He pauses, staring at the deep red of the liquid clutched in his hand. Then, instead of drinking it, he throws it across the room. Glass shatters against the side of an empty golden tub, and I’m drawn back to the night we arrived here, a vision flashing in my mind of Auset on her knees scrubbing down Scorpius. I don’t know what he’s madder about, that he didn’t make the connection sooner or that there’s a connection to be made at all. We don’t usually leave witnesses.
I’m sure we all thought that the girl that night in Dorsin’s office wasn’t going to survive long in the world she found herself naked and chained to. We were all content with allowing fate to run its course, not wanting undeserving blood on our hands. Instead, we doomed her to this life. She’s back to teach us just how wrong we were for thinking fate was going to tie up our loose ends.
“Do you think Tilleo knows?” I ask, my mind whirring with all the possibilities of just how fucked we might be right now.
I doubt the slaver would care that we took out his boss, but if he’s trying to discover what we took from Dorsin’s vault that night, we might have more serious problems on our hands than we realized.
“He kept her alive,” Bones points out as though it somehow answers my question. “He must have thought that massacre in his office was her doing,” he goes on, and I see what he’s getting at.
“That’s possible,” Scorpius concedes. “But what’s the likelihood he didn’t torture her for every detail of what happened that night, and now we’re being set up?”
“She said Tilleo’s target wasn’t us,” Bones argues, and Scorpius shoots him a look that tells him to pull his head from his ass.
“We all knew from the beginning that something was off about her and this whole situation. Now we have a lead, and we’re not going to give the little killer the benefit of the doubt because she grew into your ultimate wet dream, Bones,” Scorpius chides.
Bones snorts out a derisive laugh. “Riiiight,I’mthe only one hard for her,” he snarks with a scowl. “If we had kept her from the beginning like I wanted, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Oh fuck off, Bones. She’s not a hound that you can collar, feed, and scratch behind the ears when it’s convenient for you,” Scorpius snaps.
“No. She was a scared female, who was chained to the floor in the room of a monster, and we just left her there,” Bones snarls back, and I step between my brothers, drawing both of their attention to me.
“Firstly,” I interject, looking over at Bones, “you never said anything about keeping her that night when we executed Dorsin. You only asked if we should do anything about her,” I point out, shutting down my brother’s heroic delusions. “Secondly, we don’t need to give her the benefit of the doubt, and we also don’t need to be stumbling around in the shadows here. There’s an easy way to get to the bottom of all of this,” I declare, looking from Bones to Scorpius. “I think it’s time we pay Tilleo a visit.”
Neither Scorpius nor Bones says anything, and I can see them both weighing the cost and benefit of cutting out the middleman and going straight to the source of our suspicions. There’s a possibility that it could bite us in the ass. That it might put Tilleo on the back foot and encourage him to be more desperate. That is if he’s behind some sort of plan to take us out in the first place. However, if he’s not scheming behind our backs and we’re reading this situation wrong…
“If he’s plotting against us, we’ll have to kill him,” Scorpius states coolly.
Bones scoffs dismissively. “He’s more or less an employee anyway. We fund his enterprise here. We can promote someone else to run it, or get out of the business altogether,” he points out. “Tilleo and his Biddings have been a good opportunity to collect information, but we knew the well would dry up at some point. None of the other Orders are even in our league. It might be time to see things as they are and move on.”
“And what about Auset?” I inquire, a heavy cloak of finality settling on my shoulders.
“Let’s deal with Tilleo first, then we’ll know how to proceed on other fronts,” Scorpius declares, and both Bones and I nod our agreement.
I walk over to one of the stands encasing a large ball of fairy light to help illuminate the inside of our quarters. With a wave of my hand, the light sputters out, sending a corner of the tent into shadow. Flickers of light from the other stands dance across the hide of the tent wall, and I can’t help but recall the way Auset’s gaze fixed on mine in the healing chamber. The pain that filled her gaze and yet there was still that hint of challenge even before Bones did what he could for her.
I wanted to heal her completely, scoop her up and get her as far as possible from this place. Every fiber of my being was calling for me to be for her what Eacon was once for me. She’d found me in a horrid state, tied up, abused, covered in filth and hopelessness. I thought I’d been sold to her. That she was just another of the ones who wanted to take from me, who wanted to break me. Then she led me out of the caravan I’d been chained in and sold from for longer than I could remember, and I saw the bodies and the blood. She hadn’t bought me, she’d saved me, fed me, let me get cleaned up, and then brought me to Scorpius and Bones. Together, they helped me fight the nightmares and trauma, and taught me to never let another fae fuck with me again.
Bones steps up to my side, and I shake away my thoughts. I tamp down on the longing that surges through me to help her, and instead step with my brothers into the dark. The shadows welcome us happily, just like they always do. We’re pulled from the planes of our realm and invited into a corridor of enigma and in-betweens. We shadow walk seamlessly from our tent to Tilleo’s home, stalking through the shadows of his halls until we find the master in his study.
He stares sightlessly at a roaring fire, a half-filled glass of spirits clutched tightly in his aging hand. I try not to roll my eyes at the absurdity of a fireplace, let alone acozyfire in any home in the heart of the desert. The waste of magic to cool the room to a comfortable temperature scratches at my skin, but I let the annoyance roll off my shoulders. We have bigger concerns than all the ways Tilleo is clearly squandering his resources.
We watch and wait from the dark corner by the window, eyeing the master who’s lost to some thought or memory as he stares off into nothing. Deep lines etch his brow, his mouth is dipped into a pensive frown, and there’s a tightness around his eyes that speaks of agitation and aggrievement. We settle into our silent spying, observing from the darkness long enough to see that Tilleo doesn’t appear to be waiting on anyone. He doesn’t drink from the tumbler gripped in his palm. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t impatiently check the time or relax his taut posture in any way.
Scorpius taps on my shoulder and then, using hand signals we’ve created over our years together, signs that we should split up. He indicates that each of us should take a murky corner in the room so that the master can’t escape or call for help before we get the answers we’re here for. Bones and I nod and step back into the recesses between realms, shadow walking to our subsequent corners.
The darkness wraps around me like a cool hug, the shadows of my corner deeper than where I was watching from before. I can feel when Bones and Scorpius are in place, and all at once, we step from the dark into Tilleo’s study like the reapers we are. The slave master shoots up from his seat with a shocked exclamation. He pulls back one arm, ready to launch the thick crystal tumbler in one hand while his other reaches for a knife sheathed at his waist.
“You can go for that knife and then meet mine instead, or you can dip into your wits and breathe for a little longer,” Scorpius warns, stepping further into the light to make it clear why his words ring with promise.
The tumbler falls to the ground, the thick layers of carpet cushioning its impact as the honey-colored liquid spills into the dark indigo of the rug. Tilleo’s hand drops the dagger and clutches at his heart instead. He bends forward, placing his hands on his knees as though this position will dampen his fright and help to expand his chest with soothing deep breaths. He doesn’t look scared or like he’s been up to anything he shouldn’t be. He certainly doesn’t look like a fae who ordered one of his slaves to murder an Order member and violate a sanctum.
“Shit, Scorpius, I didn’t realize it was you,” he grumbles, his eyes manically bouncing around to find Bones and me slightly further back. “What’s going on? Why is the Order of Scorpions paying me a late night visit?” he queries, doing a good job of hiding the sudden quiver in his voice.
There it is. There’s the guilty tell I’ve been waiting for.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” he genially offers, gesturing to the cart of bottles and glasses, his eyes now wary and soaked in trepidation.
He probably thinks we’re here to kill him. Who knows, depending on how forthcoming he is about what’s going on around here, maybe we are. Scorpius waves the offer of drinks away and settles his large frame in the only other chair in front of the fire. He turns it until it faces Tilleo, while Bones and I continue to stand, ready and waiting for anything.
