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Angel’s hand tightened around mine.

“Your job has always been to investigate murder. We have a killer in custody,” Hanna added.

My father. But not really, right? I vividly remembered Jason’s death now. Though it was the only one I’d witnessed. I thought I probably needed to lay him to rest, but had I raised him to help with the tear? I couldn’t recall his corpse being one of them, even though I could mentally scan through the bodies and knew they were nearby. Likely moved here for investigation.

“Then let’s go see him,” I said, unwilling to wait and worry about mundane things like new offices and memorizing the layout of a magic building. I wanted to see just how corrupt Adrian Holt was. Maybe he was a changeling in human skin? To say I wasn’t conflicted would be a lie, but I also needed to shut this chapter of my life if I hoped to move forward.

Hanna nodded, and led us through the winding corridors of the fortress, past doors that hummed with warding magic and cells that held things I didn’t want to think about. The air grew colder the deeper we went, until my breath fogged in front of my face and the threads of the building pulsed with a sickly, watchful light.

I didn’t realize I’d stopped walking until Angel’s hand found my back.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“No.” I forced myself to keep moving. “But I will be.”

The holding cell was at the end of a long hallway, sealed behind a door of black iron and silver runes. Two fae guards flanked it, their eyes tracking us as we approached. Though they said nothing, simply stepped aside as the door opened.

Adrian Holt sat on a bench in the corner of the cell, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes fixed on the wall. He looked older than I remembered. The man I’d thought for years was my father, and who had somehow still hated me. The man who’d murdered Jason, my first love, and bargained me off to a bloated changeling to try to gain power. He’d probably murdered my mother, and I wondered for a minute if he was Ivan’s real father, or if that was all a lie too.

I stayed by the door, unwilling to get closer, and carefully clarified my vision to see the weave. I expected a changeling, or some strange mess where a god of some kind had hollowed him out to use him as a puppet. But he was human.

Ordinary.

Just a man with a dull grey knot tangled at his core, pulsing with sickly green.

Greed.

If I traced it slowly, I could tell where it began. A brief flicker of his childhood and a friend who had more than he did. Another touch when someone offered him magic the first time, and he found he had little. Rage fed the internal hunger and helped the greed latch on. It was all-consuming, like an addiction. If he’d started off with more power, more money, or even access, he’d have been a nightmare of a thing. Even more so than he was now in his sickly human skin.

And wasn’t it interesting to follow the haphazard ties keeping up the confidence and resolve that made him sit there in silence. He could have given up names, tried to bargain for freedom, but he thought he had the power here.

I reached out and snipped the strands of the knot, yanking out the rotting tangle of greed. I held it in my hand for a second, then crushed it. It dissolved into nothing, and with it, his confidence collapsed. Fear overtook his expression as his gaze flicked over each of us.

“I want a lawyer,” Adrian demanded.

But that was the difference between the human side of the Veil and here beyond. Rules didn’t cross all barriers. I sucked in a breath and reached for the bodies I felt nearby—the dead I’d called to help stitch the tear, the dead that shouldn’t have been close to my father’s suburban mansion.

I reached for the bodies in the morgue. The ones Erlik had drained, offered up by Adrian’s cult to a shadow monster in the ether. The ones without names. I’d seen them on tables. Cold. Grey. Empty. But death was my domain now. And the dead did what I asked.

A body appeared at the door of the cell. The guards flinched back. A woman this time. I wondered if she’d been a friend of my mother’s, or a neighbor, or even an employee. Did any life have meaning to my father?

Adrian looked up at her, and screamed.

“I want names,” I said. “People who helped you. All of the cult, and every person you ever hurt.”

Adrian’s eyes were wide as saucers as he gasped for air, gaping like a fish out of water.

“I have easily two dozen more to call,” I offered.

The zombie took a lurching step toward him.

“Fine. I’ll talk. I’ll talk...” Adrian said in a rush.

Hanna’s smile showed a few too many teeth, but she hit a button, and I knew we were recording. In that moment, I wondered if she was still the scariest thing in the room—or maybe I was. And oddly, I would have been okay with either.

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JUDE