Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(81)

Porter blinked and blinked, as if such disturbing thoughts had never occurred to him before. “But . . . but I loved her.”

I let out a harsh, mocking laugh. “You didn’t love her. You stalked her, you hunted her. And when she wouldn’t play along, when she wouldn’t give you what you wanted, you finally killed her. Maria’s gone, and you have no one to blame but yourself. And now you keep trying to recreate these feelings you had for her with other women. Well, guess what, Bruce? None of the poor girls you brought here and murdered loved you either. And Maria? I imagine that she pitied you more than anything else.”

I paused, getting ready to twist my verbal knife in even deeper, just like I had with Tucker. All the while, I kept gathering up my Stone magic, getting ready to hurt Porter with it even more than I was hurting him with my sharp, taunting words.

“Nah,” I said. “Maria didn’t even pity you. She just made fun of you. She probably laughed and laughed at you behind your back with all her rich, snooty friends.”

“Shut up,” Porter growled. “Maria never did anything like that. She would never be so cruel.”

“She would have been exactly that cruel,” I snapped right back at him. “How could she not laugh at you? The silly little servant boy who thought that he actually had a chance with the rich, pretty princess? Just hearing your stupid sob story makes me want to laugh.”

I stared him right in the eyes and started chuckling, making the sounds as low, harsh, and mocking as possible. Trying to make him forget about everything else except how angry he was with me.

And it worked.

Porter’s blue eyes narrowed to slits, a red flush crept up his neck, and his hands clenched into fists. And I knew that I was seeing exactly what all those other women had seen right before he killed them. They’d said the wrong thing, they’d ruined his fantasy, and he’d flown into a rage and killed them, just as he’d killed Maria when she finally rejected him.

I let my chuckles fade away. “Face it, Bruce. Maria never cared about you, not one little bit . . .”

This time, I was the one who went on a rant. More and more hateful words spewed past my lips, each one more poisonous than the last, even as I gathered up more and more of my Stone magic, getting ready for what was to come. My words and power mixed together, each one fueling the other.

That flush crept up to Porter’s cheeks, staining them a dark, mottled red, and pure murderous rage glinted in his eyes. His entire body tensed, and his hands were fisted together so tightly that his fingers had gone white from the strain. But I kept right on talking, taunting him.

“And you know what else?” I said. “You didn’t bring all those women here because you thought you loved them. Not really. You brought them here because you wanted to hurt them the same way that Maria hurt you. Because deep down, you like hurting women. Because you wanted all the fucking power over them that you never had over her—”

And he finally snapped, like a rubber band stretched to its breaking point.

Bruce Porter let out a harsh primal scream, surged out of his chair, and threw himself at me.

And that’s when I finally unleashed my magic.





26


My Stone magic roared out of my body like an invisible lightning bolt, and I focused all my power, all my energy, on that one weak spot above Maria and Porter’s doctored photo on the mantel. As soon as my magic hit all those tiny spiderweb cracks, the stones blasted out of the fireplace like missiles, all aimed directly at Bruce Porter.

The stones slammed into the dwarf, knocking him away from me and down onto the floor. Porter yelped in surprise and tried to get up, and I used my magic to blast another wave of stones out of the fireplace and straight into him, knocking him back down to the ground. He yelped again, but instead of trying to get up, he curled into a ball to protect himself from the heavy chunks of rocks and sharp, flying shrapnel.

I’d managed to take down Porter, at least for a few minutes, so I looked over at the fireplace again, this time focusing on a much lower stone in the wall.

“Come on, baby,” I muttered. “Come to Gin.”

My heart pounded, sweat streamed down my face, and tremors shook my body from head to toe from concentrating so hard and long on that one spot. Even though I’d been practicing using my Stone magic in just this sort of pinpoint-precision way, getting one single stone to shoot out of an entire wall of them and go exactly where I wanted it to taxed even my great elemental power. But this was my best—and only—chance of escaping, so I cleared my mind, concentrated even more intently on that spot on the wall, and let loose with another hard, forceful wave of magic.

CRACK!

That single stone shot out from the wall, zoomed across the room, and slammed straight into the side of my chair. The heavy rock punched right through the wood, shattering the entire left side of the chair. The brutal blow knocked me over onto the ground, and my head smacked against the floor, making me see white stars. But my left hand was free now, so I pushed the pain away, grabbed a long, jagged piece of stone from the floor, and used it to saw through the ropes on my right wrist and my ankles.

And not a moment too soon.

Porter finally realized that I wasn’t targeting him anymore, and he got up onto his hands and knees and shook off the stones that had landed on top of him, like a dog flinging water out of its fur. He had a large purple knot on his forehead, and several bloody gashes streaked down the side of his face, but he was by no means out of the fight and not even close to being dead.