The red-head—Rowan—slammed his hands against the wood, bowing his head. “I can’t walk away from this. We must be close?—”
“But we aren’t,” Adrian replied, scrubbing a hand through his golden hair.
From the doorway, Maeve, the vampire, crossed her arms. “If that thing is helping Dante track her, then we need to find a way to pry it off her. If we do not have the runes, then perhaps we need to build our own key.”
I glanced at the female from the corner of my eye; it wasn’t the first time the idea had been shared, but it certainly had the other males in the room pausing. The only problem was, there was no clear place on the collar for saidkey. We knew the collar had to be linked to Dante himself. Tied to his power in some way. The key would be him.
“Perhaps if the wraith could get close enough to Dante, then he could steal the bastard’s power,” the demon king said, as if considering the same thing I had. “It would only take a moment for the power to be drained.”
Adrian sighed, the sound grating. “Dante wouldn’t make it that easy,” he replied, taking a step back, eyes darting to the mural of runes painted on the wall. It was our effort to understanding the so-calledGod Runes. Seeing them laid out this way allowed those who understood runes to better recognise their patterns and possible meanings—at least, that’s what they claimed. But they were strange, different to the old runes covering my home world.
“He’d have a rune marked on his person,” Rowan stated, pushing away from the table and turning towards the wall of runes. “Something he would know.”
“In the same way only certain soldiers were able to unlock the cell,” I murmured, remembering how only a few of his men were able to take Ivy in and out of her cage. The vampire who’d been by Hawk’s side was one of them.
Slowly, both Adrian and Rowan turned back to me, and I continued, “I could unlock the shifter cages, but didn’t have clearance to touch the prisoner cages. My handler did, though. He could unlock the cage holding your father. But neither of us could get Ivy out. Very few were capable of that.”
For a long moment, Rowan stared at me, though it didn’t take much for me—or the others—to realise he and Adrian were thinking of something.
Of course, I could be wrong, though I doubted I was. However, just because there had been soldiers with clearance to unlock the cage didn’t mean they could take off the collar.
And Adrian said just that. “If we can identify the corresponding runes,” he murmured, walking up to the wall and pointing to one I’d noted from her cage, “the lock and then key, maybe we can do the same for the collar.”
Rowan pressed his lips together as he went back to the table. He drummed his fingers against the wood, staring at the files and scrolls laid out across the surface. “The collar doesn’t have any runes from what we can see,” he murmured. “So that might be hard.”
“Let’s start with the cage. I’ll need to send word to Elara, get files oneveryoneshe has imprisoned fromLuna. With photos. Do you think you’ll be able to point out anyone with clearance to Ivy’s cage?” Maeve asked, eyeing me with little emotion.
I met her stare and nodded once. “Yes. I made certain to commit their faces to memory.”
To that, she bowed her head. “Rhadamanthus.”
The demon king growled, but he stalked out of the room behind the vampire, leaving me with the two mages.
Adrian turned away from the wall with a shake of his head. “You didn’t see him put it on her?”
I shook my head, glancing away from the desperation clouding his eyes. “No. Not this one.”
The only ones who had seen her first collar—the heavy metal one—had been him and the demon. The one around her neck now was thinner, capable of attaching to chains Dante kept separate just for her.
There’d been too much time between him capturing her and me seeing her again to really understand the difference or know when he’d swapped them.
“Thanks anyway,” Adrian murmured, returning to his position at the end of the table. “There has to be something we’re missing. He can’t just…block her powers. He hasn’t taken them yet, so we know she stillhasher magic. It’s just locked away.”
“She wasn’t even at full power when he put the collar on her,” Rowan added, head cocked. “And maybe he designed the collar thinking she was. Did he ever learn you were her mate?”
“I’m not sure, though I suppose he suspected it after my…outburst,” I replied with a shrug. “There would have been plenty of time for him to adjust the collar and I wouldn’t know. Thor would.”
The red-head drummed his fingers on the table again, this time eyeing the blocked window, chewing his bottom lip.
“What are you thinking?” Adrian asked.
I had to admit, even I was curious.
“My mother, your mother, literally everyone made it really clear Ivy needs to be at full power,” Rowan started, lookingbetween us. “And she’s not. Even though your mom is dead and her power is with Ivy now, not all her bonds have been unlocked.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked, crossing my arms. I’d heard them refer to her power several times now not being at full strength. Before, I hadn’t been sure what that meant—why it was important—but it appeared to mean something.
Rowan looked me in the eye, a sigh passing his lips. “Ivy has a fuck ton of power on her own. As the Daughter of Nyx—and now, the Queen—she is flooded with Nyx’s magic. Lots of it. But that also means it’s…unbalanced. She’s technically human, like the first Daughter and Queen, so that much power is too much for a mortal body.”
