She turned, ever-so-slowly, in his arms. When she tilted her face up, her eyes were no longer dull, but shone with razor-thin circles of pure white light around the pupils. “I’m not afraid of dying, Shade. There are much worse things that can happen in the world, and I’ve seen most of them.”
Petra said it with such frankness, such calm finality, that it made the unfamiliar weight of dread sink into his belly. “Something iswrong,”she continued, “not just here in St. Emaine’s, but in the whole Temple — and that man is at the heart of it. I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid tofail.I’ve spent three years trying to get to him on my own, living under constant surveillance, so I’d really fucking appreciate it if you didn’t get me killed before I saw this finished, okay?”
She pressed a palm against his chest. He was so taken off-guard by her that he let her direct him back a step, allowing her to slip around him. Silas watched her pause at the scattered packages of food on the floor, before she reached out to snatch her discarded nightgown from the bed.
“If you want my witchbond, then you’re going to have to start taking this seriously,” she warned him, “because if Antonin gets his way, you won’t get it.”
“What does he want?” Silas demanded. “Power? Sex?”
Those were the usual suspects in cases like this, when a woman became desperate enough to hire him to deal with a man. Whatever the motivation, it wouldn’t save Vanderpoel from his wrath, but Silas was a man who liked to go into situations armed with every bit of knowledge he could.
Petra knelt to gather the food with one hand. Placing each package on the cabinet by her bedside, the one that hid Dooraker’s ashes, she arranged them with an unsettling gentleness. It was as if she were afraid that one wrong move would make the little packets of cookies and pretzels and trail mix disappear.
Secrets,he thought, dissatisfied again.Secrets on secrets on secrets.
“I wish I knew what the reason for all of this was,” she finally answered, head down and eyes fixed on her task, “but I don’t.”
“You’re in the center of the shit storm. How could you not know?”
“The center?” Petra paused. The golden curtain of her hair shimmered when she lifted her head to look over her shoulder. There was a dreadful sort of amusement in her expression when she told him, “Shade, whoever you think I am, I’m not. I’m no one. If I’m at the center of anything, it’s because I’ve made room for myself there, not because I’m the one pulling strings.”
The longer the conversation went, the more confused and annoyed he became. Silas ran a palm over one of his curling horns — a restless, anxious gesture he hadn’t done since he was a child — and then hissed with annoyance when he realized he’d done it.
“Why would you involve yourself in this, then?”
Petra remained in a kneeling position on the floor, her nightgown in one hand and an unopened packet of chocolate candies in the other. At any other time, he would have enjoyed the pose, the way she looked up at him from so far below, as if she wished to offer him a prayer from her pretty, sacred mouth.
But in that moment, her blue eyes cut right through him. They saw clean through muscle and bone to the wild, confused thing in him, the part that wanted nothing more than to get on its knees with her.
“Have you ever cared about someone so much that you’d risk everything for them?” It was a soft question, but the words landed like bolt shots.
Silas’s mouth went oddly dry. “No.”
Tal didn’t count. Not really. He could handle himself, and were Silas to die, he would continue on for millennia more. They had an unshakable bond, but it was different from the thing they both knew she spoke of.
His clan didn’t count, either. Against all good sense, they loved him. His aunts and uncles, his cousins, the dozens and dozens of little baby demons they seemed to pop out every year, about ten months after every rut. He felt enough for them to know it was in their best interest that he keep his distance, but would he riskeverythingfor them?
No.The answer was obvious to him, but clearly not to her, so he asked, “Why would I?”
A small puff of air escaped Petra’s nose — the tiniest, softest, most heartbreakingly disappointed sigh he’d ever heard. “That’s answer enough. I guess there’s no point in trying to explain it to you. You’ll never understand it.”
Dissatisfaction came again, hard and mean, but Silas couldn’t rightly tell if it was directed at her or himself.
Chapter Nine
Petra didn’t sleep welland never had, but she could admit to herself that knowing Shade had disabled the camera in her bedroom made rest come a tiny bit easier.
Unfortunately, rest was a relative thing when her worries still kept her up half the night.
She spent most of it agonizing over her uncharacteristic lack of self-control in front ofShade,of all people.You can’t afford to break,she’d admonished herself.Not now. Not after all this time. You just have to hold on a little longer.
Normally, she held onto her emotions with an iron fist — a necessary thing when every one of her movements and words were tracked. If it wasn’t the cameras and the microphones she discovered during her first few months in the cathedral, then it was the acolytes, none of whom could be entirely trusted not to report back to Antonin to curry favor.
If it wasn’tthem,then it was a worshipper. A photographer forThe San Francisco Light.A child who’d wandered away from the nursery.
Not once since she’d taken Max’s position had she beenalone.
Really, she had no reason to trust that she was at that moment, either. Shade very well could have installed his own camera, or simply lied about disabling the one she already knew existed.
