Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(5)

“Mr. Rutger, don’t do this. Adultery isn’t illegal. You haven’t committed any crimes yet. Please don’t do this.”

His eyes stared at me, cold and hard.

“You can still walk away from this.”

“You thought you could humiliate me. You thought you’d embarrass me.” His face darkened as ghostly magic shadows slid across his skin. Tiny red sparks ignited above his palms and flared. Bright crimson lightning danced, stretching to the tips of his fingers.

Where the hell was the hotel security? I couldn’t take him down first—it would be an assault, and we couldn’t afford to be sued—but they could.

“Let me show you what happens to people who try to humiliate me.”

I dashed to the side.

Thunder pealed. The glass doors of the hotel shattered. The blast wave picked me up off the floor. I saw the chair from the lounge fly at me and I threw my hands up, curling in midair. The wall smashed into my right shoulder. The chair hit my side and face. Ow.

I crashed down next to the shards of a ceramic pot that had held a plant two seconds ago, then I scrambled to my feet.

The red sparks ignited again. He was getting ready for Round Two.

They say a hundred-and-thirty-pound woman has no chance against an athletic two-hundred-pound man. That’s a lie. You just have to make a decision to hurt him and then do it.

I grabbed a heavy potsherd and hurled it at him. It crashed against his chest, knocking him off balance. I ran to him, yanking a Taser from my pocket. He swung at me. It was hard and fast, and it caught me right in the stomach. Tears welled in my eyes. I lunged forward and jammed the Taser against his neck.

The shock surged through him. His eyes bulged.

Please let him go down. Please.

His mouth gaped open. John went rigid and crashed like a log.

I knelt on his neck, pulled a plastic tie from my pocket, and wrestled his hands together, tying them up.

John growled.

I sat next to him on the floor. My face hurt.

Two men burst from the side doors and ran to us. Their jackets said security. Well, now they show up. Thank God for the cavalry.

In the distance police sirens blared.

Sgt. Munoz, a stocky man twice my age, peered at the security footage. He’d watched it twice already.

“I couldn’t let him put her into the car,” I said from my spot in the chair. My shoulder hurt and the handcuffs on my hands kept me from rubbing it. Being in close proximity to cops filled me with anxiety. I wanted to fidget, but fidgeting would make me look nervous.

“You were right,” Munoz said and tapped the screen, pausing on John Rutger reaching for his wife. “That right there is your dead giveaway. The man’s caught with his pants down and he doesn’t say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up.’ He doesn’t beg for forgiveness or get angry. He goes cold and tries to get his wife out of the picture.”

“I didn’t provoke him. I didn’t put my hands on him either, until he tried to kill me.”

“I see that.” He turned to me. “That’s a C2 Taser you’ve got there. You do know range on those things is fifteen feet?”

“I didn’t want to take chances. His magic looked electrical to me, and I thought he might block the current.”

Munoz shook his head. “No, he was enerkinetic. Straight magic energy, and trained to use it, courtesy of the U.S. Army. This guy is a vet.”

“Ah.” That explained why Rutger went flat. Dealing with adrenaline was nothing new to him. The fact that he was an enerkinetic made sense too. Pyrokinetics manipulated fire, aquakinetics manipulated water, and enerkinetics manipulated raw magical energy. Nobody was quite sure what the nature of that energy was, but it was a relatively common magic. How in the world did Bern miss all this in the background check? When I got home, my cousin and I would have to have words.

A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door and handed my license back to Munoz. “She checks out.”

Munoz unlocked my cuffs, took them off, and handed me my purse and camera. My cell and my wallet followed. “We have your statement, and we took your memory card. You’ll get it back later. Go home, put some ice on that neck.”

I grinned at him. “Are you going to tell me not to leave town, Sarge?”

Munoz gave me a “yet another smart-ass” look. “No. You went up against a military-grade mage for a grand. If you need the money that bad, you probably can’t afford the gas.”

Three minutes later I climbed into my five-year-old Mazda minivan. The paperwork described the Mazda’s color as “gold.” Everyone else said it was “kind of champagne” or “sort of beige.” Coupled with unmistakable mom car lines, the minivan made for a perfect surveillance vehicle. Nobody paid it any mind. I once followed a guy for two hours in it on a nearly deserted highway, and when the insurance company later showed him the footage demonstrating that his knee worked just fine as he shifted gears in his El Camino, he was terribly surprised.

I turned the mirror. A big red welt that would mature into one hell of a purple bruise blossomed on my neck and the top of my right shoulder, like someone took a handful of blueberries and rubbed it all over me. An equally bright red stain marked my jaw on the left side. I sighed, readjusted the mirror, and headed home.

Some easy job this turned out to be. At least I didn’t have to go to the hospital. I grimaced. The welt decided it didn’t like me grimacing. Ow.