I reached into the hidden drawer Trevor had built into the side of the table, and pulled out my savings. Seventeen goldani. I’d been saving for a new scabbard for my obsidian blade, and that was more than I needed. It was nowhere near enough to buya building, though, not one that could be made safe quickly for the women and children.
I pulled a small pouch from another hidden slot in the wood, and poured the contents into my palm: a single yellow diamond, flawlessly cut.
This gemstone would buy more than a building, but it was far too valuable to try to sell in Turino. Not even the finest jeweler could give me anything close to what it was worth, and they would immediately report my attempt to the king.
But maybe… My stomach churning, I pulled my knife out and considered it. The sullen winter light glinted off the jet-black stones on the handle, and the obsidian-black, carved blade itself. It wasn’t obsidian, though, or at least not the regular kind. This blade had never cracked, and it almost seemed thirsty for blood when I used it.
Vilkurn had mentioned soon after the knife came into my possession—courtesy of a little judicious murder, which the previous owner had earned by attacking my crew and family—that the stones weren’t all common onyx, either. Some of them were black diamonds, from the island nation of Pict. I had a feeling the whole knife was from there, which made sense, since I’d taken it off an assassin from there.
Taken it off his corpse, that is.
“Priceless beyond your wildest imaginings,” Vilkurn had said about it when I showed him my prize. “And it has a history, if rumors are to be believed. It belongs to some religious order. If it falls out of your hands, Ratter, and makes its way back to its original owners…Well, they’ll send more than one assassin to make you pay for taking it. Their god may demand it.”
But now I was leaving. If I sold it, and anyone came looking, I’d be gone, not only from the town, but the country. “Priceless,” I muttered, holding it up again. There was no such thing. Everything had a price. And so would my knife.
I fought back a wave of sadness, stuffing it down. If someone had been willing to part with a treasure when I was a child in this city, my mother would have been able to find a safe place for us, medicine for her wounds. She might have lived. I would have known more than hunger, pain, and fear when I was little, before Vilkurn saved me.
No, I had two things to sell, and I’d need both for the debts I had hanging over my head.
One would buy safety for the ones who needed it most. The other…
The air around me smelled of mint as I pictured the dark-haired Alpha in his sickroom at the castle.
I grabbed what I needed, unlocked my door, and headed for the one jeweler I trusted not to cheat me too badly, and who had the funds to cover what I’d need. I’d purchase the property I had in mind, and then I’d go say goodbye to my nemesis.
And, though I was really not good at it, mostly due to a lack of practice, I’d apologize.
SERAK
Her knock was unmistakable. No one but the young woman I’d become obsessed with over the past few months would pound on the door to a young nobleman’s room like that, impatience and arrogance in each thump. Especially not that of a nobleman who was meant to be suffering from the aftereffects of an “unintentional” poisoning.
Quickly, I set down my borrowed quill and ink, and blew on the page I was writing to my masters back on Pict. In code, of course. Anyone else reading it would think it a letter to my ailing parents. My parents, however, were long dead, and Ratter wasn’t just anyone. She was the protégée of General Vilkurn, a man who frightened me almost as much as my masters did, though he could only torture and kill me. My masters, on the other hand, could do far worse.
I shuddered, remembering standing beside the bubbling lake of fire a year before, my direct master hissing promises that I would live inside it for eternity, suffering without end, if my identity was discovered during my task. Or if I failed in what had become a two-fold mission: to return the missing obsidian dagger to its rightful home, the volcanic caldera that housedthe Alldyns Vug, and to ascertain if the young woman who had stolen it and went by the name of Ratter, was in fact an Omega.
And not just any Omega, but one who had been pledged to the Lord of Fire even before her birth. Not Ratter, but Rada.
I’d no sooner stashed the letter under my mattress and slid into bed than the door opened. The previouslylockeddoor. “What the hells?” I demanded in Mirrenese.
“To the hells with you, too, Serak Zellum,” Ratter replied in the same language as she entered like a queen. No, a goddess. A storm boiled in her gray eyes, the anger she carried with her like an invisible cloak swirling around her.
Her actual cloak, the gray assassin’s garb she’d supposedly worn since she was ten, was draped over her arm, and I eyed it like I would a viper. Who knew what poisons she carried in that thing? Candellia was probably the least of them.
Today, she was dressed in her usual garb. Black boots and trousers that outlined her long, lean calves and thighs, a sturdy black leather belt with sheaths all around the backs and sides, and… I blinked. She had on a white shirt, but also a corset over it. It was black cloth or leather, stitched with some sort of pattern. But it must have been tighter than usual, as it lifted her breasts up and together so they were thrust toward me, like two ripe peaches, straining the sheer white fabric above the corset. Waiting to be plucked, tasted, devoured.
When she drew in a huge breath, I lost track of what I was saying. Or thinking. I may have stopped breathing.
Then she crossed her arms, pushing them up even higher, and the blood rushed south of my beltline so fast that I became slightly dizzy, though that could have been some residual aftereffects of the candellia antidote. I thanked the Lord of Fire for the sheet that covered me from the waist down.
“Hmph.” Ratter stopped talking and stared at me imperiously, though for the first time since I’d met her five years before, she seemed slightly twitchy.
Which made me twitchy. She was like the gemstone adders of my home island. As beautiful as they were deadly, and just as likely to kill you as glide past, depending on the weather, or their mood.
“What do you want, princess?” I finally managed to say. “Back to finish the job?”
It was entirely plausible. If she’d discovered who I was, or worse, realized I suspected whoshemight be, then she had good reason to kill me as quickly as possible. I hadn’t been able to ascertain why she’d poisoned me, though. Had I let my cover slip? I didn’t think so.
“No.” Her mouth worked like she was sucking lemons, but her eyes moved around the room, no doubt taking in every detail. She did that every time she entered a room, though others might not notice it. She was very good at her craft, and appeared on the outside to be a slightly spoiled, bored noblewoman—inexplicably wearing trousers, of course, as the Rimholtian court had changed over the past few years to make them very fashionable.
