“Thank the gods you’re alive,” Lucas murmured.
“It’s good to see you, too,” Josie smiled into the fabric of his tan linen shirt.
She pulled back to see Clyde watching her warily.“Coming here was foolish,” he gently chided. “The Bellare are having me watched.” But he hugged her to him anyway, the circle of his arms a familiar safe haven.
Gods, she’d missed her friends.
“Hence the disguise,” Josie reasoned as she pulled away and motioned down at her City Guard uniform. “But in case it doesn’t get the job done, let’s be quick.” She nodded toward the library down the hall. Lucas always lamented that he loathed the space because of its lack of windows, but today, it was the perfect hiding spot for such a conversation.
“Have you heard news of your parents?” Clyde asked as she settled onto the leather couch. “We were hoping you were with them.”
Lucas took up a spot next to her, while Clyde sat in an armchair diagonally across from them.
“No,” Josie confessed quietly.
Lucas’s teeth dug into his plush bottom lip, reluctance written in his features as he hedged, “And…Aidon?”
Josie let out a slow breath through her nose. “It’s true,” she stated. “He’s an Incend.”
Clyde scoffed, his ankle crossing over his knee as his thick black brows furrowed in offense. “You think we care?”
Josie whipped her head to find Lucas regarding her similarly, clear affront twisting the corners of his lips. “Gods above, Josie, I meant have youheardfrom him. Word is he didn’t return with the Visya force.”
Tension melted from Josie’s muscles as she sat back against the couch cushions. She wouldn’t have come if she thought Clyde and Lucas weren’t true friends to Aidon, and yet she couldn’t help the way relief coursed down her spine to find she was right.
“He didn’t,” Josie said as she cleared the thickness from her throat. “Aleissande ordered him to flee during the Battle of Dunmeaden. There’s been no sign of him since.”
She glanced over her shoulder toward the hallway, hervoice dipping even though she knew them to be alone in the house. “I have much to tell you, and little time in which to do it. So I need you to listen carefully and not to interrupt.”
Clyde and Lucas exchanged a look, communicating in that sacred way one could only do with someone they loved. She knew it was rare for them to see her like this—direct and insistent andserious. So much of their time together over the years had been full of laughter and playfulness, and a joy that now felt like a distant memory, or like something Josie had watched someoneelseexperience.
She was not the same woman they once knew.
She waited until they nodded their assent, and then she recounted it all: the truth behind Dominic’s partnership with Kakos and Aidon’s double bluff, Viviane’s betrayal and what Aya had done to save her. The horrors she faced with the elite Visya force in Milsaio and Dunmeaden, and her suspicions of where her brother was now.
They interrupted her only once, when she mentioned that Viviane remained alive and hidden at the Maraciana.
“She is lucky she still breathes,” Lucas rumbled, his forehead creasing as he frowned.
“She is,” Josie agreed. “But she is so far from my priority that I don’t have time to even envision her death.”
The heel of Clyde’s boot tapped a quick rhythm against the tiled floor. He pressed two fingers to the center of his chin as he stared at the bookshelf, lost in thought.
“So you do not believe the rumors surrounding the Dark Saint then?” he finally asked slowly.
“No,” Josie insisted. “I know Aya. She would rather die than join Kakos.”
She pushed away the fear that came with such a declaration, pressing back against the voice that told her she had thought she’d known Viviane, too. She did not have time to lose herself to doubts; not anymore.
“One of our soldiers, Cole, has gone to Sitya to findAidon,” she continued. “He will not have heard what transpired here.”
Clyde let his hand fall to the arm of his chair, his leg stilling as he fixed his gaze on Josie. “I take it you don’t intend to sit idly and wait for his return.”
“I do not.”
Josie leaned forward, her elbows bracing on her thighs as she pivoted so she could see both men clearly.
“The Bellare claim to value the interests of humans, but you both know as well as I do they’re more concerned with power,” she began. “We need Trahir to see that the Bellare are not fit to lead us through the war; that their care is not for the citizens—humanorVisya—but for themselves.
