djinn wars 04 - broken by pope christine

Author:pope, christine [pope, christine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dark Valentine Press
Published: 2015-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

The bed was comfortable enough, but that didn’t mean Julia intended to get a lick of sleep that night. After dinner, she’d been allowed to come up to her designated room on her own. Qadim had stayed in the dining room, finishing the last of the bottle of wine. The satisfied expression he’d worn seemed to indicate that he was confident in the outcome of his battle with Zahrias the next day.

What form that would take, she wasn’t sure. She’d witnessed Jasreel’s duel with his half-brother Aldair, but they were both air elementals and so had fought on a more or less even playing field. But with Zahrias commanding fire and Qadim controlling earth, she wasn’t sure how that would even work.

Well, she supposed she would find out tomorrow.

She was lying flat on her back, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The door was locked, but Julia didn’t have much confidence in that flimsy defense. No door locks could keep a djinn out. What unnerved her even more was that she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Margolis since Qadim had sent him packing. He had to be skulking around someplace, but where?

He won’t try anything, she told herself. Qadim would just do that Darth Vader maneuver on him again.

Maybe. She’d seen the flicker of madness far back in Margolis’ eyes, and wondered if that madness would spur him to questionable action, even if doing so meant risking Qadim’s wrath. Margolis had never been all that stable, but six months of imprisonment had only served to damage him that much more. It was possible that fear of the djinn who commanded him wasn’t strong enough to keep him away from the prize he’d been lusting after for so long.

If only she really was Zahrias’ Chosen. She knew that the djinn had a connection with the mortals they’d made their partners, a connection so deep they could reach out to one another across the miles and communicate by thought. But she wasn’t anything to Zahrias, only a woman he’d felt some attraction to, but not enough so he would dedicate his life to her.

All right, she could deal with that. The knowledge hurt, but so had a lot of other things in her life. Maybe he’d sensed the flaw within her, had realized that something inside had been fractured early on and could never really be repaired. She could slap a temporary bandage on it and pretend everything was fine, but it wasn’t. Because Zahrias was strong and noble, he deserved someone strong as well, not a woman who was so weak that she’d sell the property she’d worked so hard to earn on her own, just because her fiancé told her to, a woman who’d stood there and let him hit her that one time, just because she’d had the temerity to go car shopping without him.

Jessica had tried to reassure Julia, to tell her that she knew Julia would have had the strength to leave eventually if the Heat hadn’t intervened, but Julia wasn’t so sure.

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