“She’s the one who wanted to give you that. She’s the one who demanded we meet. You think I’d do this? You think I’d do you afavor?”
A keen-eyed animal peered out of Rasmus’s mismatched eyes. “What favor are you doing for me, exactly?”
What little patience Silas possessed was rapidly evaporating. “You know what I could be doing right now instead of this? Mymate.Just look in the fuckin’ bag so we can go.”
In a headspace not clouded by hormones, Silas would’ve appreciated the caution with which Rasmus peeled the tape offthe package and pulled the edges of the bag apart. After all, there were many ways one could kill a man. Hiding some nasty sigilwork or even some good old fashioned poison in a package wasn’t the worst thing Silas had ever done, and they both knew it.
Rasmus was no saint. He’d had an illustrious career as a jack of all trades criminal before he settled down with the San Francisco were pack and took up the job as their enforcer and most recently as the owner of The Broken Tooth. There wasn’t much work for weres in the grim days after the war, so it wasn’t an uncommon story. The ones who learned to control their beasts tended to band together to share resources. Many of those packs inevitably turned to crime when every other door was shut in their faces. Some were better at it than others, and a select few, like the man standing before Silas, were very, very good.
Like him, Rasmus had killed men in underhanded ways. Many of them.
His skepticism was warranted, as was his clear reluctance to peer into the bag. Silas wouldn’t have done it. But he could feel his rut rising in him, putting pressure on all the soft, logical parts that might have found some humor in the situation, if not an overabundance of patience.
He wanted toleave.
It didn’t make a damn lick of difference to him what happened with Rasmus and the journal. He didn’t care about the man, nor weres in general.
And yet, somehow through the cloud of hormones and impatience, a bit of… something managed to get through when Silas watched the man’s face go sickly gray.
Rasmus stared into the bag for several seconds before he reached inside to retrieve the old, smoke-scented doctor’s journal. His eyes went wide and glassy, his lips colorless. All the life in him appeared to simply shut down.
“Where did you find this?”
“On a dead man.”
Rasmus didn’t open it. He didn’t appear to need to. His fingers gripped the aged leather cover so hard the pads went white. “Who.”
It wasn’t a question. It was barely even a word. The single syllable was garbled, choked out like a reflex.
Silas didn’t want to give him anything, especially any information tied to Petra. Everything about her was on lockdown — particularly her involvement in the death of the Protector of the Gloriae.
But Silas fought to claw back some of his usual cool rationality. He needed to see this moment as he would have a month ago, when everything was different.What can I get from this?
He’d never considered allies before. After all, he’d only ever needed Tal. Everyone else who might have been useful to him could either be bought or blackmailed into giving him what he wanted. Silas had viewed the gift of the journal as a sort of bribery for a future favor, but when he watched Rasmus’s features tremble, threatening the infamous and horrifying transformation into his were form, he realized that there might be something else gained.
“His name was Antonin Vanderpoel,” he begrudgingly revealed. “He was Protector of the Gloriae and the leader of the Ardeo.”
“TheArdeo?”Rasmus took half a step back, his expression contorting with disbelief. “The Temple hasn’t had a military since?—”
“Apparently they survived. Or someone has gone to great lengths to remake it.”
“Fuck.” Rasmus braced his free hand on the roof of his car. His other hand hung stiffly by his side, the journal pressedagainst his thigh like he wanted to keep it out of sight. If Silas thought he was pale before, it was nothing compared to the sickly pallor that passed over him then.
Almost speaking to himself, the were muttered, “Soldiers. He was trying to make soldiers. Just never found out why.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Wyeth.” Rasmus’s forehead beaded with sweat. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Josephine said it was— She warned me. She was always trying to warn me. I thought it was the Queen. Weallthought it was the Queen.”
Silas could barely follow the thread of what Rasmus was trying to tell him, but there was only one queen in the UTA. The orcish queen of the Orclind was a formidable, ruthless woman, and he had no doubt that shecouldhave been responsible, but… “That was never proven, and Queen Sigrid denies it.”
“That’s where most of us were shipped. Not all, but most,” Rasmus replied, brows bunching as if in pain. Silas got the impression that he’d momentarily forgotten who he was talking to. “The Orclind was being hammered on both sides and they’d started running out of soldiers. None of it made any sense, but it was the only theory that had legs. It never occurred to me that they might have been testing soldiers for another player altogether and— and hiding it behind selling us as mercenaries.”
The hair on the back of Silas’s neck prickled. Voice dropping, he muttered, “I think the Temple has had grand ambitions for a very long time.”
“How do you know?” Rasmus opened his eyes and pinned Silas with a glassy look. “How do you know he didn’t just— just stumble on the journal? Or buy it?”
They were valid questions. If Vanderpoel was in the blackmail business, as he very much was, then it made sense that much of his information would be bought secondhand. It wasn’toutrageous to think he might have had no direct involvement in the scheme to weaponize weres.
