“Here.” He handed her his phone.

The message was only three words long, but those three words chilled her to her core. “Finn has escaped,” she read.

CHAPTER NINE

Team Muscle and Magic

THEY HURRIED BACK to the hotel. Kai managed to summon a taxi, for which Sera’s feet were eternally grateful. This was the last time in this lifetime that she wore four-inch heels.

As soon as they were inside Kai’s suite, he grabbed his computer and sat down on the sofa. A cloud of agitated magic, invisible but potent, rolled out of him, burning the soft fragrant scent in the air. Inside the tall clear vases in the room, flower petals wrinkled and wilted before her eyes. Sera sneezed.

He looked up from his computer, staring across the room at her. “Come here.”

She hesitated. “Only if you promise to put your magic away. You’re burning the air.” She pointed at the vase beside the sofa. “And those nice petals.”

“I’m trying to put out half a dozen fires at the moment, Sera. I don’t have time to worry about flower petals.” He pulled in his magic anyway.

“It looks like you started a few fires of your own,” Dal’s voice said from the computer speakers.

Sera kicked off her shoes and hurried over to the sofa. As she sat down next to Kai, she waved at the three men staring out from the computer screen. Dal, Callum, and Tony, the guys she’d lovingly dubbed Kai’s ‘commandos’, were as tough as nails and as cool as cats. They weren’t just Kai’s employees; they were his friends. They’d helped her and Kai take down Finn’s revolution. They hadn’t survived the ordeal without a scratch, however. Kai had commanded them to take some time off. And yet here they were.

“Hi, guys,” she greeted Team Muscle and Magic. “Aren’t you supposed to be sitting on a tropical beach somewhere, working on your tans?”

“Nah, we had to give up on that idea. Callum burns horribly in the sun,” said Tony, grinning.

“That wasn’t sunburn. It was a fire spell,” Callum protested, also grinning.

“Sure thing, burning man.”

“Sera,” Dal said. “How are you doing? How’s your training coming along? Is Kai going easy on you?”

“Kai Drachenburg doesn’t go easy on anyone,” she said, smiling.

The three commandos chuckled.

“I wouldn’t be doing her any favors by going easy on her,” Kai said.

“Funny. He’s always saying the same thing to us,” Tony told Sera.

“Right before he blasts us with a tornado,” added Dal.

Callum nodded. “Or shifts into a dragon and spits fire at us.”

Kai gave them all a cold glare, and the snickers died down. “Tell me what happened at Atlantis.”

Tony’s soldier mode clicked on. “The prison’s security footage shows a gang of hooded mages popping up in one of the unused storage rooms near Finn’s cell, opening the cell with a keycard, then returning to the storage room with him. And then they all just vanished.”

“A portal?” Sera asked.

“We think so,” said Dal. “But there’s no residual magic left.”

“How long ago did Finn escape?”

“This morning,” Tony told her.

“That’s still recent enough, even if they hid the portal.” Sera turned to Kai. “You need to get me into that prison. I can break the magic hiding the portal and figure out where they went. We can still catch them.”

“You have other things to worry about,” he said. “Like the Magic Games. They start tomorrow. You don’t have time to go to Atlantis, and you certainly don’t have time to hunt down Finn.” He looked at the commandos. “Go. Check out the prison. Look for a hidden portal and report back your findings.”

“This is foolish,” she said as he closed his computer. “You need me there, finding that portal—not here, sitting on my hands.”

“You won’t be sitting on your hands. You will be fighting in the Magic Games. Once that’s done, if you’d like to come work for me, we can discuss my terms.”

“Your…terms?” she choked out the words. What was he playing at? “Like what?”

“You’ll start by explaining how a first tier mage managed to hide her magic from the entire supernatural community for over twenty years.”

She crossed her arms against her chest and frowned at him. “Not everyone.”

“And then you’ll tell me why,” he said.

So he hadn’t given up on trying to unearth her secret after all. Maybe that’s why he was helping her; maybe he thought that by getting close to her, she’d spill the beans. Nope. Not happening.

“I have no interest in working for you,” she said.

His eyes narrowed. “What are you hiding?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t like secrets.”

“Neither does your Magic Council,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. They want to crack my mind open like an egg. The question is why you’re helping me. Why not just let them break me? Then you’d know everything you ever wanted to know about me.”

He leaned forward as his lips slid back to show his teeth. He looked positively primal. “I don’t want to crack your mind, Sera.”

“Then put away the dragon fangs. You can’t just go around intimidating people into doing what you want. It’s not nice.”