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Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

He couldn’t say he felt bad for calling Petra dramatic, but he could admit that he underestimated how fucked up the heart of Glory’s Temple was.

Silas knew it was corrupt because all institutions were. He knew the higher-ups were liars because everyone was. He knew they had a history of blackmail, indoctrination of gifted children, and much more because… well, that shit was all in the history books.

After all he’d seen and done in his long criminal career, Silas thought he was unshockable. Turns out he was wrong.

A dead, red-clad guard stared up at him with glassy eyes. He was sprawled on the floor, disabled by one of Silas’s nastier wards when he made the mistake of checking on a mysterious noise in the sparkling, freshly renovated bathroom. The ward hadn’t been his cause of death — not technically, anyway. Neither was it Silas’s boot, which had come down hard on his windpipe as soon as he stumbled to the ground.

No, his demise came from a beautifully woven mesh of magic draped over his mind. One that, once disabled by Silas’s own ward, had set off a cascade effect that terminated in what he could only speculate was an aneurysm.

Whether that was an intentional design or simply bad luck, Silas couldn’t say.

“Damn,” he muttered, peeling his boot off the guard’s throat. He didn’t like dealing with brainwashed folks. It grossed him out about as much as m-siphons did. Yes, it was a quick way to get things done, but where was the art in it? The skill?

Besides the fact that it was just lazy, it was also prone to failure. The guard was a perfect example. The mind could only take so much pressure, so much fiddling, before it became as fragile as an eggshell — a bad trait to have in a henchman.

Sighing, Silas stooped to drag the body across the bathroom floor and into the brand new bathtub. Normally he didn’t care about leaving a mess, but this was Petra’s territory and he didn’t want to complicate her life too much.

Thinking of her made him even more restless and agitated. Now that he knew he was dealing with a man who carted around carloads of armed and brainwashed guards, he enjoyed the thought of her out there entertaining Antonin for most of the day even less than he had before.

The only thing that stopped him from abandoning his plan for Vanderpoel’s suite was the knowledge that she was safely locked away in her closet, guarded by Tal. For all his warnings and complaints, Tal would look after Petra with all the ferocity of Silas himself.

Mostly. Tal wouldn’t set fire to this city for her. I would.

It was a struggle to put her out of his mind for most of the day as he set up his wards in the Protector’s suite well ahead of his arrival. It was a new and humbling form of torture to force himself to sit in the alley that the Protector’s bathroom window opened up into, waiting, knowing that Petra was out front facing the man himself.

He considered spiriting her away before Antonin arrived, but that was an instinctive urge, not a logical one. Petra was right in that she was a perfect distraction, and killing the man would be much easier if he wasn’t already on his guard due to a missing High Priestess.

So as much as it went against something deeply fundamental, Silas let her greet the Protector and, according to the flat updates passed between the guards he heard moving in and out of the suite, give him a tour.

He drew the line at dinner, though. Not just because it was objectively too risky, especially now that he knew the man brainwashed his guards, but because the jealous, possessive monster in him simply couldn’t abide the thought of her sharing a private meal with a man who wanted her.

Silas had been sure of that before, but after a quick scan of the belongings his entourage had unpacked and set about the suite, he was absolutely certain of it.

Luxury women’s bathing products had been placed alongside the Protector’s shaving kit, the bottles new and unopened. Two robes, one small enough to fit his witch and one slightly larger were carefully hung on hooks on the other side of the bathroom door. When he stalked into the bedroom, he found the bed sheets turned down.

Both nightstands held covered glasses of water, and at the foot of the bed was a sheer negligee in deep crimson, just the right size for his witch.

Silas’s stomach turned. When it settled back into position, it began to fill with the liquid fire of pure fury.

Clearly the man expected dinner to go well. It was just too bad for him that Petra wouldn’t be sleeping in anyone’s bed besides Silas’s — and also that she wouldn’t be making their date. She was safely locked away in a closet and guarded by one very determined wraith.

Reminding himself that he’d kill the man as soon as he returned to the suite, hopefully feeling jilted, Silas turned his mind to getting his job done as quickly as possible.

The bedroom had little of interest save for a few strategically hidden guns and portable wards, which had been effectively muted by the ones he laid around the suite before the Protector’s arrival.

The sitting room held far more of interest.

I’ll be damned, he thought, eyeing the impressive portable command center the guards had set up in a corner. Petra was right. He did bring everything with him.

Not only was there a bank of screens showing the entire cathedral, but also several neat red trunks lined up against the wall. When he skated his palm over them, magic screamed out from the very pores of the leather, warning him away.

Silas debated for a moment over which to investigate first. He eyed the empty seat in front of the screens. Fury roared out from where it simmered in his gut.

The guard who lay dead in the bathtub had almost certainly been stationed there, scanning the screens for anything amiss — including the one that showed the manipulated view of Petra’s bedroom.

You’re lucky you’re already dead, he thought, stalking over to the station.

Yanking the chair back from the desk, he fought the urge to swipe his arm across the whole thing, sending every bit of machinery onto the floor where he could stomp it into nothing but trash.

You promised her.

He’d get her revenge, but he had to do this, too. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t get her bond.

Silas gripped the edge of the desk so hard his knuckles bleached white. At some point his objective shifted from needing her power and connections to needing her. It was a subtle thing, a movement of inches when he wasn’t looking, but there it was, clear as day.

If his shadows refused to take to her like they should, then her bond was all he had to tie her to him. Not having her tied to him was so fundamentally unacceptable, he simply refused to contemplate it.

So he pried his claws out from where they’d gouged holes in the desk and got to work.

She wouldn’t have any excuses after this. No reason to deny him. He’d give her Vanderpoel’s head, the proof she believed she needed, even hand deliver it all to her journalist friend — whatever it took to chain her to his side so he could satisfy the craven, desperate thing in him that howled for her every second they were apart.

While Silas downloaded the contents of the surveillance station and the various tablets and phones he’d found locked away in a safe onto a few hard drives, he got to work on the red trunks.

Their hardware was burnished gold and the red leather was stamped with the Glory’s symbol on the lid, but otherwise they were nondescript. The only thing that truly set them apart were the wards.

A few had been voided when they were brought into the suite, but whoever had worked on them knew what they were doing. Failsafes and multiple layers meant that they were still a bitch to unravel.

Normally he would have savored the challenge, but his nerves were strung too tight to enjoy it.

The wards required all his focus — if he didn’t want to lose a finger, or be immolated, or perhaps have his gray matter turned to jelly from a controlled sonic impact — but a small part of his mind couldn’t be diverted from his anxiety over what Petra was doing, whether Tal was keeping her safe.

Of course he was. They had, after all, gone around in circles over the point just the night before. Even if Tal didn’t suspect how deep Silas had sunk into his obsession with the witch, he trusted his brother implicitly.

Like him, Tal had a heavily skewed moral compass but he was unerringly loyal to those few who earned it. If he said he’d keep Petra safe, he’d do everything in his power to keep his word.

And yet Silas wasn’t the one watching her. She wasn’t in his den. She’d been fully prepared to meet another dangerous, unpredictable man for dinner. She probably even had Antonin’s scent on her — the cloying, artificial amber of the expensive cologne that lingered in the bathroom.

It was enough to drive a man to distraction, even when he handled borderline explosive magic-infused objects.

He did get them open, though, one by one.

Within each trunk were hundreds and hundreds of painstakingly organized files, hard drives, ancient disks, and much more modern organic computing chips that could store a mind-blowing amount of data. At a glance, the information in the trunks seemed to span at least two hundred and fifty years, but probably much more than that.

Some of the paper files were labeled with names, some with codes. Some held compromising photos, bank records, politically damaging testimony. Some were almost an inch thick and some held a single piece of paper. In one he picked at random, he found a thin file on a sweet-faced initiate dated to the eighteen hundreds. Twin girls, their hair braided, stared out from beneath a later portrait of just one of them.

Something tickled his brain about the shape of their faces, the canny, almost vulpine look to their features, before he quickly flipped through the rest of the file. A blur of information went over his head — initiate intake paperwork, a two-hundred year old marriage license registered in the Coven Collective, yellowed letters with increasingly erratic handwriting, a plea for help scrawled on the back of a hymn ripped out of a book, and a death certificate.

Huh, he thought, eyebrows hiking up his forehead as he read the name on the certificate. Ellouise Goode. He flipped back to the pictures. The resemblance clicked. I didn’t know Sophie Goode had a sister.

Silas let out a put-upon sigh. He slid the file back into place and closed the trunk before he moved onto the final one. Petra will want all of this.

It was a good thing he’d parked his car in the alley and cloaked it. Otherwise getting all the damn trunks out would have been an even bigger pain in his ass.

After a glance at the download progress of his hard drives, Silas opened the last trunk. Unlike the others, it was only half full, and what it did have was mostly personal effects.

An ancient-looking leather-bound journal that smelled of stale smoke, a small, well-buffed briefcase, several velvet boxes containing gold and platinum, more files…

Silas popped open the briefcase and tensed. Within it was a slim red file with Petra’s name on it. He couldn’t say he was surprised, but it was still jarring to open the cover and see a picture of her there, glossy and candid.

He skated his fingertips over the curve of her cheek and made a silent promise to burn it for her as soon as he was able.

Unable to stop himself, he turned it over to see what lay directly beneath the large photograph.

What the fuck?

Silas stared, uncomprehending, at the half-finished marriage license. It was registered to San Francisco and the names, birth dates, and ID numbers had already been filled out.

All it was missing was a couple signatures.

He’d never blacked out in his life, but in that moment, Silas’s mind went completely blank, his senses mute. The declaration on the innocuous piece of paper, the intention behind it, was so outrageous and so offensive that he could not assimilate its existence into his reality.

It was one thing to know that Vanderpoel wanted Petra. Of course he did. Silas could understand that better than anyone, though that understanding wouldn’t save the man from his wrath.

What had never occurred to him, however, was that he would want to keep her. The implications of that desire were far, far more dire than that of a man who simply wanted to have sex with a beautiful, powerful woman like Petra.

Does she know?

A bitter taste coated the back of his tongue. His ears rang. He didn’t even realize what he’d done before the remnants of the shredded document floated back down into the trunk.

Of course she knew. Hadn’t she hedged when she explained why the Protector was so interested in her? He’d assumed she didn’t want to admit that he wanted to fuck her, but now…

She knew that the Protector wanted to marry her. It stood to reason that he also wanted her bond.

Silas recalled the products in the bathroom with curious, deadly calm. The negligee. The turned down sheets.

Little liar, he thought, you really have been playing with fire.

A muscle in his jaw spasmed as he slowly placed the file back into the briefcase. The discovery of Maximilian Dooraker’s file within the briefcase as well only made him that much angrier.

Obviously the Protector had discovered far more about Petra than she realized. Silas hated that. Not just because it put his witch at risk, but because those secrets didn’t belong to Vanderpoel. They, like everything else about her, belonged to him.

Petra had no clue how much danger she was in. She’d danced with two vipers, both trying to consume her, and thought she could survive.

We’re going to have a very serious conversation tonight, naughty little goddess. A very, very serious conversation.

After he released her from her imprisonment, of course.

One by one, he shoved the trunks out into the alley and then into the back of his car. Downloads complete, he threw his hard drives into his backpack and then tossed that in the car as well.

Now all he had to do was clean up. Then he could rip Vanderpoel’s throat out and retrieve his naughty witch.

Intending to save the body for last, Silas stooped over the surveillance station, inputting the program to wipe every bit of data from the servers and all connected to it, when the shadows in the corner of the room rippled.

A cold stone of dread dropped into the pit of his stomach.

Before Tal could even finish manifesting, Silas lunged for the door.

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