I wanted him to come back home with a longing that seared my veins the second I rose. The rest, we would have to figure out, like we had so far.
Together.
“I’m tired,” Dax said, cranking his neck. “We’ve filled an entire forest’s worth of pages. We still have no answer and I only have one vial of truth serum left.”
He was right. He’d drained himself to his limits, dark circles clinging to his eyes.
“I know. But something has to be in here.” I grimaced at the pages.
“I wonder if it will even matter in the end,” he muttered.
Alarm bells rang in my ears. “Why?”
“So many deaths, many more to come, none of them for the ones who actually deserve it.” He sighed once more. “I’m just tired. You’re bothered. We make a fantastic team.”
The silence that descended between us reeked of defeat.
I fisted my hands on the table. I couldn’t let us give up. Not with my father’s last request.
Swallowing my own exhaustion, I flipped through the endless pages.
“Bia Marino was at the Academy two years ago,” I said.
“And doing wonderfully, from what I heard.”
“If she was still a student,” I went on, undeterred. “She couldn’t have asked for mission gold.”
“That’s right.” Dax’s brows rose. “She shouldn’t have in the first place, anyway.”
“Yes, but–” There it was. Another large sum, right between the summer harvest charges. “Did she just come back from the Academy to empty the vaults? If she avoided Aquila like the plague, when would she have had the time to ask for the gold, get it authorized, and then…what? Make it vanish?”
He tilted his head to the side. “If she only came back for that and she already had someone she was sending the gold to, then yes.”
I looked at the parchments with a growing horror. “So how can we figure out who she sent it to?”
It seemed like a monstrous feat.
If Bia was alive, then she was very well hidden.
If she was dead, that made the task of finding answers infinitely more difficult.
“You know what doesn’t make sense in all of this?” He let his quill rest for the first time today. “Why would she have been working with Silas?”
“She could have found out how inept he was from Clara,” I said, but that defense sounded meek to my own ears.
“Even with all these numbers, one person can’t empty a Clan vault.”
“No.” I bit my lower lip. “It would have sounded some alarm.”
“Unless she found another way to steal more,” Dax said. “Ifshe did it.”
“And how could my father have realized this?” I grimaced at the lines. “It wasn’t like he spent all his waking days in the vault.”
“Unless someone told him.”
“Who?”
The question hung between us, as if begging for answers.
