“Any idea how she did it?” Colonel Viridian asked for the twelfth time. “I just can’t wrap my head around it. Priestesses don’t have offensive capabilities—”
“Apparently they do,” the captain returned, his tone biting. The exhaustion pounding through him the sort I could feel even across the room, for he’d been at this longer than any of the others. Forcing himself to stay awake. Vigilant as he fought to redirect suspicion away from us. To heap it back on Sasha’s ghost, so we might escape the consequences of my actions.
His suffering was acute enough to draw me up from my comfortable stupor, and I looked. Found him dressed in the black and gold of his nation. Buttoned from wrists to throat. A thatch of messy black hair the only thing out of place. That, and deep shadows beneath, sunken, inky eyes.
Wretched, and running on fumes, he was sustained by what he took from me after he’d finished feeding his wall. Drinking down whatever was left of the empath’s excess in great, heaving gulps.
“This isn’t a joke,” the colonel snapped, and scrubbed a hand down the white stubble speckling his cheeks. “A priestess as a weapon”—he coughed up an incredulous laugh—“how could we have missed that? How didHarpermiss that? Sasha washispriestess. All this time, harboring a secret like that?” An indelicate snort. “It’s unfathomable.”
A few tense moments passed, and the hush was nearly enough to let me slip back into my stupor until a new voice broke the silence.
“The important question, gentlemen, isn’thowwe missed it,” this new man said, and my bleary gaze flicked to a new face, unseeing. My eyes too heavy to focus and listen at the same time. “But how many of the other priestesses know about it. Was Sasha able to pass along some tender little scrap of knowledge before her death?”
This was a man smart enough to ask therightquestions.
The first to guess at the secret knowledge I carried.
Every priestess who’s ever been has the potential… to become an empath… a weapon…
I squinted from beneath my lashes, peering through a nest of blankets to take the measure of the man. Middle aged. Dark hair laced with wisps of silver that reached back from his temples, he was a handsome, statuesque man of bold Caledonian lineage. But it was his eyes that caught my attention. Stormy grey, his gaze was cutting. Eyes that could penetrate deep enough to see exactly what was meant to be hidden.
I felt the captain’s glare before I saw it. The burning attention of my very own personal leviathan, he engulfed me with net of unstable, frantic power. Commanding me to be still where I was entombed in his bedsheets, molten gold rushed through my veins in an instant. Trapping my breath in my lungs, my every muscle seized in searing bands looped about wrists and throat. Bands of gold that brooked no argument—and burned all the same.
Oblivious, Viridian scratched at his cheeks, absentminded, his fingernails rasping at silver stubble as he hummed and continued the thought. “Are we facing an uprising of suicidal priestesses with power enough to damage the Northern front from within? And if so, why now? Why wait five years? Why not strike when patriotic tempers were still hot?” At this, the colonel sighed, and said, “So many questions we’ve no answers to.”
The third man didn’t miss a beat, his stormy gaze fixed to Asher’s profile. “What abouther?” he asked. “I understand your girl and Harper’s were spending a great deal of time together. It would be foolish to assume Sasha didn’t attempt to pass her something before she died. An object, perhaps? Information, at the very least.”
Nervous anger danced through him into me, poison that leached through a barb lodged deep inside my heart. “I carried her out of that riot myself, Lieutenant General Hastings,” the captain snapped. Jaw bunching at the corner, his knuckles going white where they were clenched beneath the table, unseen. And there, on his brow, the evidence of the effort he expended—a sheen of anxious sweat. “We’ve been under ‘round the clock surveillance since the demonstration, and thanks to Dez’ wild accusations about an untrained fledgling priestess somehow causing that riot”—he sneered—“we haven’t so much as left this room in eight fucking days.” At this, he laughed, and it was a brittle, wild thing. Reeking of desperation hardly concealed. “She’s barely opened her eyes since, and if”—a curse, and the captain cracked his neck, scrubbing at the small hairs at his nape—“ifSasha had managed to pass something to her, I can assure you, I’d have already found it.”
“This isn’t an attack on your character, son,” Viridian soothed. “We’ve got hundreds of elites to think of, here.”
The other man didn’t so much as blink.
For a moment, there was silence. Tense quiet broken by the familiar sound of a bottle being uncorked. Glass clinking, liquid sloshing. And then, “She was spattered with gore during the riot,” the captain murmured, calmer now. “She was standing right beside Sasha when Reese and the rest caught fire. The grease…”
I felt him shudder and knew the white rimming glassy eyes wasn’t a show.
Those men had been his comrades. Friends.
Men whose deaths had been ugly. Whose dust had coated our skin, caked in the fine lines. Men whose grime had lined our noses and throats, their taste left to linger long after that horror had been scraped and scoured away. An essence I wouldn’t soon forget.
“I couldn’t get it off. Not at first. Stripped her down and cleaned her up best I could without visiting the baths.” The captain paused, tipped his head back, and swallowed half a glass of amber liquor in a single gulp, then refilled his drink without bothering to conceal the way his hand trembled. “She had nothing but the dress I put her in myself.”
“Yes,” Lieutenant General Hastings replied. Droll, despite the grim weight of the subject. “How very distressing that must have been. But I’d like to hear you say it, Captain Rawlings. Without the flowery imagery. There can be no question of your innocence in this.”
Another tense silence dominated the room as the captain struggled with the edges of a frayed temper. And then, “Lieutenant General Hastings, sir, I’ve found nothing the late Head Priestess could have given Mila that might teach her how to kill an elite. She had nothing but her dress, and precious few places to hide something where I couldn’t find it.”
“Yes,” the Lieutenant General hummed, unmoved, “but that’s not quite what I asked, now was it?”
Ice washed through Asher’s blood, and his hold on me began to slip. But even without the leash, I couldn’t bring myself to move. To draw attention to myself in the presence of this man.
Lieutenant General Hastings.
Just another head of the snake to replace the one who’d come before it.
“By your own admission,” the Lieutenant General said in a low, cultured hum, “the girl stood close enough to hear Sasha’s final words, did she not?”
To this, the captain had nothing to say. No clever maneuvering or subtle diversions.
