“So you could question him?”
“So I could kill him myself,” he growled. “He ordered you dead, Mouse.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said.
“Sure, we do.” Ace glowered and stabbed the letter with his finger. “It’s all right here. His own admission to giving the orders. He deserved something far more painful than a direct shot to the heart.”
“You say such sweet things.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.” I folded up the letter and slid it into my pocket. “Let’s see if we can find anything else.”
“Like this?” Ace pulled the corner of a paper sticking out from the pile.
“A map?” I glanced at it. “I already know the area pretty well.”
Ace held it out. “I noticed the symbol in the corner.”
I looked closer. Sure enough, the map of the area had all the common markers of lakes, streams and towns, but odd symbols decorated some of the locations and border. “They look like the same ones from the river and our prison.”
He nodded and leaned over, scanning the map’s details. “Maybe we can use it to decipher some of the symbols. We know the name for Perga.” He poked the map at our location where someone, presumably O’Reilly, had etched the symbols underneath. “Maybe these symbols are a direct translation.”
I nodded and then my gaze snagged on a detail. The map used the picture of a cabin to mark the locations of towns and small settlements. Perga, Wast and Vitor were easy to make out and locate. They were also named. But to the east, closer to the border of Vitor, there was a town marked with a cabin, but no name. An X had been drawn over the cabin. I tapped the location with my finger. “Have you ever been here?”
Ace frowned, his brows drawing severely down. “No. I wasn’t aware of a town there. Why doesn’t it have a name?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of a town in that location either.” It was beyond my patrolling range, but surely I would’ve at least heard about it. I folded up the map and slid it into the same pocket as O’Reilly’s letter. “And more importantly, why did someone cross out the town?”
“Maybe a mapmaker’s mistake?”
I snorted.
Ace smirked and leaned down to press his lips to the top of my head before moving away to inspect the bookshelf.
I sighed and tried to ignore the fluttering in my chest. Wasn’t this pathetic? He did something sweet and I momentarily forgot I was framed for murders, on the kill list for both the king and rogue hunters, my brother was somehow apart of all of this, and I still had no idea how all the pieces fit together.
I pushed away from the table and stood. Shaking the feeling back into my legs, I stretched before moving away to inspect the dried pool of blood. The old man hadn’t been at his desk when he’d been shot. The stain was too far away for that. He must’ve been standing closer to the fireplace. I headed over to the mantle. He didn’t hang mementos of his wife or his son, it was bare unadorned brick. He hadn’t been standing here, looking at artwork or pondering his life choices.
Was he staring into the flames and reminiscing about the hell he came from?
I scoffed and knelt by the ashes.
Wait a minute.
I reached forward and tugged at the charred remains of a book. I pulled it free and a cascade of soot and ash rose from the hearth. I sneezed and then coughed. The ash burned my throat.
The old man hadn’t been reminiscing at all. He was destroying evidence.
The book had a leather cover. I flipped it open and the pages crumbled in my hands, falling to the floor in ashy pieces. Some of the larger pieces showed the same meticulous writing as the letter. This wasn’t a book. This was a journal.
I leafed through the remains. None of the pieces were large enough to make out more than a few letters, much less a whole word or sentence. I kept flipping, letting the flakes of paper and ash continue to fall around me.
I found a longer passage that survived the fire.
—are the blade and the whetstone. They are marked, but marked for what? The boy is malleable, but the other is dangerous…
He was writing about me and Paul. He had to be.
