“I don’t know.” He squinted into the pale light of the setting sun. “I already told the others, and they agreed to come along. They’re always down for a good fight.”
“Walk away, Blaze. You did it once. How hard can it be to do it a second time?” Augustus clapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and it’ll be for good this time.”
He strode back inside just as Dimitrios entered the sitting room. Augustus scrubbed his face. He couldn’t wait to be rid of all these people, back in his own world, with a crew who knew how to fucking knock.
Then matters turned from bad to worse. Lazaros strode in behind the heir.
“You,” he said to Lazaros, “can turn right the fuck back around. You’re the last person who should be around me right now.”
Lazaros’s head bobbed in a subtle nod. “I only came to tell you what I learned about Selene’s location.”
“Whatyoulearned?” A laugh jumped from his tight chest. “Am I to believe that—in just a few short hours—you somehow came about these important details? Because I have to tell you, Bareas, I’m more likely to think you’re working with Thorne.”
Lazaros frowned.
Dimitrios offered the traitor an encouraging nod.
Lazaros inhaled deep, then said, “A ship matching the two the navy sank in the bay was seen leaving Stone Cove. They’re heading south.”
Warian Bay was south. So was his father and the fleet. Thorne’s war had always been with his family, and taking Selene… Was this his way of luring Augustus into some trap?
“Thorne wants a war with your family,” Lazaros said as if reading his mind. “Where’s the fleet?”
“You think I’d hand that to you? So you can scurry back to Thorne and buy redemption?”
“I only want to help.” A hard edge had entered the traitor’s voice. “I lived in Warian Bay for over two decades, Augustus. I watched and I listened and I lived that life. I can see how all these pieces fit.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
Augustus leapt forward. The room disappeared. There was only Augustus, Lazaros, and the razor-sharp knife at the traitor’s throat.
Augustus held Lazaros by the back of the neck, distantly aware of the voices shouting his name. If there were hands on his shoulders, there was little they could do to break the contact.
“Did you think,” Augustus said, tightening his grip, nose to nose, “I would be grateful to you for this? That I would forgive you?”
“No.” Lazaros swallowed deep against the knife’s edge.
“Once, you claimed to be a man of honor. Raised to value loyalty. Remember?”
Blaze appeared in his peripheral. “Augustus. What are you doing?”
This was none of his fucking business.
“You said those words to me while I was your captive,” Augustus continued. “After months of playing the part of one of my most trusted advisors. You told Selene her friends were dead with so little regard for their lives or her feelings?—”
“I thought I was doing the right thing for my country. I’m not proud of it.”
“Ah, mate,” Augustus purred, “you shouldn’t have said that. My mother always said, never take a life unless you can live with it. Because if you regret it, then it’s nothing but a waste.”
Lazaros didn’t blink—didn’t breathe—as Augustus put his mouth near his ear. “Believe me when I say… I won’t regret this.”
Augustus slid the blade deep and long across Lazaros’s throat, then stepped back to let the traitor’s blood spray across his chest.
Lazaros held tight to his wound, eyes wide as his blood slicked past his fingers.
Hands clamped around both of his arms, and Dimitrios’s shout for help came as if from a dream, but none of that mattered. As long as he got to witness every moment of this death.
Lazaros sank to his knees as tears fell from his eyes. Even as his lifepoured from his throat, Lazaros nodded. As if to say,“Yes. This is what I deserve.”
