His eyes flashed as his lip curled.
“Grandfather isn’t expecting you,” he said.
“And I wasn’t expecting violence perpetrated by the Vipers down on the Second Ring last night,” I replied. “But dead men can’t make appointments.”
A look of shock crossed Holden’s face before he could rein it in. Then, blinking, he took half a step back and reached for one of the knives strapped across his chest. In an instant, Paxon laid a hand on his own blade and took up a threatening stance beside me.
“I wouldn’t do that, Holden,” he hissed.
Holden’s gaze slid from me to Pax and the weapon at his belt.
“I don’t–” he began.
“Open the gate, Holden,” a familiar voice rang out from the courtyard.
I looked up to find Myrine watching from down the path. Her arms were crossed and her expression was set in a scowl that had always rivaled her son’s.
Holden didn’t hesitate to do as she said, clearly grateful to have someone else around to make the decision for him. As he pulled back the bar and let the gate roll open, Myrine marched down the path to meet us.
“I imagine I know why you’re here,” she began once she was close enough, “but so we’re clear–”
“I want my cousin back, Myrine,” I barked.
She gave one quick nod before turning her back to us and marching back to the House. With one uneasy exchanged glance,Paxon and I followed, leaving Holden to lock the gate again behind us.
Myrine marched us through her ancestral home until we reached a door I’d only stood outside of twice before. She knocked quietly and waited until the villain beyond bid her enter before pushing open the door and ushering us inside.
Cosmo was seated behind his desk, leaning over letters and record books, jotting down notes in the margins and responses on fresh sheets of paper. He didn’t look up for a moment when we entered, just continued his work as if we weren’t even there. I waited for a moment but it grew so disrespectful, I could no longer take it.
“Cosmo,” I said.
Finally, he looked up.
“Well, if it isn’t the boy who tried to put me on trial for murder,” he crooned, clearly amused with himself as he took his time removing the reading glasses perched on his nose, folding them up, and putting them away in a drawer. “What have you come to accuse me of now?”
“Kidnapping.”
He nodded slowly, sitting back in his chair and examining me with the same shrewd eye which seemed to make so many others uncomfortable. I merely waited for him to speak again, to explain himself.
“And who, precisely, am I to have kidnapped?” he asked, feigning ignorance.
“My cousin,” I informed him. “Olympia.”
“Ah, well, this has clearly all been a misunderstanding. The girl gave herself up on her own this morning.”
“Gave herself up. As if you’re the Guardians?”
“Apparently, anyone is capable of leveling a charge against anyone else in this city now. As that seems to be the case, proven by your own actions of assembling a council which goes againsteverything this city was founded on to go after a Patriarch of a Major House based on the words of some angry lower ringers, I feel I’m fully within my rights to hold the girl until she can face justice. Though I imagine that may take some time as we clearly have some reconfiguring to do when it comes towhopresides over justice in this city.”
He was smiling at me now, clearly entertained by the predicament he felt I’d placed myself into voluntarily. He believed he was ten steps ahead of me and, truthfully, he might have been. Cosmo of House Viper might have always been ten steps ahead of me, but had I ever truly had a chance? Who else was capable of contemplating the evil which seemed to run through this man’s diseased mind without end?
“You were able to await your own trial in the comfort of your own home amongst your own family,” I reminded him. “Who are you to claim Olympia cannot do the same?”
“Her own family has proven incapable of holding her within the confines of her House,” he argued. “As the crimes she stands accused of are quite serious in nature, it would be in the best interest of the city’s safety for her to remain held somewhere she cannot escape.”
“And what crimes, exactly, does she stand accused of?”
“Murder, for one.”
