“Service entrance.” Nova cocked her head toward the rear of the house. “If they’re drawing everyone out front—”
“Dorian will stay behind,” Yemi finished for her.
“Got to love a coward. On me.”
Nova led the way quickly toward the house. They were safe in the shelter of shadows by the time they heard the confused exclamations of soldiers coming out of the front door to investigate. The car’s explosion gave way to shouting and the trademark scrambling sounds of a mounting defense. Nova drew her fans and connected their straight edges to form her shield before opening the door slowly and creeping inside. For a moment, they stood inside the narrow service corridor and listened. The kitchen to their left was empty, the staff likely retiring to the relative safety of the other house across the circle at this hour. Nova inched cautiously forward just enough for Yemi to reach the electrical panel that controlled all the lights in the house and shut everything down. They both knew this place inside and out. There wasn’t a crevice or cupboard they hadn’t hidden inside, playing games here as children. If anyone needed the light, it was the enemy.
The rest of the corridor was a suite of coffered doors: storage mostly and butler’s closets, the last places a humorless aristocrat like Drake would think to stash himself during a siege. No—if he were to cower, it would be somewhere opulent.
They were separated from the great room to their left by a grand staircase where the corridor let out near the front of the house. To their right, pocket doors closed off the formal dining hall filled with stacks of draped furniture. Four long, rectangular tables formed a square around a rain garden slightly overgrown for some years now. The open skylight over it dripped in moonlight. Nova leaned in and listened for any movement before deciding the room was clear and drawing the doors back closed behind her.
Beyond the giant front doors, there were intermittent sounds ofstruggle mixed with the occasional burst of pistol-fire. Rows of draped paintings—judging by their shape—leaned against the wall. Out of curiosity, Yemi flicked the heavy fabric off one of them and swallowed the knot in her throat. A family portrait. Her parents gazed back at her with younger, more carefree eyes. It was the sort of picture relegated to secret family spaces, not the hallways of palaces where rulers had to be seen as stoic, royal, if they were to be seen at all.
Her own sigh distracted her. When she breathed, she found there was a stench in the air. Gunpowder, yes, and also sweat. But she noted an undercurrent of something sour. Stress. Desperation. Fear.
Dorian Drake was close.
Nova shot her a sympathetic glance before creeping into the great room. Iron chandeliers loomed from vaulted ceilings over terra-cotta floors piled with bright rugs. A fire roared in the clay hearth on the far side of the room, casting dancing shadows easily mistaken for villains if they weren’t careful.
Yemi followed her until her head snapped instinctively toward the top of the stairs where a shadow had flitted by. The odor hit her again.
She knew it was him.
Unable to pull herself away, she split from Nova and stealthily took the stairs, feet falling on the quiet spots she remembered from sneaking into the kitchen late at night for cakes Nefti left unsupervised. The wall of windows along the upstairs hallway overlooked the forest from which they’d arrived. She didn’t have to check the dozen rooms with their doors closed as long as she followed the scent. A dim light emanating from her parents’ room at the end of the hall called to her.
She remembered other smells here. Mostly leather, wood fires, juniper soap, her father’s unfortunate trials of “rugged” colognes foisted upon him by perfumers. The rug here was well worn, the ancient breakables on alabaster stands long removed for fear of her childhood antics, but the imprint of their bases indelible in front of narrow columns between the windowpanes. She’d laughed here likely more than anywhere else in her life. The ghosts of those times were happier than she could ever remember being.
There were memories, too, of bursting through her parents’ bedroom door and being greeted by their tired smiles or snored invites to join them in the event of bad dreams. Her mother would read her books while Yemi braided her hair. Her father liked his hands massaged after they’d taken a beating sparring with Cutter. Occasionally he’d be found at his armoire by the big front window, muttering over cuff links, and she’d be allowed to pick the most absurd ones for him to wear that night. Every photo, a new ridiculous pair of cuff links.
There, by the armoire, Dorian Drake stood with his back to her, bent over the controls to a radio. Before he could press the talk button to call in his little emergency, Yemi thrust her spear forward and impaled the console. He jumped backward and spun around as the radio sparked and smoked to stillness.
“Hello, Dorian,” Yemi sneered.
A brief moment of horror flickered across his face before he gathered himself and his eyes narrowed. “You.”
“Me,” she replied, closing the door silently behind her. “We haven’t got a world of time, so on your knees.”
He glanced backward out the window at the melee going on below, no doubt hoping someone would see her and rush to his aid. As it happened, they were all either busy or would never be busy again, so he sank slowly to his knees, chin up in defiance even if he couldn’t meet her gaze.
“You and I are going to play a game. It’s called ‘Don’t Scream.’?” She ratcheted the spear to its active position, letting its ominous orange glow raise terrifying questions in Dorian Drake’s mind as she stalked toward him. “The object of the game is to prolong your life by being useful to me.”
She let the tip of the spear glide across the lock panels of his suitcases and steamer trunk aligned in front of her parents’ dresser, each popping open and spilling its contents, the locks themselves tumbling onto the rug. She brought it to rest an inch from the tip of his nose and let the heat force him to fidget as she looked over his shoulder.
“It’s getting quiet out there. Don’t suppose that bodes well for you.” The calm she felt now was the most she’d possessed since before her mother died. Perhaps it was the power coursing through her veins, the feeling of being in her family home, the sight of her enemy on his knees. The hunger in her hadn’t abated, but it wasn’t screaming in her veins. “Do you know why we never embraced the use of firearms? Officially.”
“Because it was a bullet that felled your father,” Dorian grumbled, jerking his head away from the glowing tip of her spear.
“No, but that did strengthen the position. Guns remove the intimacy from a killing. They make it easier to take a life. It’s too quick, too efficient to allow regret or reconsideration. My father—your king—insisted that the value of that life, the weight of it, should stay with the killer to the end of their days. To cheat that is cowardice. And we are not a nation of cowards.”
She tapped the spear to his right cheek and then his left, singeing them both and forcing his gaze upward. A whimper escaped him.
“When you executed Moss, did you feel the weight of his life? Do you feel it here, sleeping in my parents’ bed and laughing with your now-quite-dead friends in our driveway?”
“A casualty of war,” he spat. “A Blackgate should know more about that than anyone.”
“Murdering loyalists and making allies of traitors were two of the worst decisions you could have made for such a smart man. The third was not making sure I was dead so I couldn’t repay you the favor.” She shaved the buttons off his vest and let the spear hover over his heart as it burned away the cloth between them. “Tell me, what was your war for? Why do this to yourself? To Dahlia?”
“Progress,” he whispered, panic edged in his voice. “The century of it lost to your family’s preoccupation with itself. Our followers, our people, believe we were meant for more. Divinity and monarchy are fitting stepping stones for establishing civilizations, but we have outgrown our need for them. What you represent—”
