Thick swirling mistof darkness dissipated from around us as I shadow-jumped us into Matthieu's creepy little shop. Only instead of materializing in the shop area, I made sure to materialize in the back where his room was to avoid suspicion of any guards lurking about.
His chambers were dimly lit, filled with arcane symbols all over the stone walls, and dust floated in the air adding to the ominous vibe. The air was extremely cold in here.
My gut coiled as I laid eyes upon a shrine full of dark energy and adorned with wickedly twisted branches and black roses above his bed. In the center was a portrait of Fawn,my goddess,captured in an intricate ruby frame.
It was an extremely old painting of Fawn with her beautiful blue hair braided and pulled back on top of her head. Her blue eyes twinkled with happiness, and she had the most breathtaking smile on her face. She looked socarefreein it--unmarked by trauma.
A broken sob escaped from Fawn as her hand covered her mouth, her eyes widening as she took in the painting. "That was the only painting I've ever had done of myself, but it wasn't just of me. That painting was from my family portrait before I was ever taken by the empire."
Anger lashed through me, and I craved the taste of Matthieu's blood on my tongue as I ripped him open for daring to own something like this of her.
Casper's jaw was so tight I was pretty sure I heard a molar crack as he shook his head.
Fawn approached the shrine cautiously, her hand brushing against the cold stone and tracing the delicate carvings around her painting. Then her hand finally lingered on the portrait, and I could feel the nostalgia and fear spike through the bond as she looked at it.
She glanced at Silas. "Can you put a rune on me that would be able to protect this painting? Kind of like how you did with my cats?"
Silas nodded his head, his face almost blank, even though I could feel the waves of worry and nausea coming through his side of the bond. "I can, but I already have a rune that can store it if you want me to take it."
"Please," she croaked. "I don't even want to think about how he got this. This painting was done only once, and it stayed at my family home. I just wish that it was the full painting with my parents and my brother."
Dark wisps surged from my fingertips, intertwining with the painting. The air crackled with energy as I pulled the painting from the stone wall and floated it to Silas.
He lifted his shirt to show a glowing rune on his abdomen. "Here."
I slowly pushed the painting into it for safekeeping.
A shiver racked through Fawn's body as the painting disappeared into the rune, and she glanced back at the shrine before her face paled.
"What is it, love?"
She snatched up a silver locket with the initial F etched into it that was sitting at the shrine and clutched it to her chest. "This was given to me by my mom, and I had it on me when I was taken by the empire. I lost it during the ritual when they cursed me," she whispered, fear lacing her voice. "How could he have this in his possession?"
Matthieu was a dead man. It was no longer a rescue mission. It was an assassination.
I didn't care if it would piss off Silas or Emperor Lloyd. The bone and metamorphose mage had signed his own death ticket.
"There's a shit ton of intel on the Revivium Empire." Silas flipped through a folder that was sitting on the nightstand next to the shrine. He tossed it on the bed, and documents splayed out of it, settling around where we could see them.
The documents detailed a few of the Revivium Empire's dirty secrets, from the potion experiments to the experiments they were doing on their own people.
"Do you think Emperor Lloyd knows?" Aimon asked.
Silas shook his head. "There's no way he knows all of this."
"But Matthieu's his informant, and these are informative documents," Bastian said.
Silas still shook his head. "I'm not going to believe Emperor Lloyd knows anything about this unless there's solid proof."
"Bless, that's a lot of bones," Bastian murmured, his face turning almost green as he stepped away from the drawer in the nightstand. Sure enough, there were a ton of toe bones in the drawer, filling it to the brim.
Casper pulled the other side open, and it was also filled with toe bones. "I would take great pleasure in removing Matthieu'sentireskeleton from his flesh suit."
"There's a ton of old journals over here with the pages ripped out," Aimon said as he looked in the other drawers.
Below the mass of bones were journals, but as Aimon flipped through, he frowned. "It looks like anything that was important in these were already ripped out."
"Of course it was," I muttered bitterly, not able to take my eyes off the shrine of Fawn in his bedroom.
