Game of Lies

by Sadie Moss

  Rain’s expression stiffened. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve been refining my spell. My next attempt should pull magic without any loss of life.”

  “Your… next attempt?” My voice was low and halting.

  “Yes.” He grimaced. “Another unfortunate side effect of my first siphoning spell was that, while I successfully extracted magic from a large portion of the Gifted population, that magic was rendered unusable in the process. My aim was to take magic away from some and give it to others, thereby making those who wield it even more powerful. I’ve built a device that can do this and have tested it successfully on a small scale. But it will need to be powered by a great deal of magic to run on a large scale. I’ve been taking magic individually from the Gifted and Touched in the Capital, like our friend Gerald. It’s been a slow process. I couldn’t move too fast or I’d draw suspicion. But I’m very close now. I just need the magic of a few more powerful mages.”

  There it was.

  That was what this sick fucker wanted with me. He wanted to draw the magic out of my body, probably leaving me as deranged as poor Gerald, and use it to power a spell that would pull magic from people en masse.

  But isn’t that what you wanted? a dark voice whispered in the back of my mind. Fewer Gifted and Touched in the world?

  Tears stung my eyes as I shook my head. No. It wasn’t.

  Maybe I’d once thought so, but that was before I met more magic users, came to love three of them, and realized people couldn’t be broken up into such neat little categories. Since that day at Akio’s house, when the world as I knew it came crashing down around my ears, I’d had to face my own prejudices. And now I had to accept responsibility for the harm I had done.

  I didn’t want a world with fewer Gifted—especially not one where all the power was concentrated in even fewer hands. What I wanted was the world that Rain had described before the Great Death. The one where lines weren’t drawn in the sand and people weren’t split into groups of “worthy” and “unworthy,” each side taught to hate the other.

  Rain took two steps closer to me. He was almost within reach again, but I didn’t make a move for him. The bars of my cage were still enchanted to dampen my magic and cause blinding pain whenever I touched them, and if I was going to get out of here, I needed to be smart. I needed to conserve my energy.

  There were four men out there who each held a piece of my heart, a piece of my soul.

  And there were hundreds of thousands of innocent people who would suffer or die if Rain succeeded in performing another large-scale magic pull.

  I would find a way out of here.

  For all of them.

  As if reading the determination on my face, Rain shook his head and smiled. “Get some rest, Miss Lockwood. We’ll start soon.”

  The Gifted man turned away from me, the smudges of blood on his face glinting in the light as he walked toward the stairs. I clenched my hands into fists as I watched him go, trying to see past the shape of a man to the devil underneath.

  “Hey, Rain?”

  He stopped, one foot on the bottom step, head tilting toward me. “Yes?”

  “Just so you know. I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

  His laughter followed him up the stairs, cutting off only when the door slammed shut.

  THANK YOU FOR READING!

  Thank you so much for reading Game of Lies and going along on this wild ride with Lana and her men. And don’t worry, there’s more coming!

  Their story will conclude in Consort of Rebels, coming in November.

  You can preorder it on Amazon HERE.

  In the meantime, you can keep the adventure going with a free copy of Kissed by Shadows, a prequel novella that has more of Corin and Lana’s backstory.

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  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, thank you to my incredible husband and my sweet puppy for putting up with all my mad ramblings about the Magic Awakened series.

  Thank you, Jacqueline Sweet, for the amazing cover! I love what you’ve created for this series.

  To my amazing beta readers: thank you, thank you, thank you!

  About the Author

  Sadie Moss is obsessed with books, craft beer, and the supernatural. She has often been accused of living in a world of her own imagination, so she decided to put those worlds into books.

  When Sadie isn't working on her next novel, she loves spending time with her adorable puppy, binge-watching comedies on Hulu, and hanging out with her family.

  She loves to hear from her readers, so feel free to say hello at sadiemoss.author@gmail.com.

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