A lump of emotion formed in her throat. Petra couldn’t quite stop herself from glancing at the body as she passed it. When she looked at it, she didn’t just see a shell. She saw the years — decades, even — of hard work and care Silas had put into its creation. She saw the love there, even if Silas would never admit to it.
And she saw the longing in those striking lines. The loneliness in the empty sockets of his eyes. The man there, just waiting tolive.
It was more than just a shell or an experiment. It was the vessel for all Tal’s hopes.
“Kaz is going to have a stroke,” Silas muttered, sounding far too pleased with himself.
Petra forced herself to focus. Crossing the room, she stood by Silas’s hip and picked at her thumbnail nervously. “Call him again.”
Silas’s fingers didn’t pause their rapid movement over the keyboard. “I tried. He’s not gonna answer and we’re out of time.”
“Then we should send a tip to Patrol.” If her nerves got any worse, she was pretty sure she’d throw up. “This is really extreme, Silas. What if they find out it’s you?”
“Oh, I’ll tell him.” Silas shot her a cheeky wink. “And technically this counts as telling Patrol, since it’ll come with a message.”
“But—”
“Baby,” he drawled, “do you trust me?”
Petra exhaled slowly in an attempt to get her heart rate under control. “Of course I do.”
Without looking, he reached over to pat her ass. “Then you’ve got to let me work.”
She bit her tongue as the images on the screen changed from incomprehensible code to something more recognizable: a map of San Francisco.
“It won’t all go down immediately,” he explained. “It’s a multi-step system with failsafes, so it’ll take a while for everything to shut down. Vital services will stay up, but everything else — private communication and everything not on back-up power — will shut off for exactly one minute.”
“And that’ll trigger the security on the Tower?” Margot’s face appeared in her mind, smiling and unaware of what would happen in a matter of minutes. Petra desperately wanted to call her and warn her, but the chances of not being taken seriously was too high. With the suspicion around Atria Le Roy’s bounty clouding things, they couldn’t rely on her trusting Petra’s word, and if her call was sent to Margot’s secretary instead, then there was no way of knowing if the elf was in on the coup or not, too.
Silas warned her that the only thing worse than knowing there were traitors in the Tower was the prospect of accidentlyalerting them that their plot had been discovered — and the conspirators’ timeline moving up accordingly.
All they could do was act and hopefully live to beg for forgiveness after the fact.
“Yep,” Silas answered, pressingenterwith a flourish. “The Tower and all government buildings are designed to go into room by room lockdown in the event of a potential threat. Helpfully for us, a suspicious failing of the grid counts. I found the exploit for it a few years ago and figured it might come in handy, so I never told Kaz.”
“Will it happen while Margot and the sovereign are on their way to the cathedral? If the grid goes down and an alert goes out, their guards would take them somewhere safe, right?”
“Only if we get lucky,” he replied, pushing away from the desk. “But I doubt it. Getting through the failsafes takes time, which we don’t have. When do they normally show up for the ceremony?”
Petra glanced at the time in the corner of the wide screen. Bile churned in her empty stomach, scouring her insides. “In about thirty minutes. Forty-five if they’re running late.”
Silas gave her a long, unhappy look. He didn’t need to tell her that it wasn’t enough time. “If you stay here, the wards will keep you safe, and Tal will be here guarding the computer just in case.”
She wasn’t built for intrigue, let alone life or death plots. Petra liked the ritual of her life. She enjoyed teaching her initiates, teasing Robert, and giving services. It became very clear to her then that she wanted nothing more than to spend her days running the cathedral and her nights with Silas in his ridiculously expensive house. They had a life to live, babies to make, and a dog to adopt. She didn’t want to put herself on the line or save the day.
But there wasn’t a chance on Burden’s green Earth that she was staying home while Silas did it for her.
“Max died for this,” she told him, straightening her spine. “And I didn’t come this far to put my mate in danger while I sit here twiddling my thumbs.”
Silas sucked in a breath through his teeth. “If I get even ahintthat you’re at risk, I’ll do what I have to do to protect you. No warning. No hesitation. No mercy. Understood?”
Petra hooked a hand behind his neck and drew him down for a hard kiss.Gods, I love this man.Grabbing one of his hands, she placed it over her heart. “Understood. I’m not asking you to sit around and watch me get hurt again. I still want a wedding, remember?”
He slicked his tongue along the contour of her lower lip before he replied, “And two kids.”
Her fingers shook when she smoothed them over his chest. His heart beat steadily under her palms, so unlike her thundering pulse, and knowing that he was mostly calm helped settle the worst of her nerves. Offering him a thin smile, she reminded him, “Don’t forget the dog.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
