I applied the ointment. It slid over my skin like a satin-covered hand. And the second it touched the burn, the scald disappeared in little wisps of steam.

  I screamed.

  “It’s nothing to be worried about. It is a powerful healing tincture. It will do no damage to you. Now come out.”

  I ignored him and stared at the ointment.

  This wasn’t just a powerful healing tincture – this was a cure-all.

  This was the kind of stuff an ancestral vamp would keep in his vault in case he sustained a life-threatening injury. And Thorne… he’d wasted it on me?

  I turned the tincture around again, wanting to check out the label, even though I remembered there was only the Ashcroft insignia. And that would be when my butter fingers let go of it.

  In horror, I watched it tumble out of my hand. Then great big white globs of it fell across the bathroom floor.

  Cure-alls like this needed to be kept in their containers. Though you couldn’t see it, the glass would have certain spells interwoven into it to ensure that the ingredients were always fresh. Expose them to the air – and take them out of the container – and they would lose their power.

  I gagged.

  I locked my hand over my mouth. Oh God. Oh dear God. I had just wasted all of Thorne’s cure-all.

  My clumsiness had cost me a fair amount of money over the years. I had never come close to destroying anything of this value.

  “The car is ready. We need to go,” Thorne said.

  I winced. His tone had changed. He would know that I had just wasted his tincture. I could hide here, or I could stupidly try to climb out of the tiny window above the sink.

  I would have to fight to open it first, because we were on the penthouse level, but maybe my glass magic would play nice today.

  And maybe hurtling down the side of this 40-floor tower would be infinitely better than facing Thorne.

  But though I was a coward around most things, I had this streak in me. I wouldn’t call it bravery. But I did face up to what I had to when I had to. Sometimes. If I couldn’t run away.

  With a trembling hand, I opened the door.

  I picked up the now empty jar. “I… I have no excuse. It slipped. My fingers—”

  He glanced down at it wordlessly. He plucked it up off me then threw it in the bin behind him.

  And just like that, he ignored the destruction of a priceless antique. “The car is waiting,” he prompted me tonelessly.

  I stood there, mouth agape. I ran over to the wastepaper basket. “That’s a cure-all, and I accidentally dropped it all over the bathroom floor—”

  “It’s done its job. Let’s go.”

  “But….”

  He’d already reached the door. His hand was on it. His fingers slipped down, and just for a second, his broad shoulders, which always looked as if they could hold up the world, sagged.

  Have you ever seen something that’s meant to be strong from the wrong angle and wondered if it was weak after all?

  It was a half-formed thought for me, but it was kind of like staring down upon Atlas as he held up the sky. Maybe from underneath, you’d see his bulging muscles and appreciate the sky was being kept from the earth. Maybe from the sky, however, you’d see his back straining and his head dropping and wonder just how much longer he could hold on for.

  Thorne Ashcroft was meant to be the strongest vampire in the city. But a glass witch knows this. Everything is born to break.

  Chapter Three

  Camille Knowles

  We drove out to the hotel.

  I cursed myself. If I had remembered the appointment today, I would have crossed the street and tied the Ashcroft banner up properly. Now the other half of it had come free. It was holding on by a single anchor point.

  As we parked and Thorne got out of the limo, a massive gust of wind chased down the street. It grasped hold of the banner and ripped it off the fence.

  It yanked it high into the air. Jimmy was already there. He lunged for it, but he didn’t catch it in time.

  It shot off down the street.

  My old grandmother had believed in omens. To be fair, she’d been a mildly psychic witch. So they’d made sense to her. Me, if I believed in omens, I’d be screwed, because I always created my own bad luck. This didn’t seem like a good sign, though.

  Thorne glanced at the departing banner once.

  He grabbed his tie and smoothed it down, maybe wondering if that would be next.

  Then he motioned to me. “This is a building site. Do not wander off.”

  He didn’t exactly point to his side and tell me to heel like a misbehaving dog, but it felt close.

  Just before I could get antsy at that fact, I tugged my freaking head in and reminded myself that only this morning, I had wasted a precious cure-all over his white tiled floor.

  Literally tugging my head in and trying to make a smaller target of myself so he didn’t remember that and change his mind, I scurried up to his side.

  The wind was pretty wild. I’d checked the weather report this morning. It hadn’t mentioned anything about gale-force gusts. One struck me now. It drove me to the side. I concentrated on controlling my skirt, though thankfully it didn’t have a large hem that could be yanked high.

  As I tried to control it, the wind subsided.

  Sorry. No. A big, broad-shouldered vampire stood between me and it.

  I glanced up to see Thorne’s shoulders right in front of me.

  I’d gotten over how attractive he was a long time ago. Day one, in fact.

  Because I would like to think that I was a girl with perspective. I knew what was possible in this world and what wasn’t.

  Now his shoulders were right in front of me. Maybe you’d think I should check him out. I did not.

  I instead noted the fact that his shoulders were rounded and lower than usual. That image of Atlas struggling to hold up the sky came to mind.

  It didn’t have long to sink in.

  I’d assumed we were waiting for the representatives from the Magnet Group. They were already here.

  I heard echoing footsteps as someone walked across the empty first floor of the hotel.

  It’d be a big building once it was finished.

  Weird that it was close to where I lived. You wouldn’t be surprised to know that I wasn’t the richest soul out there. I was just scraping by. I had, however, inherited my old grandmother’s house.

  Still, it was in a pretty cheap area. You wouldn’t think we needed a 20-floor hotel. Then again, at the rate of development these days, what had once been a suburb for the poor became a suburb for the rich in a decade. Then where would the poor go, my grandmother would’ve asked – into the ditches and dumpsters?

  She would’ve also, if she were here, tugged my head up and pointed out there still wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. But the wind raged as if it was at the forefront of a storm.

  Speaking of storms. John Storm strode toward Thorne. I knew his name, because, believe it or not, I had read this deal’s brief yesterday. And even if I hadn’t, everybody in this city knew the head of the Magnet Group.

  They didn’t actually come from this city, but they were spreading across the country faster than a virus in a sauna.

  Plus, the gossip mags that Daphne loved so much went gaga over John Storm.

  A werewolf, he had the kind of body that would make humans limp away in shame.

  His shoulders were… I suppose what shoulders had always wanted to be.

  They were so broad, it looked like he could pick up a car. They led to a handsome jutting jaw, sharp cheekbones, dappled sandy brown hair, and a look.

  He had the electric blue eyes of a husky, and before you thought that was creepy… it was, but it was more than made up for by the fact it was penetrating.

  What he looked at knew it was being stared at, and I imagined that happened even if it was an inanimate object. As those electric blue eyes swung over me, trust me, I sure as hell felt stared at, too.

  His eyes didn’t dart up and down my nonexistent figure, but they didn’t need to. It was like he took me all in in one go.

  Thorne took a step to the side and forward. If I’d been paying attention, I would’ve realized it was in front of me. But it wasn’t quite quick enough to hide the sharp flash of a smile that cracked across John’s lips. “You—”

  His head was inclined toward me, and it almost felt like he was addressing me, but Thorne cleared his throat and pushed close. He yanked a paper contract out of his pocket.

  It wasn’t even creased.

  The gold embossed Ashcroft seal on the back glinted under the sunlight.

  “Come on,” John said, lips scrunching into another smile, this one different from the last.

  He was a werewolf, but his lips were pretty much the same as a human’s. I was telling you this to try to underline that they weren’t magically different or anything. They didn’t have more muscles. They weren’t genetically bred to be able to produce more smiles. Yet he had finer control over those lips than anyone I’d ever seen. Now they scrunched in a mix of competitiveness, disdain, and… I dunno, superiority? That last one was hard to figure out. “Come on, we aren’t going to jump straight to the end, are we? A vampire like you knows that’s impossible. You’ve gotta survive the middle first.”

  John reached out a hand and grabbed Thorne’s shoulder.

  People never touched Thorne.

  Did I need to repeat the bio I'd given you ad nauseam? He was the head of this chapter of the Magic Council.

  Magical creatures tended to avoid him and give him a radius of at least two meters. As for werewolves, they had never been vampires’ friends. That radius was usually five meters. Now John broke the unwritten rule and clamped his hand harder around Thorne’s shoulder.

  “Survive?” Thorne said slowly.

  You know how I told you he had two tones. The bored one he used for almost everyone, then the one he always used when I was injured? Okay, apparently I was wrong. He had three tones. I’d never heard this one before. It was hair-raising. A blast of nerves shot across my back and down my spine. At least his cold ire wasn’t directed at me, because none of Thorne’s attention was directed at me. He shifted forward onto the toes of his feet. His stance changed, becoming not easier but looser.

  He looked like a tiger someone had just untethered. Even though I’d assumed he wasn’t paying attention to me at all, I felt him staring at me in his peripheral vision.

  I bit my lip.

  Jimmy had wandered off. I could see him close to the car talking on his phone, having a hurried, low conversation with someone. It was clearly secret, and when he picked up one of the werewolf construction workers getting too close, he jumped into the front seat.

  So Jimmy wasn’t there to see the fact that it looked like there’d be a war between Magnet Group and Thorne.

  I scanned the area, looking for help only to swiftly remind myself this was hardly my problem.

  Thorne would always know how to look after himself.

  “Please do remember who you are currently touching,” Thorne said simply.

  It worked on John.

  He lifted his hand like he was admitting surrender, took a step back, shoved his fingers into his pocket but left his palm pressed against his jeans, then swung his gaze over to me again.

  This was easily the edgiest contract discussion I’d ever attended. I wanted to melt into the background somewhere. And you know what else I wanted to do? Find a bathroom, take off my blouse, and touch my side. I couldn’t feel the burn anymore. You might not think that was particularly impressive, considering I hadn’t felt the scald in the first place. But when I’d seen it, I had sure as hell experienced the pain – which had disappeared the second the cure-all had touched it.

  Forgive me, but I had never seen a cure-all in operation.

  I just wasn’t important enough for them.

  Yet Thorne had wasted his familial potion on me?

  Thorne looked two parts distracted to one part angry. But it was a tame anger for now.

  “Let’s take a look around the place first. You don’t want to buy something you haven’t seen. Come on.” John turned smoothly on his camel-colored leather boot.

  He shrugged Thorne forward.

  “Do we need hardhats?” Thorne demanded.

  This elicited the chuckle it was always going to. These men were stuck in some kind of braggadocio competition.

  And apparently Thorne had lost it – in John’s eyes at least – the second it had started.

  “This might be a construction site, but aren’t we both magical creatures?” He crossed his large arms, his shoulders bristling.

  “It’s for my secretary,” Thorne said simply.

  As always, he didn’t look at me when he was speaking about me.

  He wouldn’t move another step until a hard hat was produced.

  John himself handed it over. Or at least tried. Thorne intercepted it, grabbed it, took a step toward me, and looked as if he was about to tell me to head back to the car – with a hard hat on, which seemed like overkill.

  One of his nostrils flared. He quickly changed his mind.

  “We don’t have all day. Business must be done quickly to maximize profits,” John said.

  His voice got stuck on the word quickly.

  Why did I get the impression that almost everything he said meant something else? Oh yeah, because I had never seen Thorne this stiff.

  Someone cleared their throat from beside me as John took a step over to Thorne and started discussing the finer details of the development.

  I swung my gaze over to see one of the construction workers. There was… something about him. He was the guy who’d delivered the hat. “Do you live around these parts?” he grunted.

  Way to go to start the conversation creepily, I thought. Then I quickly realized something. Though I hadn’t seen much of the guy I’d glimpsed this morning, was it such a stretch of my imagination to think he was the same worker? Plus, I passed this construction site twice a day.

  “I—” I went to nod.

  “Take Camille back to the car,” Thorne said suddenly.

  I blinked. Really? I’d screwed up already? I turned to see Jimmy had finished his conversation and had raced back to Thorne.

  He shot a satisfied look my way. It suggested that, yeah, I had screwed up.

  How many times was this now?

  I couldn’t tell you the number of negotiations I’d been on with Thorne where, halfway through, he’d either sent me out to the car or on some errand.

  It was like he’d suddenly get bored of my face.

  A different part of my brain could point out that only ever happened when things started to get edgy, but I couldn’t follow through with that thought.

  “You know the way to the car—” Jimmy began.

  Thorne didn’t have to say anything. He just had to crack out that look. It even worked on bullies like Jimmy.

  “Come on,” Jimmy hissed.

  I wandered off.

  I turned around to look at the construction worker I’d started to converse with. He had an expression. Hardly surprising. Anything with eyes – hell, anything without eyes but with a movable face – can have a look. It’s just that this one made me shiver inside.

  “Come on, Camille, seriously, how long have you been here? The boss already wants you in the car? What did you do, trip over a werewolf tail?”

  I sneered at Jimmy – well, as much as I dared. “Who were you talking to before, anyway?”

  “And that’s business of yours, is it? Are you suddenly interested in the finer workings of Ashcroft Corporation? Wait, no, you aren’t. You are only interested in destroying it.”

  I bristled. “Destroying it?”

  “Okay, okay, that would take intelligence. Which you clearly don’t have. But you can do a lot of damage by tripping over the wrong thing or dropping something precious.”

  My cheeks twitched. I didn’t want to give anything away, but forgive me, the cure-all was on my mind.

  Jimmy wasn’t even paying attention. We were back at the car. He turned and wandered off with a muttered, “Dumb ass.”

  I got ready to hurl insults back at him, but the media had just arrived.

  They ignored me and wandered off into the construction site.

  I leaned against the car for a moment, crossed my arms, sighed, wondered if I should really just quit, then tried to get into the passenger side. The car was locked. Jimmy had walked away with the keys.

  Great. Just great.

  A fat droplet of rain landed on my shoulder.

  I frowned at it.

  But there were no clouds in the sky, right?

  Correction. There had been no clouds in the sky previously. Now the darn thing was swamped with them.

  That gale force wind had obviously yanked them in from the bay beyond.

  What started off as one fat droplet of rain soon turned into the sky-equivalent of a freaking tsunami.

  “Oh my God,” I shuddered, trying to ineffectually yank on my collar to offer myself a semblance of warmth and protection.

  I wore a jacket – but it was a suit jacket. It was not waterproof, and critically, it couldn’t offer me much heat.

  Seriously, that was the critical part.

  You knew I was a witch. You knew I barely had any power. You knew we glass witches were rare. Now, let me tell you about one important quirk. We glass witches couldn’t get too cold.

  Not only did we have tremendously sensitive skin and organs, but the cold disproportionately affected us.

  I had frigging read the weather report. I read the weather every day. It had said there was a tiny chance of rain, but it hadn’t pointed out the rain might come from a storm. As these fat droplets of driving rain continued to splash down from on high, the temperature dropped precipitously.

  Oh… crap.

  I looked around for a place to run to and briefly thought of heading home. My bag and keys were back at work. I would just be a soggy sick glass witch on the doorstep if I ran back to my house.