Tristan tapped the cuff on the table. “I’ll contact Cael right now.”
“What did you find in the ledgers?” Ronin asked, bracing himself.
Tristan speared him with a hopeful glance. “Her name wasn’t anywhere in those ledgers, Matakos.”
Adrenaline surged through Ronin in a heady rush. He wanted to speak, wanted to ask another question, but he couldn’t make his mouth work. Could barely hear his own thoughts over the agonized howling of his wolf.
“What does that mean?” Cassandra asked, her voice miles away.
“It means,” Mireille said, “that Selene may have been arrested.
“But she was never sent to Tartarus.”
After a blocks-long chasethrough moon-slick streets, Mireille finally found Ronin’s colossal white wolf atop the wall at the city’s edge, howling at the stars.
She shifted back into her Fae form, then ambled over to the wall. “Please come down from there.”
His white muzzle swiveled down to her. Shadows hid his face, so she couldn’t see his expression as he executed a three-storyjump that would have injured a smaller creature. He walked toward her, claws clacking on the cobblestones.
Despite the hour, other prisoners roamed about, sending furtive glances their way.
The white wolf settled onto his haunches before Mireille, then lay down fully, resting his head on his paws.
Moonlight crawled over his scar, no longer hidden behind the patch Ronin wore in his Fae form, and Mireille sucked in a sharp breath.
It wasvicious. A jagged, silver slash devoid of fur where his eye should have been.
She ran a tentative finger across it and the wolf whimpered, but made no move to retaliate.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice choking with emotion. “I’m sorry I did this to you.”
White fur rippled, then Ronin himself stood before her, one eye red-rimmed and the patch once again covering the other.
“She was never here,” he croaked.
“I heard,” Mireille responded. Pointlessly. She didn’t know what else to say. She almost wished he’d stayed in his wolf form.
He staggered over to a bench and flopped down, dropping his head into his hands. Mireille sat beside him, close, but not touching.
“I’m the reason she’s gone,” Ronin whispered, so quietly that Mireille wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.
“What?”
Ronin sat up and leaned against the bench, tipping his head back and rubbing at his patch. “I’m the reason she was arrested.”
Mireille didn’t respond. His tone was penitent. And she had a feeling he wasn’t done confessing.
“She didn’t tell me.” Devastation crumpled Ronin’s face, years of guilt and regret. “I had no idea she was going to be there. If I had, I never would have… I would have been theone to… It was the only way to protect my cover within the Imperial Defense Council. I gave up the name of the rebel cell’s location and Selene was… She didn’t have time to escape before they caught her. It’s all my fault.” He turned to face Mireille, his sensuous mouth twisted into a grimace. “I threw myself into Tartarus for nothing.”
Mireille closed her eyes against the blow.
She’d already endured so much. Two centuries within this Creator-foresaken place, all those Harvest Nights she’d survived, the endless, unrelenting captivity. Not to mention what she’d done earlier. Putting her body and scars on display for those asshole Brethren, letting the Koenig himself paw her, kiss her…
Ronin’s words were worse than all those atrocities combined.
She felt flimsy. Brittle. Bright hot. Like molten glass that might shatter at the smallest tap before it had a chance to fully harden.
And all she wanted to do was hurl the shards at him. To use what she knew of his and Selene’s history to wound him as much as he’d just wounded her.
