Game of Lies Read online

  Game of Lies

  Magic Awakened #2

  Sadie Moss

  Copyright © 2018 by Sadie Moss

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or had, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Message to the Reader

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Gray eyes.

  Eyes so similar to my own they made my heart clench. Eyes like those of the woman who called herself my grandmother.

  But these eyes belonged to a man. He was tall, so much taller than me that he had to kneel to look me in the face. Or maybe it was just because I was so short. I felt very, very small. The world loomed high around me, a threatening place only grownups knew how to navigate. I was too little for that. I needed my parents to protect me.

  The man—my father—cradled my face, his large hands engulfing my cheeks. He kissed away my tears, but there were tears on his cheeks too, and no one was kissing those away. Who would take care of him? I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know what was wrong.

  But something was very wrong.

  Danger and fear lay heavy in the air, and though my father’s voice was steady as ever, I could feel the tremor in his fingertips against the side of my head.

  “I love you, Lana.”

  He’d said those words to me a thousand times before, but today they didn’t sound right. They didn’t sound like “I love you.” They sounded like “goodbye.”

  “Daddy, no!”

  I grabbed his large wrists with my tiny hands, trying to… do what? What could these little hands do? The world was too big for me, and although I wanted to fight off whatever was scaring my father, I didn’t know how. I wanted to promise him it would all be okay, like he always told me. But this time he hadn’t uttered those words, and I knew if I said them to him, it would make me a liar.

  At a base, instinctual level, like a rabbit frozen and alert on the plains, I understood something terrible was coming.

  My father tugged his wrists from my grip, so gently yet so easily my stomach burned with frustration. He took one of my small hands and pressed something into it.

  A ring. Copper and tungsten, with numbers engraved on the inside.

  The ring he’d always worn on his pinky finger, the one he told me he had made to celebrate my birth. Why was he giving it to me now?

  “No, Daddy! I don’t want it!”

  “Keep it with you, Lana. Always.”

  His gray irises churned like storm clouds heavy with rain as his hands slipped away from my clenched fist. I peeled my fingers open slowly, revealing the ring pressed against my sweaty palm. I didn’t want this. It was too big for any of my little fingers.

  I looked up to give it back to my father, to make him take it back.

  But he was gone.

  The world blurred around me, fading into hazy smoke. I spun in a circle, but there was no sign of my father anywhere.

  “Daaaddy!”

  The surrounding fog caught my words and ate them, gobbling them up so not even an echo remained. He’d never hear me. He’d never see me.

  I would never see him again.

  My chest heaving with uneven, gasping breaths, I looked back down at the ring in my palm—the thing my father had given me as if this little piece of metal could replace his love, strength, and protection.

  Where the copper and tungsten met, the ring began to glow. Like the sunrise breaking over the horizon, sharp beams of light emanated from it, shining brighter and brighter. I raised my other hand to cover my eyes—

  And the world exploded into white light.

  I lurched up in bed with a gasp, eyes wide.

  Then I almost choked on my tongue.

  My body tensed, my hands reaching out to grip the sheets like they were a lifeline. The bed—hell, all the furniture in the room—was floating. Everything hovered about ten feet above the floor, and it was a good thing Beatrice’s fancy-ass house had high ceilings, or I’d have smashed my head against the ceiling when I sat up so fast.

  As I shook off the fog of sleep and fully absorbed my situation, the furniture began to wobble precipitously, my roiling emotions affecting the magic inside me.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

  I tried to take a deep breath, but it was like sucking oxygen through a tiny straw. My lungs heaved with the effort as a weight seemed to press against my chest.

  The enormous bed tilted sideways, and I scrabbled for a better hold, clinging to the headboard with sweaty hands. A ten-foot drop wouldn’t kill me, but falling from that height and then being crushed by a king-sized bed might.

  Closing my eyes, I tried to ignore the feel of the bed pitching and rolling beneath me like a ship on an angry sea. I directed my energy inward, reaching for the flame of magic that burned at my core. It flickered wildly, agitated. The power spread out in tendrils from my body, wrapping around the objects in the room. My control on it felt tenuous, as if at any moment the magic would either drop all the furniture or fling it around the room like a child throwing a tantrum.

  Godsdamn it. Please don’t do that.

  Trying to reason with my magic as if it were sentient was probably pointless, and it only made me feel more like a host to some dangerous, unwanted parasite.

  This magic was a part of me. I should be able to control it.

  Except… it wasn’t just a part of me.

  It was connected to four other people—the four men who had been present when my magic first flared, breaking through the suppression charm in the ring I had worn since I was a little girl. It bonded to each of them, and according to the old reader, Asprix, the bond was permanent.

  Which might explain why my magic had been going so haywire lately.

  I’d only known I was Gifted for a little over a month. Once I confirmed I truly did have magic, I’d spent hours training with my four, learning to use the powers I possessed. It had been going pretty well, too. But after two weeks of being separated from them, I could feel my control over the wild power inside me slipping.

  At that thought, the bed tipped sideways again, dropping three feet and forcing my heart up into my throat.

  Baring my teeth, I reeled the magic back into myself slowly, loosening its hold on the objects in the room. After another sharp drop that made me yelp, the downward trajectory evened out, and a few moments later, the bed cleared the final few inches and settled on the floor wi
th a heavy thud.

  It was followed by the rest of the furniture thunking down in quick succession, like a herd of elephants all sitting down at once. The walls shook, and then the room settled into a still silence, broken only by my sharp breaths as I tried to slow my pulse.

  I flopped back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling that, moments ago, had been only a few feet away. As my panic subsided, flashes of the dream I’d had ran through my mind. My heart rate began to pick up again as I remembered the fear in the man’s face. My father’s face. That had been my father; I was sure of it. Dominic Lockwood, a name I’d only recently learned from my grandmother. Now that I was awake, I couldn’t even remember his features, but in the dream they had been as familiar as my own.

  The bed shuddered beneath me, and I wrestled my emotions back under control, pressing my fingers to my closed eyes so hard it hurt. Without looking, I reached over to the bedside table, my hand closing over the teardrop earring that held the communication charm Jae bought for our break-in attempt at the People’s Palace. Cradling it near my ear, I rolled over onto my side, curling into a tight ball as I pressed the middle stone to activate it.

  “Hello?” My voice sounded too loud in the quiet room, and much too weak.

  A half-second later, Jae’s sleep-roughened voice sounded in my ear, panic making him alert. “Lana? Are you all right?”

  Just the sound of his voice soothed my frayed nerves, and I leaned my head closer to the communication charm as if it would bring me nearer to him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked again, voice quiet but intense. “What’s going on?”

  I swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I don’t even know what time it is.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” I could hear a shuffling noise in the background, and then the low sound of a television. He must’ve gone to the living room where Ivy, my ghost roommate, always had the TV on. The four men had been staying at my apartment in the Outskirts since I moved in with my grandmother in the Capital. Jae occasionally left to put in an appearance with his family in the city, but I hadn’t seen him since I’d come here.

  It couldn’t have been comfortable for four grown men to share a one-bedroom apartment, but since Akio’s house had been destroyed, they didn’t have a lot of other options. They could’ve stayed at the Resistance headquarters, but after its location was almost discovered by the Representatives, Christine thought it best to minimize the number of people coming and going. And honestly, I was glad they’d chosen to remain at my place. It made the distance between us feel less vast somehow.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? You can talk to me, Lana.”

  The concern in Jae’s voice warmed my heart, but I could hear the strain of tension too. If I’d called Corin or Fenris instead of the even-keeled mage, they’d probably be on their way over here already, convinced I was in mortal peril.

  “I…” I twisted a long lock of red hair around my fingers, stalling. “I had a magic flare in my sleep. I was having a dream, a nightmare, and when I woke up… everything in the room was floating.”

  “Oh, gods. Lana, are you—?”

  “It’s fine now. I got it under control. Everything’s where it should be. It just freaked me out, you know?”

  “Yes, I can imagine.” His voice was calmer. “It’s good that you were able to pull the spell back on your own though. Your control is improving.”

  I snorted. Waking up surrounded by levitating furniture seemed like the definition of “not in control” to me.

  Jae picked up on my unspoken skepticism and continued. “What you’ve been asked to do is extremely difficult, Lana. Most mages of your power have years of training and practice to master their skills. Add in the incubus and shifter magic you got from Akio and Fenris, and it’s truly incredible you’re able to control your power at all. And on top of that…”

  His words trailed off, and I waited, wanting to hear him speak again. It wasn’t as comforting as his touch would have been, but his voice was still a balm.

  “Have you… been feeling a strain?” he asked, almost hesitantly. “Since you’ve been away from us?”

  “Yes!” I nodded forcefully, even though he couldn’t see me. “It’s like my magic keeps trying to reach out, to latch onto you, but it can’t get to you. So it stretches farther and farther until I lose control of it like I did tonight.”

  “I thought so. Asprix said there might be a negative reaction if we spent too long apart. I feel certain that as you gain more control over your power, you’ll feel less strain when we’re separated. But your magic is so new, so wild, it needs stabilization now more than ever.”

  Sighing, I stared at the pattern the moonlight streaming through the windows cast on the floor. “So maybe me coming here was a really bad idea.”

  “No, it wasn’t. You have an opportunity to learn more about the inner workings of the government than we ever have before.”

  “Do I? I mean, your father is the Minister of Justice. Couldn’t we learn enough through your connection to him?”

  There was a brief pause, and I grimaced, kicking myself internally. Jae’s relationship with his father was strained, to put it mildly. It wasn’t surprising he couldn’t leverage that family tie for insider information—not because his father suspected him of being part of the Resistance, but because his father hated him.

  “I…” His voice was strained. “I’ve tried, but—”

  “I’m sorry, Jae,” I cut in quickly. “I know you have. And I’ve met your dad. It’d be easier to get information out of a block of ice.”

  His slight chuckle unclenched the knot in my stomach. “Much easier. You’re our best chance, Lana. We just need to find some way to keep training you while you’re there. I’ll talk to Christine again. She’s been adamant about none of us having any traceable contact with you, but I’ll explain the situation to her and see what we can work out.”

  My heart fell.

  Part of me had hoped Christine would just pull me off this assignment, though I knew that would be a mistake. I could be a hugely effective spy for the Resistance here and possibly shift the entire course of the Resistance. I just needed to suck it up and do my job.

  I rolled over onto my back. “Thanks, Jae. Oh, and did you tell her about the file I saw with her name on it?”

  When I broke into a room in the palace to destroy the receiver for the tracking spell that had been placed on me, I’d seen a piece of paper bearing Christine’s name sticking out of a folder. A palace guard attacked me before I could read it, so I had no idea what the Representatives knew about her besides her name. But I couldn’t think of any information that would be good.

  “Yes, she’s aware. We’d hoped the Representatives didn’t know who our leaders were, but it seems they’ve been paying more attention than we thought. She should be safe since she rarely leaves the Resistance base, and it’s hidden behind the concealment spell.”

  I bit my bottom lip. “And you’re sure nobody here will know I’m with the Resistance? I had that tracking spell on me when we went to the ball. What if they traced my movements to the palace and realized I was the one who broke in?”

  “If I thought that was a possibility, I wouldn’t have let Christine give you this assignment. But the concealment spell I put on you hid your movements long enough for us to arrive at the palace undetected. If the tracker were still running, the Representatives might be able to connect you to the break in eventually. But you destroyed it.” Jae’s voice was warm but firm, and I could almost picture his green eyes gazing at me intently.

  A yawn caught me by surprise. As my adrenaline faded, weariness rushed in to take its place. “Thanks, Jae. I don’t—”

  “Is that Lana? Killer, is that you?” Fenris’s voice came through the communication charm, a whisper that wanted to be a yell.

  I chuckled. “Hey, Fen. Yeah, it’s me.”

  “We miss you like hell! Did you figure out all the top-secr
et government shit so you can come back to us already?”

  Biting back a smile, I deadpanned, “Yup, I’ve pretty much cracked the whole thing wide open. I’m just waiting for them to hand over the keys to the palace, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  “Fuck, I miss you, killer,” he repeated, his tone losing some of its brightness.

  The longing in his voice and the answering thrum in my heart made me clench my jaw. I needed to hang up soon or my furniture really would end up smashed against the walls. Powerful emotions were burbling inside me like I was a covered pot set to boil, and I could feel them mixing with my already agitated magic.

  “I miss you too, Fen.”

  I bit my lip, remembering the feel of his mouth on mine. It’d been over two weeks since the kiss we shared in my bedroom, but I could still remember exactly what his lips felt like as they devoured me, stealing my breath and my sanity.

  “Be safe, Lana. And call us if you need anything. Even just to talk. Please.” Jae didn’t wear his emotions as openly as the wolf shifter did, but even his voice carried a weight of sadness.

  “I will. Thanks, guys.”

  Before I could stop myself, I pressed the stone on the communication charm again, cutting off the connection. The too-large room grew quiet again, and I rolled to my other side, pulling the pillow over my head.

  Come back to us.

  Fenris’s words echoed in my head, and I grimaced. That day was so far away it seemed almost unreachable.

  I’d been joking with him about being given the keys to the palace, but the sad fact was, I’d made almost no progress on my mission since I’d come to the Capital. I was supposed to be ingratiating myself with the Representatives and other government officials, positioning myself to dig up information valuable to the Resistance.