He liked his fierce, canny priestess. He found the sharp edges of her beautiful.ThisPetra was a perfect match for him.
She let out a soft sigh. “Yeah. Four years is—” Petra cut herself off. She went stiff under his hands.
Alarms ringing in his mind, he bit out, “What? What’s wrong?”
Petra lifted her head, but she didn’t look at him. Her gaze wandered sightlessly as she propped herself up. “Four years.”
“…Yes? That’s how long you’ve been High Priestess.”
Petra sat up completely. He followed her up, despite the fact that his body protested every tiny movement. The rut hit him hard, and the bond had taken what little strength he’d had left, but he ignored his discomfort in favor of peering into his mate’s pinched expression. She looked like she was trying to solve an invisible puzzle and failing.
“Petra, what’s happening? What are you doing?”
Without looking at him, she grasped his forearm and held tight. “Four years ago. What happened four years ago?”
He really wished he had some psychic abilities. That way he could have rifled around in her mind to see what on Earth she was trying to put together. “You decided to find out what happened to Max.”
“Yes, but before that?”
“Max died.”
Petra nodded, but her eyes had squeezed shut. “Uh-huh. What else?”
“I don’t know. He caught Antonin with his hand in the cookie jar?”
“Max refused to tell me what he’d found. I asked Antonin to tell me why he killed Max, but he wouldn’t say. Not until we were bonded.” Petra didn’t seem to notice the way a growl rumbled out of Silas’s chest. “But?—”
“It had to have been something he uncovered around that time.”
“I assumed it was blackmail,” she muttered. “Everyone knew the rumors. I thought maybe Max found out he was abusing his power, using the blackmail to do awful things. I mean, forMaxto think it was bad enough— It had to have been really, really bad. Something awful happening within the Temple, like when the scandal broke about the orphan indoctrination in 1930 and half the High Gloriae stepped down. Then I thought maybe it was the stuff with the weres. Except that’s not urgent. Not something that he would recklessly run into without a plan.”
Petra finally opened her eyes. There was so much dread in them when she asked, “What happened the summer Max was murdered?”
The hair stood up on the back of his neck. His shadows began to ripple with agitation and the need to protect her from an unseen threat when he demanded, “What do you mean? What else would it have been?”
“What happened four years ago?”
“I don’tknow.”And it was really starting to annoy him that he didn’t.
Her nails bit into the flesh of his arm when she rasped, “What event would have even brought him to St. Emaine’s in the summer of 2044? Not Max’s appointment as High Priest. He’d been there for years and St. Emaine’s was considered extremely stable. No money problems, no bad acolytes, no scandals. The Protector would have had no reason to go, and if there was an internal issue — something or someone worth dragging the Ardeo in — I would have heard rumors about it by now.”
“So it was somethingoutsidethe Temple.” Silas’s mind raced.
Soldiers,Rasmus had said.They wanted to make soldiers.
Why would an organization need soldiers like werewolves? Why didanyonewant an army?
Speaking slowly, like she didn’t want to say the words, she asked again, “What happened, Silas?”
“Delilah Solbourne abdicated,” he answered slowly. “And everyone thought the EVP was about to tear itself apart.”
Why did anyone want an army?To take something they wanted, usually a territory.
When was the best time to take a territory?During a war. Civil wars were preferable, as a fractured society was easier pickings than one united by a common cause.
But no war had come to pass. Theodore Solbourne managed to calm the territory down and hold his seat. His marriage to Margot Goode had significantly strengthened his position less than a year later. Whatever opportunity Antonin might have seen in the power exchange hadn’t manifested.
But it could’ve.
