I pulled out my phone and dialed Cosette.
“We’re almost ready to leave,” she said as soon as she answered. “Just give us—”
“The building’s security guy just warned me that there’s a fey girl that always shows up to check on Tessa. This fey is currently in the building.”
“Don’t fight her. Don’t you dare even approach—”
I rushed up the stairs. “Fuck that, Cosette. Fuck that. I’m giving you a warning because—”
“I’m not joking. If she’s from my court, if she’s part of my mother’s magic, she could control you. With your wolf like it is—”
I growled at her.
“Stop. Think.” There was magic in her words, slowing me down.
I reached the third-floor landing and gripped the stair-door knob, but I didn’t turn it. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t rush down the hall and tear into Tessa’s apartment to kill whatever fey was inside.
I stopped and thought about what I was doing.
“Van’s finishing something up. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“That’s too long. I need—” I heard a voice talking about me, and I stopped talking.
A woman. The fey woman that kept watch on my mate.
“Dastien? Are you still there?”
I hung up on Cosette and texted her that the fey was in the hallway. I slid my phone into my pocket and twisted the knob. I pulled it open painfully slow. Just a crack. That was all I needed.
I inhaled. Holly, pine, and moonlight.
The security guard—Kirkall—was right. There was a fey in the hallway. Not just any fey, but moonlight meant it was someone from the Lunar Court.
My first instinct was to attack, but I heard Cosette’s warning in my head. Stop. Think.
If I went through that door, the best thing that would happen was killing the fey and destroying the immediate threat to Tessa.
But if I did that, then they’d know we had her back. It would either start an all-out war, or they’d try to take Tessa again, or try to hurt her through the magic already on her. All of which I wanted to avoid. I didn’t want anything to hurt Tessa again.
I needed time to break through the magic that was embedded in Tessa’s soul. I wouldn’t get that if I went into the hallway.
So, I listened through the barely there crack in the door.
“—No. You’re not listening.” There was a pause, and her footsteps grew louder. “No, I understand that, but—”
Okay. The fey girl was talking on the phone, and now she was getting close enough that I could hear the other side of the conversation.
“And I’m telling you that I got a message from that mutant pup abomination. She was calling me from the hospital.”
And I knew that voice.
Helen. The queen of the Lunar Court. “That means that one of them—”
“I swear no wolves or witches or supernaturals aside from me and Tessa crossed her threshold today,” the fey girl in the hallway said. “None of the safeguards there have been triggered.”
“But the safeguards I built into the spell itself serve as a warning should any of her friends push too hard against my magic.” There was so much icy anger in Helen’s voice that I wondered why the fey girl wasn’t dusted in frost. “If she collapsed and went into a coma, then they’ve been triggered, and—”
“The pathetic security guy downstairs doesn’t have the ability to lie to me without me knowing.” The girl pressed the elevator button, and then ten more times.