“He thinks Petra is involved withhismate’s attempted kidnapping, Shade,” Rasmus explained, like he could see the violence brewing in Silas as clearly as Petra could.
An electric sensation zipped across their bond, one that raised all the fine hairs on her body. It was like the magic thatfiltered through him had taken on Silas’s unique flavor — and his rage.
“No,” she muttered, covering the hand on her thigh with her own. “You can’t kill him. Calm down.”
“Aren’t you and Kaz friends?” Rasmus asked. His skeptical tone belied how much stock he put in the idea. “Get in contact and tell him Petra had nothing to do with it. If you clear her name, she can come back to the city.”
Silas’s upper lip peeled back from his fangs. Before he could argue the point, Petra reminded him, “We have bigger fish to fry. It lines up with my timeline, which means that he must’ve wanted the m-generator. If we can prove that?—”
Rasmus cleared his throat. “Who wanted the m-generator? Was it Vanderpoel?”
“None of your damn business, nosy wolf,” Silas growled. Flicking the watch's screen, he ended the call.
Petra barely noticed. Her heartbeat was a frantic rhythm in her ears when she asked, “What could Antonin have done with that kind of technology?”
Silas’s lips pressed into a hard line. He was quiet for a moment. Those clawed hands found their way back to the projected keyboard, but this time they moved even faster than before, inputting code so quickly she could barely keep up.
A window popped onto the screen. It was normal-looking, as far as she could tell. Just a square with two input fields: one for a username and another for a passcode.
Her heart sank, but she didn’t have time to ask if there was a way around having a passcode. Silas pasted a long string of symbols into both fields and hit enter.
Sitting back in his chair, he stared hard at the sea of neatly organized files that filled his screen. “He could do just about anything, but my best guess is weapons.”
Petra swallowed hard. It did little to quell the bile that scaled the fleshy walls of her throat. “They’re building a prototype in the Tower.”
“That’s why I rolled into town, too.”
“But that won’t be ready for months,” she reasoned, trying hard to find some way to make it better, a little less terrifying. “Even if he still thought he could get it, why would he come back to San Francisco so urgently?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to wait.” Silas dragged his gaze away from the screen to pin her with a dark look. “Maybe he saw a different opportunity.”
“How do we find out what that was?”
“Whatever he had planned, it took coordination. You can’t do that without a paper trail.” He gestured toward the computer screen. “It’s in here, baby. We just have to look.”
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her voice came out whispery with panic when she asked, “What do we do if it’s bad, Silas? Really bad.”
It’d been one thing to hand over evidence that Antonin was behind Max’s murder to a journalist, but if the truth was as big as it appeared to be, then things were a lot more complicated — and infinitely more dangerous.
Silas didn’t appear panicked. He was deadly calm when he answered, “That’s up to you.”
“Me?” she squeaked, appalled.
He nodded. “If what we find puts you in danger, then I’ll take care of it. If it doesn’t… Then it’s up to you.”
Petra’s stomach turned. “What if I make the wrong choice?”
Silas shrugged. “You won’t. Now tell me where to start looking.”
She turned her gaze to the screen. He’d told her how much data there was. She tried to imagine just how much information that had to be, the countless secrets and plans that layinnocently behind pixels and files labeled in mundane, boring ways.
Where did one even begin to find the truth when there was so much?The same place I did.
Taking a deep breath, she said, “Start with Max.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Silas couldn’t sayhe was surprised by what they found. In many ways, he and Vanderpoel had always been after the same things. They both wanted Petra — not just forher,but for her bond and her access to the m-generator — and between them, they didn’t have a drop of morality to spare.
