Spell Bound - Kelley Armstrong [53]
I woke tied to a chair. Everything was dark, but when I moved my head, I couldn’t feel a blindfold.
I tried to twist and feel how I was bound, but my hands were tied back-to-back and I couldn’t stretch my fingers enough to touch anything.
I closed my eyes and worked on inhaling and exhaling, struggling to slow my galloping heart.
Kidnapped.
If anyone else was here, I’d joke about how this made me a legitimate challenger to Jaime’s record. Kidnapped again. Ha-ha.
Only it wasn’t funny at all. When I saw that blackness and felt my bound wrists, panic surged, tugging behind it the memories of kidnappings past.
The first time, I’d been captured with my mother. They’d come for her and I’d been home playing sick, so she’d had to protect me, which meant she couldn’t get away. She’d died without ever getting away.
The second time I’d been captured by my father. He’d been fighting Paige for custody and unable to tell his side of the story, so he took me. Then Leah convinced me he’d murdered Paige, and in a blind tantrum of spell-powered rage, I’d killed him.
Two kidnappings. Two deaths.
Who would die this time?
No one. I couldn’t get anyone else hurt here. I was alone.
But for how long? The familiar bulge of a cell phone in my rear pocket was gone. Had they disabled it before Adam could get coordinates?
What if Adam came? What if he got killed—?
A door behind me squeaked open. Light flooded in. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder and instead took stock of my surroundings to see what I could use in a fight. Not a damned thing, unless I could play lion tamer with my chair.
“Savannah?”
My hackles rose at that voice.
Roni walked in front of me, circling wide as if I might lunge and bite her. Tempting.
“I’m sorry it had to be this way.”
I spat. Sadly, I missed.
“It’s your own fault,” she said, her mouth going rigid. “All you had to do was come and help me when I asked. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Help people? The others said it wouldn’t work, because you aren’t like Paige and Lucas. I insisted on trying. That’s ironic, isn’t it? A witch-hunter championing the goodness of a witch? But you proved me wrong.” Disappointment leached into her voice. “They aren’t very happy with me now, especially after you killed Maddie and now it looks like Tyler might die, too. Your werewolf friend hurt him pretty bad.”
Tyler must have been the man who went after Elena. I remembered what Roni had said before I passed out, about my “half-demon and werewolf” friends coming after me. So Elena was fine. Like Adam said she’d be.
I relaxed. “That’s what Tyler gets for taking on a werewolf. And if Maddie was the woman in the parking garage, I didn’t kill her. She swallowed poison.”
“Because of you. So as far as they’re concerned, you killed her.”
“That wasn’t your aunt, was it?”
“No, just a group member who kind of looked like me.”
It took a moment for me to process what that meant. Roni’s family had never been chasing her. She’d pretended they were, with the help of these people. A setup to convince me that she was in trouble.
“So no one from your family was involved in this. They knew nothing about it. You’re the witch-hunter and you killed your cousin because she tried to stop you.”
“I had nothing to do with Amy’s death. She had her own problems.”
A lie. I was sure of it. Had Amy found out Roni was mixed up in something? Had Amy threatened to tell their family. Did Roni kill her? Or did these people, when Roni told them? It didn’t matter. Not now.
“So your aunt was right—they stopped hunting witches and you didn’t. You went rogue.”
A smug smile. “I went more rogue than they could ever imagine. I’m not a witch-hunter anymore. I’m a witch.”
I laughed. She didn’t like that.
“If they’re promising to make you a witch, you slept