Emotional Justice
I was starting to feel sick—and not just from Rune’s voice. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said about Charlie. That he was still useful. That he was easily manipulated. That all her needs were being met.
All her needs.
All her needs.
I felt like I was going to throw up. Not because I missed Charlie, but because this was the version of him that had replaced what we’d had. This was what I’d been traded for.
And Raven thought that setting the clock back an hour so he’d be late for work might be “overdoing it”? Charlie deserved much worse, but not…not at Rune’s hands.
I’d never needed someone who wanted to own me or parade me around or decide what I should feel. I’d fallen in love with some real jerks over the years—including one who tried to sacrifice me to the long-dead god, Daegan—but Charlie and his martyr complex might have been the worst for me. Slowly, I was learning to put my own needs first. What I needed—what I had with Raven—was someone steady. Someone who watched from the shadows and stayed when things got hard. Raven hadn’t asked for anything from me, ever. But he always showed up.
And with him, the demon in my head was quieted.
I peered through the crack in the closet door at Rune as she turned off her phone and jammed it back under the end table. Then she walked out of sight. There was a pause. An exasperated sigh. The sound of her walking back toward the door.
Silence. A slight vacuum in my ears as the front door opened.
Then the door slammed shut, groaning against the frame before locking in with a thump.
I waited three seconds. Then ten. Even though Raven shifted slightly behind me, neither of us moved.
I pressed the back of my head against Raven’s shoulder. “She’s gone.”
“Mm.” He nodded. “We should get back to work.”
“Hm. We should.”
Still, neither of us moved.
Rune was right, I wanted to tell him. You do smell good.
Finally, I let go of the doorknob to let the closet door swing open into the bookshelf-lined hallway, but it moved only about eight inches. Raven coughed and pressed the butt of his palm against the door. The second it swung open, the air felt fresh—heavier somehow, but infinitely cooler than the tight space I’d shared with Raven. I stepped out slowly, brushing off lint and pride, while Raven scanned the hallway like he expected Rune to double back and declare, Aha! I knew there was emotional closure hiding in my linen closet!
He offered me a hand to steady myself. I didn’t take it.
I needed to stand on my own tonight. Figuratively and literally.
“She’s really got him under her thumb.” I pointed at Raven’s backpack on the closet floor. “Don’t forget your tools.”
Raven reached for his pack as he emerged from the overcrowded closet. “She has leverage. He’s afraid. If he’s not afraid, he probably doesn’t know he should be.”
I didn’t respond as we stood there. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to scream or unscrew every lightbulb in the house. Probably both. I could’ve left thoughts of Charlie behind long ago if I just didn’t have to see him every day or have his new relationship rubbed in my face every time I turned around. The daily reminders were maddening.
Trying to pull myself together, I tapped the dark face of my watch and waited for a message to appear. “Dru says Charlie’s en route to the restaurant. All safe.”
Raven moved first, his boots silent on the hallway floorboards. His smoke-alarm cameras would be nearly invisible once in place. Wards drawn in dust across the back of photo frames. Sigils woven in light across shadowy corners. Subtle, expert work. Both magical and mundane.
“I’ll handle the living room and bedroom,” he said. What he didn’t say was that he knew it would be hard for me to be in the room where Charlie and Rune slept. Or didn’t sleep. “While I do that, Lilah, you look for stolen books and anything the professor can use to track Rune’s network. Or just anything really that’s out of place since your last visit.”
I caught the hesitation in his voice—last visit, as if this were a place I’d toured once instead of a life I didn’t want to excavate. A lot had happened since I’d last been here, and while the arrangement of furniture was the same, both the scent of the rooms and the clutter in the closets weren’t mine.
“Don’t forget to check your watch for alerts,” Raven said as he disappeared into the master bedroom. He was probably thinking that he’d better get his watch upgraded before our next assignment if he couldn’t depend on me to set my alert notifications properly. For all the military-grade technology Dru had access to, her biggest security hole was still me.
Still, I nodded and walked the familiar path to Charlie’s study, which was half of the spare bedroom. It hadn’t changed much. His old desk. Her new curtains. Books I’d given him as a present on the shelves—well, copies of my medieval stories I’d researched, loved. One thing almost everyone at Dru’s library had in common.
I opened my hands, palms up, and hovered them over the row of spines on the other shelves of books Charlie had acquired since his marriage. It was the quickest way I knew to search for the energy of Daeganean books.
Nothing.
No energy signatures.
No books from our vaults.
I should have felt relief. Instead, I felt…erased.
These weren’t even worth stealing.
Before leaving his office, I grabbed the cord to the Wi-Fi router, then thought better of it. Raven would need it for the cameras. But the printer?
Chuckling to myself, I used the onboard menu screen to switch the language to Icelandic. That poor printer was going to get blamed for all sorts of bad stuff.
The door creaked behind me. I didn’t flinch. Raven stood there with his usual unreadable expression as if he didn’t just see me tampering with office equipment.
“Bedroom’s set. First smoke alarm camera’s all done. Dru will have eyes inside this place before Chuck has pie.”
“Oh!” I held up my watch face and tapped out a status to Dru. “She says Charlie’s car is at the restaurant.” I didn’t mention that Dru’s message was ten minutes old.
“Good, good. Plenty of time. I’ll set up the living room now.”
I nodded, then crossed the hall into the kitchen. I stepped over the board that always creaked.
I started with the books stacked under the side table—nonfiction oddities, mostly. A few, Rune probably lifted from local public libraries. One had a return card still stuck inside. A few were rare—worth money, but not magical. A couple were valuable to collectors, but useless to Dru.
“Hey, Raven?” I called as I padded into the dining room. The table was covered in antiquarian books—none of ours—that had been taken apart, page by page, and stacks of mailing envelopes and labels. Beside them were printouts of orders from an online auction site.
“Yeah?”
“Does Rune know you killed her husband?”
I heard something drop in the next room. Raven appeared in the doorway, screwdriver in one fist and the spy camera in the other. “What?”
“Does Rune know you killed Marco?”
His lower lip caught between his teeth as he stared at the screwdriver. “It would be more accurate to ask if she knows that Marco got himself killed.”
“Yeah, well, she knows that. But does she know you had a hand in it?”
Raven shrugged and glanced at the front door. “That I personally set the trap so the library named for my parents would implode to keep the wrong hands from getting to the texts hidden there? I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Charlie knows. Or if not you specifically, that it was a Daeganean library Marco broke into.”
“And you think ol’ Chuck told her?”
I shrugged as I tiptoed back into the kitchen. “I don’t know. He didn’t seem to believe me about who she was or that Marco was her husband. Charlie’s more the type to bottle up that kind of information.”
Opening the microwave, I removed the food-speckled-but-otherwise-clear plate and shoved it into my backpack.
Raven followed me into the kitchen. “But if he did say something to her, she might have more reason to retaliate against the priesthood.”
“Or against you.”
There it was. That was my concern. Raven.
“You shouldn’t worry about me,” he promised as he headed back to the living room. “I can take care of myself.”
I followed him into the living room, stepping over the creaky board again, and then over a pair of skimpy red panties that had been rolled all the way down the wearer’s thighs and left to air out—inside out—on the floor next to a discarded nightgown. I stepped over them like crime-scene evidence and took stock of Raven instead, arms over his head as he inserted a spy camera into the square where the smoke alarm had been a few minutes ago. His black shirt hiked just above his belt to reveal a muscle I didn’t even know was possible.
Sucking in my breath, I turned away saying nothing and noticed the TV remote on the armrest. Without thinking, I popped the batteries and slipped them into my bag.
Petty? Yes. Satisfying? Deeply.
From there, it escalated.
Microwave plate: already gone.
Refrigerator bulb: unscrewed and in my bag.
Breaker switch for washer and dryer: off and fuse removed.
I tiptoed through the entire house, looking for lost books—and opportunities.
Each insignificant act of sabotage tucked away in my backpack like grief artifacts.
Some women burned pictures. I was dismantling a household, one minor inconvenience at a time.
I didn’t even hear Raven approach until he chuckled softly behind me. “Do I want to know what’s in the bag?”
“I’m just leveling the emotional playing field,” I said without turning around.
“And I suppose emotional justice involves removing the microwave turntable?”
“I practically wrote the book on petty revenge. I could definitely be worse.”
He gave a quiet hum, and I could tell he wasn’t judging. Not really.
We worked in silence after that. I moved room to room, checking books, documenting anything with a mark I recognized. He moved like a professional—precise, deliberate, and just slightly annoyed when he had to keep adjusting his sleeves to reach wiring.
“Almost ready?” he said from the next room. “I’m about done. All installs complete. A few sigils throughout the house to help things unravel.”
He was near the back door drawing a symbol in the air when I found…it.
On the shelf near the front door. At eye level for Charlie. Tucked behind a glass jar of keys and pocket change.
The crow feather.
My crow feather.
Sealed in a fancy glass vial with a cork. Still dusted faintly in sacred oils and powder.
I stepped closer. Raven’s spell was already causing some unraveling. Mine.
Charlie had kept it. All this time. Not in a drawer. Not in a box.
On display.
It wasn’t about the feather, not really. It was what I’d said when I gave it to him.
“Love is like this feather. It’s not heavy. It doesn’t demand anything. But if the wind shifts, even a little, it can be gone before you realize it’s moved.”
I’d told Charlie it was a reminder of the moment I’d fallen in love with him. Of that night on a rain-drenched rooftop on campus when we watched the full moon rise over the city and talked all night and then watched the full moon set as the sun rose the next morning. As I’d kissed him goodbye, I’d spotted the feather on the ground where it hadn’t been the night before, and I’d decided to have it blessed and turn it into a just-because gift for him.
I hadn’t expected him to forget. I’d just expected him to hide my gift or maybe even throw it away, like he had me.
And yet here it was.
I reached for it.
“What is it?” Raven’s voice, quiet, behind me.
I didn’t turn. I couldn’t.
“Nothing important.” I slid the vial into my bag with the rest.
He stepped beside me and gave me a long look as he cupped my shoulder in his palm and smiled at me. “It meant something.”
“It used to.”
“I think it still does.”
“Not to me.”
“No, to him. Come on. Let’s go celebrate a successful mission.” He headed toward the back door without me as he buckled his pack securely over his wide shoulders. At the last step, he pivoted. “You don’t have to take it. Leave it here. Make him look at it every day.”
“But he doesn’t deserve to keep it.”
Raven didn’t call me on it. He simply stood there, steady as one of his own wards.
Then—without warning—the front doorknob rattled.
You’re reading The Guide to Petty Revenge free, right here in the Library. Want a copy to keep on your Kindle or e-reader? Buy the e-book direct from me →
© 2025 Lorna Tedder. All rights reserved. Free to read here — please don’t repost elsewhere.