Page 68

Rowan looks out of place here. Too careful. Too clean. Too visibly alone. His dark coat is plain enough to pass at a distance, but up close he still carries the academy on him in all the ways that matter. The cut of his clothes. The satchel slung tight to his side. The way he holds himself like he knows he shouldn't be here and came anyway.

A woman leaning in the doorway of a red-lit club catches sight of him and straightens, one heel sliding against wet stone. She says something low as he passes, her mouth curving when he startles just enough to give himself away. Rowan doesn't answer. He just walks faster.

Of course he does.

That alone would be enough to piss me off. But what really gets under my skin is the way he keeps moving, deeper in, past the last stretch of bars anyone respectable would still call open, toward the darker end of the club district where the music goes muffled and the streetlights thin out.

He's being watched, and not just by me.

No, as it turns out, I'm not the only one tracking him.

I catch it in pieces once I know where to look. A shape shifting behind the smoked glass of a shuttered shop. Movement in an upstairs window that disappears too fast. A man at the far corner pretending to light a cigarette while Rowan passes, but not once looking at the flame.

Rowan doesn't see any of it. Or he sees enough to know he should turn around and keeps going anyway.

Fuck that.

I click on my multi-slate and type fast.

you close

Lucan replies almost instantly.

Black Chapel. Why?

i'm going to need the bike. like, now

The typing bubble appears. Stops. Appears again.

What the fuck did you do???

i'll tell you later

I cut across the street toward the edge of the club strip, slipping between a pair of drunk tourists and a delivery cart humming low over wet stone. The Black Chapel spills music and violet light into the lane when I reach it, bass thudding under my ribs.

Lucan is already outside, one hand on the handlebars of his hoverbike, looking deeply offended on principle. "You look like you're about to commit a felony."

"Helmet."

He blinks, then follows my line of sight past me toward the darker stretch of street. Whatever he sees there wipes the grin off his face.

"Oh." He glances past me again, then shoves the spare helmet into my hand. "Yeah, okay, I get it. Questions later."

"Tell Rafe I took yours."

He snorts. "Absolutely fucking not."

I swing onto the bike before he finishes the sentence and let the grav-field catch with a low electric hum, lifting clean under me as I cut out of the lane and head back toward the dark end of the district.

I spot Rowan at the mouth of a narrow side street, half a block ahead, standing under a dead lamp with the folded slip in one hand. He looks up, checking the building numbers, then starts toward the alley like he's about to walk straight into it.

And there it is again, that wrong little shift at the edge of my vision, enough to make the back of my neck go tight.

A shadow moves under the arch beyond him, too quick to be innocent, too deliberate to be random. Then another shape farther in straightens from where he'd been leaning against the wall, attention fixing on Rowan the second he turns into the alley.

Fuck.

That isn't chance. It isn't street traffic. It's not some random pair of night creeps in the wrong alley at the wrong hour.