“What, like fire?” Ronin shifted forward, his hair tickling Mireille’s temple.
Mattias expelled a long exhale. “I don’t fucking know, man. Larissa was always… she was super spiritual. Obsessed with the Fallen Goddess. Didn’t believe in the High Gods or the Empire. She and our parents used to have screaming matches about it.”
Mattias’s eyes glazed over, lost in the tempestuous sea of his memories.
Mireille coaxed him back. “So, what makes you think something happened to her up there?”
His face hardened. “Because I followed her.”
Ronin stiffened beneath her. “How? How did you even get in? And how the fuck did you get backout?”
Mattias smirked. “Bought a vial of veiling potion from one of those back-alley apothecaries downtown and snuck in with a shipment of crates. Disguised myself as one of the deliverymales.”
“What did you see while you were there?” Mireille was on the edge of her seat. Well, the edge of Ronin’s knee, really. Very few people had ever seen the inside of Otto’s estate.
“The place is fucking huge and just…so odd looking. You’ve seen pictures, right? Those tall turrets with all those melting windows. The Cathedral of Bones—weirdest fucking architecture I’ve ever seen. And the collection he’s got in there? Shit from all over the continent, some of it thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of years old. Like walking through a fucking museum. And some of those pieces, man… I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching back.”
Ronin cocked an eyebrow and Mattias let out a bitter little laugh.
“I wasn’t on this stuff as much back then.” He flicked some ash into an ashtray. “And I wasn’t there long, but I saw Larissa having dinner alone with Otto. He was asking her all these questions about our family. Where we were from, where our grandparents were from, shit like that.”
“Did the staff not question you?” Ronin was rubbing idle circles against Mireille’s hip, goosebumps raising with every pass. She didn’t even think he realized he was doing it. It was extremely distracting. Though not entirely unwelcome.
“Nah, they were all so out of it. Think Otto’s got them all under some kind of spell.”
“What happened after dinner?” Mireille asked, not sure she wanted to know.
Mattias crushed his cigarette into the ashtray, then dipped his head into his hands. “I followed Larissa up to her guest room. She was the only guest there, as far as I could tell. I convinced her that I was, well, me, by telling her things from our childhood that only I would know. We had a huge fight. I tried to convince her to leave with me, but she refused. Whatever promises Otto made to her, she was so eager for them that she wouldn’t seereason. I was lucky she didn’t drag me out of that room and expose me as an intruder.”
“What did you do?” Ronin asked.
“What elsecouldI do?” Mattias’s amber eyes filled with shame. “I left. Snuck back out on the delivery truck. I was… I hoped that maybe Larissa would come to her senses and return in a few days.”
“Did she?” Mireille strained forward.
“In a way, yes.” Mattias plucked up a bottle of Aquaver from the table and took a long, deep pull. “She came to me in a dream. Well, her voice at least. Said,I am one with my power. And I am enough.”
“What do you think that means?” Ronin asked.
“Fuck if I know.” Mattias shook his head. “I thought it meant she was still alive, still up at that estate. But the IA wouldn’t take me seriously. And I had no concrete proof, other than my own testimony, that she’d even been there.”
“Did you ever go back? To find her or try to confront Otto?” Mireille asked.
“Fuck, no. I never want to go near that male or his creepy place again.” Mattias shivered. “Jurgev Otto is the fucking manifestation of Stygios himself.
“Death and destruction, that’s all he’s got to offer.”
Mattias had always beena little out there, but even he had never spouted anything as strange as this. And Ronin knew he wasn’t lying.
“When did all of this happen?” Mireille piped up.
Ronin was trying to ignore how good, how natural it felt to have her sitting in his lap with his hand at her waist. And HighGods, her fuckingscent. He could no longer blame the effect it was having on him solely on his wolf.
“’Bout a year ago,” Mattias answered.
“And you haven’t seen Larissa since?”
Mattias’s gaze trailed out into the club, the lights bathing him in a pulsing rainbow. “No.” A simple answer, yet weighed down with a year’s worth of guilt and regret.
