Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen

“He wanted to know where I came from, how I got the seat so many other people wanted, et cetera,” she said, though she barely breathed.

“Hm.” Something squeezed around her legs and slithered upwards — the strange there-and-not sensation of Silas’s shadow’s curling around her like the vines of a great, carnivorous plant. “Is that why a man puts a camera in a woman’s bedroom? Because he wants to know how ambitious she is?”

“The Protector has eyes everywhere,” she replied, though she knew exactly what he was implying.

“I wonder how many of them are fixed on you and you alone.”

Many, she silently answered. Too many.

It hadn’t started like that. She knew the cathedral was bugged because it was an open secret amongst the higher ranks that all of Glory’s Temple buildings fed information back to the High Gloriae — every secret, every tryst, every muttered complaint. Even if it wasn’t true, the rumor had a devastatingly effective chokehold on dissent.

The other reason she knew was because Max had told her so. He mentioned it only once, during that last concerning phone call when he told her he was confronting the Protector about something he’d found. The city sounds had been loud in the phone’s speakers and she’d asked him why he was outside at such a late hour.

“There are eyes and ears everywhere in the cathedral,” he’d explained, sounding exhausted to the point of tears. “There are cameras everywhere but my room. I did a sweep there, but now— I can’t risk anything. Not until I see him.”

When she took over his old suite, she’d used her own black market sensor to confirm what Max had confessed. For three years her bedroom had been safe.

And then Antonin showed up at her door, asking so many deceptively pleasant questions, and by the time he left…

Trying to divert the conversation back into a more productive avenue, Petra said, “Well, he’ll be focused on me tomorrow, which is good for the plan. Last time he traveled with six guards. Two were with him at all times, two stayed in his suite, and the other two joined the staff security team. If everything goes right, you should only have to avoid the two guarding his suite while I have dinner with him.”

Silas was curiously quiet for a man who seemed to love the sound of his own voice so much. He merely sat there, arm and shadows tight around her, listening as she rambled at increasing speed. “Once you get something incriminating — anything — you have to take it straight to Elise. She knows to expect something. If it’s incriminating enough, she should take it to Patrol.”

“And what happens when the Protector discovers his secrets are out?”

Petra swallowed. “Well, theoretically, he’ll have no reason to tie it back to either of us, since I’ll be having dinner with him and he won’t know you’re here. Nothing more than suspicion, anyway, if you do your job well. And if the news gets out about who he is and what he’s done, then… then he’ll go to jail.”

She didn’t need to feel Silas’s deep, deep sigh to realize how naive she sounded. Petra was painfully aware.

She was also lying.

The daughter of two criminals, orphaned by a turf war, victim of a system that didn’t know what to do with magically gifted children no one wanted, and pawn in a vicious power structure — of course she knew better than to trust the system to achieve justice.

But in this instance, she had to believe something would happen to Antonin. She could only speculate about the extent of his crimes, but there was no way they stopped at the mysterious death of her predecessor.

Some terrible dread itched at the back of her mind — a shadow not cast by her own looming demise, but the feeling that something much bigger, much more terrible loomed just out of sight.

Max knew what it was and it got him killed. It would likely do the same to her despite the fact that she barely had the smallest inkling of what it might be. The only difference between them was that Petra suffered no delusions about her own ability to change the course or scare the Protector enough to confess.

Antonin would not give up power. Even faced with credible accusations, the High Gloriae, who benefited immensely from his spy network and surveillance, would never remove him even if they wanted to.

But the public? The major players of the UTA? Oh, they could do something.

In fact, Petra had a letter drafted and ready to be delivered to Margot Goode in the event of her death, explaining everything in great detail. Even if Petra’s plan completely failed, that letter would still reach her.

A steady hand tipped the bottom of her coffee cup toward her lips. Petra took a drink reflexively as he shrewdly noted, “You would have been smarter to bargain with me to kill him.”

Before she could think better of it and censor herself, she answered, “I didn’t have the money for a hit that risky.”

She didn’t expect him to let out a low groan of pleasure, nor for him to drop his head to rest on the curve of her shoulder. “You’re perfect.”

“You’re deranged for thinking so.”

No one sane would take her blithe confession that she’d considered having a man murdered as a mark of perfection. It made sense that he would, but it was important to her that he understood the crucial fact that it didn’t make it normal.

“You have no idea how much it turns me on to know I never have any idea what you’re going to say next.” Going by the press of his heavy erection against her ass, she thought she had a pretty good idea, but decided the safest option available to her was silence.

“How much money do you really have?” he asked, still sounding horrifyingly pleased with her. “I was able to find a few of your accounts, but none of them had more than ten thousand in them.”

“Was that how you found the cellphone?”

“Yes. Next time, don’t honor a long-term contract. Use it, burn it, cancel it. If you keep using the same phone, it’s relatively easy to eventually pick up on the repeated location pings in the satellite network. Find enough of them and it’s child’s play to work backwards and get the source.”

Petra swallowed a mushy lump of oatmeal with great difficulty. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll remember it for next time.” She forced down another bite. “But I didn’t set up the phones. Max did. He also handled all the accounts.”

The humiliating truth was that she only had a grasp on half of what he’d explained to her in painful detail. It was partly because she hadn’t wanted to listen, believing him understandably paranoid, and partly because no bit of her had ever, ever considered that he would not be around to make sure everything was okay.

How stupid that was, considering he’d left me before. She hated how bitter she still was about that, but childhood wounds never truly healed, no matter how much time passed.

Picking her words carefully, she explained, “The biggest account has a few million dollars in it. That was his major back-up in case we ever needed to run. The others were insurance and emergency funds.”

“The accounts, the secret phones, the back-up plan to run — that sounds like a criminal’s safety net, not a High Priest’s retirement plan.” Silas grasped her chin and urged her to turn her head. When she caught his eye, she found his expression as keen and sharp as a blade. “Who was Maximilian Dooraker?”

“A good man,” she answered, grief squeezing her so tight, she wondered if it would at last snap her in two.

Silas grazed her jaw with the tip of his claw and drawled, “Baby, good men are boring. That man wasn’t boring.”

Petra closed her eyes to keep him from seeing how they watered. She’d already cried in front of Silas once. There was absolutely no way she’d make that mistake again.

There was a part of her that balked at revealing the memory of Max to someone like Silas, but another part, something beaten and starving, was desperate for someone, anyone to know how and why she grieved.

“Max wasn’t always Max,” she whispered, as if such a secret could still hurt the man who existed as a pile of ash in her cabinet. “He grew up in a crime family from Baltimore, then moved with his siblings to Los Angeles after the war ended. He mostly ran guns — which is where he made his money.”

There’d been so much opportunity in the chaos that followed the war. So many ways to make money. Max might have made even more if the elves hadn’t gotten their act together and began cracking down on crime — specifically the du Soleil family, which controlled the vast majority of southern California with icy benevolence.

“Shit happens,” she continued, referring to the horror of that life in the way of her people, “and eventually he got sick of people dying. Around then he got shot and nearly died. Max decided it was as good a time as any to get out of the game, so he faked his death and rebuilt an identity in the Coven Collective as an acolyte.”

He meant it, too. The years of violence and grief had scarred him. Glory’s light, the peace of religious instruction and service… it healed him in ways it had never quite done for her.

Her peace had been found in a little life, helping young, wayward teens find their footing — in or out of the Temple — and spending time with the only family she had left.

All of that was gone.

“That’s all there is,” she finished, shrugging like her nose didn’t sting with tears. A whole life summed up in a couple paragraphs. How depressing.

Silas’s voice took on a curious note when he asked, “Where do you come in?”

She risked opening her eyes to gauge his expression. It was stiff with some intense emotion she couldn’t name, but also avid, like he couldn’t stop himself from asking for more information.

Her first instinct was to deny him an answer, but she checked it before the words could make it past her lips. Why shouldn’t I?

There was nothing he could do with the information besides turn on her to curry favor with Antonin, but he had more than enough on her already. Knowing her connection to Max wouldn’t dig her grave any deeper.

And she imagined it would feel… good to say it. To have the words out, heard. No one else in all the world knew about their bond and that bothered her. When Max lived, it was a sweet secret she could cherish always. After his death, it was a too-small cage for her grief, forever dooming her to screaming in the silence of her mind.

But I don’t have to do that now.

Looking at him, she knew that he would not offer her comforting words or a big hug to ease the pain. He was perhaps the least receptive ear for her grief that she could imagine.

But he was there and he was listening, and if she died the following day, at least one person would know about the relationship that saved her.

Speaking softly, she answered, “Max was my uncle, and the only family I had left. Everyone else is dead.”