A jolt of unpleasant feeling ran down his spine to settle in his gut. Logic came back online slowly. Silas glanced around at the guards, then back to his mate, as he considered just doing it. She’d be angry, but she wouldn’t leave him. He was sure of that.
But he also realized that the guards saw him as a threat, and they probably wanted the would-be assassin alive. They might even shoot him to ensure that. It was what he would’ve done, and that meant refusing to give up his kill would once more put Petra in the line of fire.
And it’d make her unhappy.He disliked that most of all.
Shadows slowly retreating back into his body, Silas released the attacker. The man collapsed onto the floor with a wet thud. Blood pooled on the tile and fancy rug from his wounds, and his right arm was twisted in a gruesome angle, but he was breathing.
As soon as Silas let him go, Petra fisted her hands in his shirt and dragged him to her for an almost painfully tight embrace. “Thank you,” she whispered into his sweaty neck. “Gods, I love you. Let’s never do anything like this again, okay?”
Silas cupped the back of her head and pressed her closer. His gaze caught on a pair of shiny leather shoes and roved upward to find the sovereign staring back at him. His dark elvish eyes were wild.
“Never,” Silas promised his mate. Gaze locked with Theodore’s, he continued, “The next time someone tries to kill the sovereigns, they can call someone else for help.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
It wentagainst everything in him to play nice, but Petra asked him sweetly, so Silas didn’t shove his boot down Theodore Solbourne’s throat when he put them under armed guard and transported them across the city for interrogation. He thought he was especially well behaved when he didn’t reach for his knife after the sovereign broke up Petra and Margot’s long, tight hug and whispered conversation.
“Right now she’s a security risk,” the sovereign informed his mate as he gently but firmly pulled her away from the embrace.
Margot, pale but otherwise apparently unruffled by the assassination attempt, raised her brows. Silas wasn’t particularly surprised by how collected she seemed. In his experience, it took a lot more than a little danger to make a healer lose their cool. His father was the calmest person he’d ever met. What part of that was training and what was natural inclination, Silas would never know.
Margot’s red hair had fallen out of its neat twist and there was some blood splatter on her white dress, but her voice was calm when she argued, “She saved our lives today, Theodore, and she’s a friend. One of the few I have.”
The air grew thick with the scent of ozone and magic as the sovereign couple stared at one another. They appeared to be having some kind of telepathic conversation, if Silas had to guess, and he was instantly annoyed that he couldn’t hear his own mate’s thoughts.
It was impossible to know what was said, but after several seconds, Margot turned to give Petra’s hands a squeeze. “I need to finish healing Aman,” she explained. “We’ll talk more when I’m done, okay? Everything is going to be all right.”
The air was charged with suspicion as an entire battalion of guards ringed the walls and manned the doors, their gloved hands resting on the hilts of their weapons. Petra kept glancing at them, her wary gaze straying to their guns, but she managed a small smile for the sovereign’s consort. “When you’re done, I want to tell you everything. All of it.”
Margot nodded. “We’ll talk over tea.” Turning to her husband, she reached up onto her tip-toes to press a kiss to his cheek. “Be nice, please.”
Theodore made no promises as he guided his wife out of the room, accompanied by her own personal guards. Silas and Petra were instructed to sit on a low couch in the living room.
The sovereign came to stand before them, his cape and suit jacket discarded. His hard gaze zeroed in on Silas. The lines of his face were severe, and when he spoke, it was in a deep, pissed-off baritone. “Who the fuck are you?”
Silas didn’t like his attitude. When he simply crossed his arms and stared at the sovereign, the tension in the room ratcheted up another notch.
Theodore narrowed his eyes and slid his attention to Petra, who sat stiffly beside Silas on the ridiculous velvet couch. Silas hoped they got blood all over it. “What about you, High Priestess? Do you have something to say?”
Silas tilted his head a bit to one side. A smile curved his lips. “Better be polite to my mate, rich boy.”
Petra dropped a hand onto his thigh and squeezed hard. No doubt she would have hissed a warning for him to stop while he was ahead, but Theodore beat her to it. “Watch it, demon.”
“Or what?” Silas leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees. There were tacky patches on his slacks where blood had begun to dry. It was already flaking off his claws and his face, despite Petra’s hasty spit shine in the uncomfortable ride over, so he could only imagine what he looked like when he bared all his teeth in an approximation of a grin.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” he explained to the sovereign in what he considered a very pleasant tone, “but I careverymuch how you treat my mate — without whom, by the way, all you motherfuckers would be dead. I would’ve let you die and not lost a wink of sleep over it. I still wouldn’t. So maybeyouwatch it. And your fuckin’ tone.”
Theodore put his hands on his hips and declared, “As of right now, you’re a terrorist being held under suspicion of attacking the infrastructure of my city and playing a role in the attempted assassination of mywife, so if I were you, I wouldn’t be so comfortable making threats.”
“We arenotmaking threats,” Petra hastened to interject. She squeezed his thigh again, but Silas refused to be the first one to break eye contact. Sounding both stressed and exasperated, she continued, “Sovereign, please ignore him. He thrives on confrontation. It’s basically his favorite pastime.”
Appearing like he was rapidly losing whatever patience he’d hung onto, Theodore broke their staring contest to fix Petra with a furious look. “Thenyouexplain what the fuck just happened. Last I checked, you were my wife’s friend, but from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re an accomplice. You knew this was going to happen. I need to know how. Now.”
“It looks bad,” Petra agreed, fingers digging into Silas’s thigh. “I totally get that, and I have a thousand things I need to explain to you and Margot about what’s been going on, but to start, we found evidence that someone within the Temple was planning an attack basically two hours ago. I think. It was a long night and I’ve kind of lost track of time.”
Silas frowned. He’d forgotten how long they’d been up. After the rut and their bonding, she had to be exhausted. He opened his mouth to tell her they didn’t need to deal with this and they ought to just leave, but when she caught his eye, she shook her head and gave his thigh a reassuring pat.
“We rushed back to the city as soon as we realized that something might happen at the ceremony.” Petra ran a trembling hand through her hair and let out a slow exhale. “I was hoping we were wrong, but we obviously weren’t.”
