Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Even disguised by the glamour she wore, Petra looked a little shellshocked as she nibbled on a crispy eggroll and drank her tea. The expression in her eyes, illuminated in pale blue-green from the controls on his modified dashboard, was lost.

Good.

It was always best to keep wily opponents wrong-footed, and Petra Zaskodna was, if nothing else, wily .

“Where are you taking me?”

Silas brushed the backs of his claws against her kneecap again. He hadn’t quite been able to stop himself from finding reasons to touch her and didn’t care to besides. He didn’t like her glamour, impressive though it was. He wanted to see her, but since he was driving, he couldn’t find where she’d placed the sigil to anchor it in place.

Smelling her but not seeing her made the animal in him restless, aggressive. It urged him to pull over the car and pin her in place as he searched for that damn sigil. Then he’d wipe it away, revealing golden hair and pale blue eyes and a lush mouth and the too-striking cheekbones that made her features almost brutal.

The animal craved a look at that face. It wanted to spend the upcoming frenzy of the rut with her, yes, but it also just wanted to bask in her. But Silas had a destination in mind, so he soothed the animal by stroking her tense knee and breathing her in.

He wasn’t typically one for explanations, but he made an exception for her. “We’re going somewhere I know there won’t be any listening ears.”

“We couldn’t have stayed in San Francisco?”

“San Francisco is one of the single most surveilled cities on the planet.” That’s why he preferred to work pretty much anywhere else on the continent, though the Draakonriik was also a royal pain in his ass.

Elves were worse, though. Enriched by the technological boom and a collectively ruthless business savvy, they kept a tight fist on their territory — who came in, who left, and what a person did nearly every moment they were there. The EVP was known for being one of the most highly controlled areas of the continent, but what few average people understood was that it also boasted a correspondingly intelligent and ruthless underground network of spies, criminals, and black markets.

What even fewer knew, even among his ilk, was that those underground activities were closely monitored and sanctioned by the EVP itself. Nothing, not even crime, happened in an elf’s territory without their consent.

Which was exactly why he stayed the fuck out. Usually. Silas didn’t play within the EVP’s rules for criminals nor did he care to report to Kazimier Le Roy, the orcish attack dog secretly in charge of the intelligence unit that patrolled the underground. They would be stupid to trust Silas even if he said he would.

He’d been playing a little game with the orc for years. Whenever he snuck across the border, he made sure to let Kaz know — after he’d slipped back out. A sort of mutual respect existed between them, something developed over years of near- misses and exchanges of information. Silas let Kaz know where the holes in his security were, which he thought was awfully generous of him. In exchange, Kaz continued to let him come and go with only cursory attempts at capture.

Silas had nothing against Kaz other than the fact that he would probably put a bolt between his eyes the second the orc saw him in San Francisco. There were no hard feelings about it one way or the other. It was a matter of principle and winning the game.

It would become much, much more than that if the orc knew Silas was only in the city to steal the plans for the m-generator his new mate co-created.

Silas rubbed the backs of his claws against the denim covering Petra’s knee once more. That restlessness in him only grew when he thought of what might happen should Kaz — very distracted as of late, apparently — discover that Silas was a threat to his mate.

Normally, he would have rolled his eyes at the dramatics he imagined, loads of snarling and threats and piping hot plasma bolts ready to melt a hole through his brain, but now…

He understood it. Just a little.

He didn’t like people touching his things, either.

“You understand that women generally don’t like being kidnapped and then driven in the dead of night to some undisclosed location, right?”

Silas rolled his eyes. “Why would I kill you if I need your bond?”

Petra went quiet again. After some time, she said, “There are worse things than being murdered, Shade.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about the worst things in the world,” he replied, careful to keep his voice level. “I wonder why that is.”

She said nothing, but he didn’t expect her to. As he’d learned over the last few days, his little goddess wasn’t entirely what he thought she’d be. She remained a hypocrite, certainly, but everything else he thought he knew was smoke and mirrors.

Petra was a far better liar — a far more experienced liar — than he ever would have given her credit for.

His words hung in the air as they drove for an hour in silence. Silas noticed that she’d finished every drop of tea and even licked the tiny crumbs of the eggroll off the tip of her finger, but he couldn’t tell if it was a task to keep herself occupied or some other compulsion.

Tal told me she hasn’t been eating much, but I didn’t think she was starving.

He’d tasked his reluctant brother with watching over her while he did his recon, but the update he’d received upon returning to the city had been more confusing than helpful, particularly in light of what he’d learned.

Every day, she woke up before dawn to perform her service. She ate breakfast afterward, usually in her office, where she took meetings with worshippers, planned weddings, and did administrative tasks. Lunch was eaten amongst the dead, hidden in a tower above the main cathedral, and the rest of the day was spent either running community programs or instructing the initiates under her care. Then dinner, bed, and it began again.

She’s good to her people, Tal had told him, sounding even more troubled than when Silas left. Doesn’t take shit, but is always patient. She works hard, plays with kids in the nursery, never gets angry when someone accidentally messes up. I don’t think she knows it, but most of the staff adore her. I didn’t see one suspicious thing, Silas. Not one. I don’t think she does anything other than live and breathe her work. I don’t even know if she actually sleeps.

Someone else might have wondered if they’d misjudged her, but not Silas. Because no one, no good, normal person, sought him out. Ever. So he had to wonder who the real Petra was, hidden beneath so many masks. Who was the real woman? The one who performed so well under constant surveillance, or the one who felt comfortable seeking the help of a known killer?

He thought he might get some answers from his trip up north, but he’d only gotten more questions.

Because, as it turned out, Antonin Vanderpoel wasn’t the only ghost.

It was nearly midnight by the time he pulled into the gravel driveway of the tiny coastal shack he kept for emergencies. It was too dark to make out much of the squat wooden home or its red walls, tucked in amongst towering, spindly trees sloped by the wind, but he knew every inch of the land on which it sat.

Like all his properties, it was warded so tightly, no one but him and whoever he allowed could step foot on it. Even if they wanted to, it was almost impossible to see. He’d crafted funhouse mirrors of magic and power, distorting the image of the land, the road, the home, until what an outsider saw bore no resemblance to what was actually there.

Silas cut a glance at Petra, wondering what she’d make of it. He wasn’t disappointed.

She sat ram-rod straight in her seat, the empty bottle of tea in her white-knuckled grip, and stared out the windshield at the cottage with eyes that were wide enough to show white around the edges.

His home in the city was equally well warded. A bomb blast wouldn’t have made a dent in his defenses there, though that house was, by necessity, far more exposed to the public than the shack and therefore required more finesse in his work. Despite what he told her, she would have been safe and their conversation private if he’d simply taken her to his home in San Francisco.

But she wouldn’t have been as unsettled there, and that part was essential. Shaking her secrets loose wouldn’t happen if he didn’t rattle her a little.

“What are you hiding in there?” she asked, voice pitched so low he almost missed it.

Silas unclipped his seatbelt and then, because she seemed to have turned to stone, reached over her to do hers, too. “Nothing but some furniture, a fireplace, and canned soup.”

He was bent over her, contorted to twist over the console, when she turned her head sharply to face him. Nose to nose, their breath mingling between them, he thought he could just see between the shimmering layers of her glamour.

Petra nearly breathed the words against his mouth when she hissed, “Is this where you take people to kill them?”

Fuck. The urge to snake his tongue along her plush bottom lip, undisguised by her illusion, was a visceral thing. He’d never been one for kissing, really, but with Petra… Yes, he could understand why others enjoyed it so much. He wanted to suck the breath from her lungs until she came to him for air.

“No,” he answered, unlatching her seatbelt’s mechanism. His voice sounded like crushed gravel. Shadows stirred around the car, awakened by the deep, dark thing in him that reached for her. “Mostly I kill people in their own homes. You think I’d go through all this effort just to clean a bunch of brainmatter off my own walls?”

He tsked. “Baby, I’m not gonna kill you. I’m gonna interrogate you. If you’re a good girl and answer all my questions, I might even fuck you after.” Silas fought the desire to kiss her, knowing he should save that for another time, and instead brushed his lips, so very gently, against the silky curve of her cheek. “Even little goddesses like to come, don’t they?”

He said it mostly to get a rise out of her — gods knew she needed to do so very little to get one out of him — but he was pleased as punch when it did something else.

The thread of scent in the air was unmistakable. He was pretty sure it was branded into his brain the first time he smelled it, but now, up close and stronger than before, it was a siren’s song.

Petra’s desire was like ambrosia on his tongue.

Her expression was shuttered, her glamoured eyes almost hateful, but her scent couldn’t be controlled — and demons had damn good noses.

Silas couldn’t help it. He laughed.

My pretty hypocrite, he thought, pressing a quick kiss to the tip of her nose, you’re more fucked up than I thought.