Seeing as they were all equally strong positions, she could do little more than sit completely still and make no choice whatsoever.
Chapter Eighteen
“He wantedto know where I came from, how I got the seat so many other people wanted, et cetera,” she said, though she barely breathed.
“Hm.” Something squeezed around her legs and slithered upwards — the strange there-and-not sensation of Silas’s shadow’s curling around her like the vines of a great, carnivorous plant. “Is that why a man puts a camera in a woman’s bedroom? Because he wants to know howambitiousshe is?”
“The Protector has eyes everywhere,” she replied, though she knew exactly what he was implying.
“I wonder how many of them are fixed on you and you alone.”
Many,she silently answered.Too many.
It hadn’t started like that. She knew the cathedral was bugged because it was an open secret amongst the higher ranks thatallof Glory’s Temple buildings fed information back to the High Gloriae — every secret, every tryst, every muttered complaint. Even if it wasn’t true, the rumor had a devastatingly effective chokehold on dissent.
The other reason she knew was because Max had told her so. He mentioned it only once, during that last concerning phone call when he told her he was confronting the Protector about something he’d found. The city sounds had been loud in the phone’s speakers and she’d asked him why he was outside at such a late hour.
“There are eyes and ears everywhere in the cathedral,”he’d explained, sounding exhausted to the point of tears.“There are cameras everywhere but my room. I did a sweep there, but now— I can’t risk anything. Not until I see him.”
When she took over his old suite, she’d used her own black market sensor to confirm what Max had confessed. For three years her bedroom had been safe.
And then Antonin showed up at her door, asking so many deceptively pleasant questions, and by the time he left…
Trying to divert the conversation back into a more productive avenue, Petra said, “Well, he’ll be focused on me tomorrow, which is good for the plan. Last time he traveled with six guards. Two were with him at all times, two stayed in his suite, and the other two joined the staff security team. If everything goes right, you should only have to avoid the two guarding his suite while I have dinner with him.”
Silas was curiously quiet for a man who seemed to love the sound of his own voice so much. He merely sat there, arm and shadows tight around her, listening as she rambled at increasing speed. “Once you get something incriminating —anything —you have to take it straight to Elise. She knows to expect something. If it’s incriminating enough, she should take it to Patrol.”
“And what happens when the Protector discovers his secrets are out?”
Petra swallowed. “Well, theoretically, he’ll have no reason to tie it back to either of us, since I’ll be having dinner with himand he won’t know you’re here. Nothing more than suspicion, anyway, if you do your job well. And if the news gets out about who he is and what he’s done, then… then he’ll go to jail.”
She didn’t need to feel Silas’s deep, deep sigh to realize how naive she sounded. Petra was painfully aware.
She was also lying.
The daughter of two criminals, orphaned by a turf war, victim of a system that didn’t know what to do with magically gifted children no one wanted, and pawn in a vicious power structure — of course she knew better than to trust the system to achieve justice.
But in this instance, she had to believesomethingwould happen to Antonin. She could only speculate about the extent of his crimes, but there was no way they stopped at the mysterious death of her predecessor.
Some terrible dread itched at the back of her mind — a shadow not cast by her own looming demise, but the feeling that something much bigger, much more terrible loomed just out of sight.
Max knew what it was and it got him killed. It would likely do the same to her despite the fact that she barely had the smallest inkling of what it might be. The only difference between them was that Petra suffered no delusions about her own ability to change the course or scare the Protector enough to confess.
Antonin would not give up power. Even faced with credible accusations, the High Gloriae, who benefited immensely from his spy network and surveillance, would never remove him even if they wanted to.
But the public? The major players of the UTA? Oh,theycould do something.
In fact, Petra had a letter drafted and ready to be delivered to Margot Goode in the event of her death, explaining everythingin great detail. Even if Petra’s plan completely failed, that letter would still reach her.
A steady hand tipped the bottom of her coffee cup toward her lips. Petra took a drink reflexively as he shrewdly noted, “You would have been smarter to bargain with me to kill him.”
Before she could think better of it and censor herself, she answered, “I didn’t have the money for a hit that risky.”
She didn’t expect him to let out a low groan of pleasure, nor for him to drop his head to rest on the curve of her shoulder. “You’re perfect.”
“You’re deranged for thinking so.”
No onesanewould take her blithe confession that she’d considered having a man murdered as a mark of perfection. It made sense that he would, but it was important to her that he understood the crucial fact that it didn’t make itnormal.
