While my future in my Clan was uncertain, the need for vengeance pounded in my chest like a wound.
May the gods have mercy on who killed my father, because I wouldn’t.
“First, I want to fulfill his last request.” I jutted my chin at the backpack threatening to spill over. “You managed to sneak out more parchments and ledgers than I’d hoped. Thank you.”
Before Evie’s doomed wedding, my father had asked me to discover why the Protectorate vaults had been bleeding gold–and why nobody had sounded the alarm.
The first poisoned arrow shot at the wedding had been aimed straight at my head.
Not Evie.
Not the Dragon.
Not the groom.
Me. I was convinced it was meant to silence whatever secret I could have accidentally uncovered in those documents.
Dax furrowed his brows. “These aren’t the ledgers. I’m good, but not even I could walk in and out of a locked down Aquila with mountains of papers and parchments.”
My breath stuttered.
I couldn’t fail my father. Not again.
“Then how–I need those ledgers. They’re our only lead. If Silas is in on the plot, he can burn all the evidence.” My chest vibrated with the wave of worried words struggling to escape me all at once. “Ry can move fast, maybe if–”
Dax raised his brows and smirked.
“You know, it really hurts when you don’t have the barest faith in me. It does.” He placed a hand on his heart, before tapping the side of his head. “I have all the information we need right here.”
I opened my freezing palms, as if I could snatch answers from the air. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“While Silas was snoring in your father’s bedroom, I spent my nights undetected in the vaults, reading all of the recent parchments I could find. The sentinels have been ordered to guard the entrances and exits, nobody bothers with the important places anymore.”
“That’s…strange.” It also chinked my theory that whatever was hiding in those ledgers was worth killing me for.
If that had truly been the reason, wouldn’t have Silas guarded those parchments with his life?
Well, someone else’s life. He’d never put his hide in danger for anything and he wasn’t about to start now that he’d stolen the Protectorate throne and could command others to risk their own wellbeing. Silas’ only true passion in this world was reading. He was always disappearing in a library whenever he was needed. Especially when Clara, his only child, needed him.
Whoever he was in cahoots with must have not bothered to tell him how important the letters and numbers catalogued in those vaults truly were.
Dwelling on that would not help, though.
I’d promised to find how our gold had been squandered and that’s what I would do.
“It’s stupid, it’s what it is,” Dax grumbled. “Ever hear of a Clan not guarding its gold?”
I shook my head. In the Serpent Clan, it wasthemost important thing.
“Neither have I. I could have strutted in there and made off with piles of gold. Small mounds now, but still. Instead, I indulged myself with numbers and facts,” he said. “It was so boring, Allie, I almost gouged my eyes out.”
“Even if you’ve read every single page–”
“I did.” Dax winked.
“That’s way too much to remember, even for you.”
Dax had a frightening knack for remembering things he saw, a skill Uncle Maksim had uncovered and honed since he and Dara were children–but the Protectorate vaults held documents spanning back centuries. Dria Vegheara’s scribes had been meticulous at the start of our Clan.
