of OCU, and she stood for a second, lost in the weight of what Ronun had suffered with his entire life.
The clock chimed, and all at once, the whole world came rushing back over her.
“Oh, shit!” Exploding into a run, Kelly flung herself through the doors.
“What is it?” he called after her.
“I’m gonna be late!”
Thundering through the silent hallway, Kelly scaled the stairs almost four at a time. Not a bad feat for someone of her stature. When she came around the corridor, she saw the light from Owyn’s door spilling out in a golden rectangle on the floor.
Oh, man. This is gonna be bad.
She skidded over his threshold so quickly her shoes squeaked, only to see her imposing employer standing with his hands on his hips. Judging by his glowering expression, it was going to be even worse than she thought.
“Miss Holloway,” he said in a terse, basso voice. “We have been over this. If there’s one thing I can’t abide—”
“I know,” she said, panting from her sprint. “It’s tardiness.”
He took a step toward her, even more imposing.
“Tardiness and being interrupted.”
Kelly glanced at the clock on the wall. “But only by one minute.”
The protest sounded weak, even to her. She knew that one minute was plenty to awaken the dragon of his ire.
“I don’t care if it was one second. When you are careless with other people’s time you are telling them that you don’t value them, Miss Holloway. After the favor I did agreeing to take you on, I would like to think you would offer me a modicum of consideration. But every day you work here, you teach me that you are a thoughtless, shiftless, frivolous little girl.”
Tears stung the rims of her eyes and she bit her lip to keep from showing him how much his words stung. It certainly wasn't the first time she'd been scolded by a superior, but she'd been trying so hard with Owyn that his rebukes cut deeper than the others’.
“Hang on just one second.” The voice over her shoulder was like a bolt of courage shot up her spine. It was Ronun. “The last thing you can call Kelly Holloway is thoughtless.”
The gargoyle’s appearance in the doorway clearly threw the formidable curse breaker.
“And what might you know about it, young man?”
“I know