Reminding himself that he’d kill the man as soon as he returned to the suite, hopefully feeling jilted, Silas turned his mind to getting his job done as quickly as possible.
The bedroom had little of interest save for a few strategically hidden guns and portable wards, which had been effectively muted by the ones he laid around the suite before the Protector’s arrival.
The sitting room held far more of interest.
I’ll be damned,he thought, eyeing the impressive portable command center the guards had set up in a corner.Petra was right. He did bring everything with him.
Not only was there a bank of screens showing the entire cathedral, but also several neat red trunks lined up against the wall. When he skated his palm over them, magic screamed out from the very pores of the leather, warning him away.
Silas debated for a moment over which to investigate first. He eyed the empty seat in front of the screens. Fury roared out from where it simmered in his gut.
The guard who lay dead in the bathtub had almost certainly been stationed there, scanning the screens for anything amiss — including the one that showed the manipulated view of Petra’s bedroom.
You’re lucky you’re already dead,he thought, stalking over to the station.
Yanking the chair back from the desk, he fought the urge to swipe his arm across the whole thing, sending every bit of machinery onto the floor where he could stomp it into nothing but trash.
You promised her.
He’d get her revenge, but he had to do this, too. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t get her bond.
Silas gripped the edge of the desk so hard his knuckles bleached white. At some point his objective shifted from needingher power and connections to needingher.It was a subtle thing, a movement of inches when he wasn’t looking, but there it was, clear as day.
If his shadows refused to take to her like they should, then her bond was all he had to tie her to him.Nothaving her tied to him was so fundamentally unacceptable, he simply refused to contemplate it.
So he pried his claws out from where they’d gouged holes in the desk and got to work.
She wouldn’t have any excuses after this. No reason to deny him. He’d give her Vanderpoel’s head, the proof she believed she needed, even hand deliver it all to her journalist friend — whatever it took to chain her to his side so he could satisfy the craven, desperate thing in him that howled for her every second they were apart.
While Silas downloaded the contents of the surveillance station and the various tablets and phones he’d found locked away in a safe onto a few hard drives, he got to work on the red trunks.
Their hardware was burnished gold and the red leather was stamped with the Glory’s symbol on the lid, but otherwise they were nondescript. The only thing that truly set them apart were the wards.
A few had been voided when they were brought into the suite, but whoever had worked on them knew what they were doing. Failsafes and multiple layers meant that they were still a bitch to unravel.
Normally he would have savored the challenge, but his nerves were strung too tight to enjoy it.
The wards required all his focus — if he didn’t want to lose a finger, or be immolated, or perhaps have his gray matter turned to jelly from a controlled sonic impact — but a small part of his mind couldn’t be diverted from his anxiety over what Petra was doing, whether Tal was keeping her safe.
Of course he was. They had, after all, gone around in circles over the point just the night before. Even if Tal didn’t suspect how deep Silas had sunk into his obsession with the witch, he trusted his brother implicitly.
Like him, Tal had a heavily skewed moral compass but he was unerringly loyal to those few who earned it. If he said he’d keep Petra safe, he’d do everything in his power to keep his word.
And yetSilaswasn’t the one watching her. She wasn’t inhisden. She’d been fully prepared to meet another dangerous, unpredictable man for dinner. She probably even had Antonin’s scent on her — the cloying, artificial amber of the expensive cologne that lingered in the bathroom.
It was enough to drive a man to distraction, even when he handled borderline explosive magic-infused objects.
He did get them open, though, one by one.
Within each trunk were hundreds and hundreds of painstakingly organized files, hard drives, ancient disks, and much more modern organic computing chips that could store a mind-blowing amount of data. At a glance, the information in the trunks seemed to span at least two hundred and fifty years, but probably much more than that.
Some of the paper files were labeled with names, some with codes. Some held compromising photos, bank records, politically damaging testimony. Some were almost an inch thick and some held a single piece of paper. In one he picked at random, he found a thin file on a sweet-faced initiate dated tothe eighteen hundreds. Twin girls, their hair braided, stared out from beneath a later portrait of just one of them.
Something tickled his brain about the shape of their faces, the canny, almost vulpine look to their features, before he quickly flipped through the rest of the file. A blur of information went over his head — initiate intake paperwork, a two-hundred year old marriage license registered in the Coven Collective, yellowed letters with increasingly erratic handwriting, a plea for help scrawled on the back of a hymn ripped out of a book, and a death certificate.
Huh,he thought, eyebrows hiking up his forehead as he read the name on the certificate.Ellouise Goode.He flipped back to the pictures. The resemblance clicked.I didn’t know Sophie Goode had a sister.
Silas let out a put-upon sigh. He slid the file back into place and closed the trunk before he moved onto the final one.Petra will want all of this.
