Chapter 46

Chapter Forty-Six

The only thing that made seeing Rasmus’s smug face within a hundred yards of his mate bearable was the knowledge that she sat in the car smelling like sex and sticky with his come.

Personally, he didn’t see the point of any of this.

Even if he hadn’t been more territorial than normal, he wouldn’t have understood Petra’s reasoning for this song and dance. Silas didn’t understand why Petra didn’t simply keep the stupid journal. After all, it was always good to have blackmail in your pocket — especially if it was on unpredictable bastards like Rasmus Adams. Or if she didn’t want to keep it, then they could damn well send it to him. He was feral, but Silas was pretty sure the man had a mailbox.

But Petra insisted on being certain he received it, and when she wanted something, she got it.

So even though it went against every instinct he possessed, Silas met the were in the parking lot of Maple’s Diner. The journal was tucked into a brown paper bag, tightly sealed with a piece of tape. Petra treated the thing like contraband, which he supposed it was, in a sense.

His mate had spent most of the last day and a half participating in a mostly one-sided debate over whether they should hand it over to Rasmus or the authorities. He really didn’t care which she chose, as both options were equally bland, but he did offer his opinion that giving it to Rasmus might earn them a favor in the future. It wasn’t as good as blackmail, but it was something.

Petra didn’t love that suggestion, but she didn’t say it was a bad idea, either. While he suspected most of her reasoning for deciding to hand it over was sentimental — seeing as they were something approaching friends, apparently — he wanted to believe she saw his point, too. His witch had a soft heart, but she could be ruthless. It was one of the many things he loved about her.

Rasmus climbed out of his sleek silver car and rested a hand on the roof, his suspicious, mismatched eyes fixed on Silas. He was dressed in dark slacks and a pale blue button down, and his tattoos peeked out from above the collar and from where he’d rolled up the sleeves. His hair, messy on top and beginning to gray on the sides, looked like he’d been running his fingers through it.

Before Rasmus could take a step in Silas’s direction, he snapped, “Stay there.”

“Why?”

“Because my mate’s in the car, asshole.”

And since the man apparently had a death wish, his gaze slid over Silas’s shoulder to peer at the tinted windshield. Even though Silas knew he could only see the vague shape of Petra, he stepped into Rasmus’s eyeline anyway, his shadows rippling across his body in a blatant threat.

“Eyes off if you wanna keep them.”

Rasmus made a sucking sound with his teeth. It puckered his scarred lips in a funny way.

The war and a hard life had done a number on him. Silas imagined that at some point Rasmus had been blown up and put together just a little bit wrong, but he’d heard people still thought the man was handsome. He didn’t get it, but his tastes ran blonde, buxom, and able to burn his nuts off when the mood struck, so he wasn’t the best judge.

“You gonna tell me why I had to drag my ass across the continent or what?” Rasmus asked, one scarred eyebrow cocked.

Rolling his shoulders to ease some of the tension knotting his muscles, Silas strode over to Rasmus’s car. The were watched him closely. His eyes had a wild gleam to them, something dark and animalistic, but that wasn’t new. Rasmus always looked like he was half a step away from letting the beast explode from within. He claimed it was part of his charm.

“Here,” Silas grunted, shoving the package into Rasmus’s chest with more force than necessary. To his credit, the man didn’t stumble.

Wisely, he also didn’t reach for it. “What’s this?”

“We came across some information. This is a bit you’re gonna wanna see.” Considering the amount of raw, encrypted data his systems were still trying to process, qualifying what they’d uncovered as “some” was probably the understatement of the century. Rasmus didn’t need to know that, though.

His explanation didn’t put the were at ease. Instead, he wisely appeared to grow even more suspicious. “And you just want to give it to me? For free?”

Silas shoved the package into his chest again, but this time he let go of it, forcing Rasmus to catch it before it fell to the gritty asphalt.

“I’m not giving you shit. My mate is.”

Holding the package in one hand like it might explode at any moment, Rasmus dared to glance toward the car again. “The only reason I bothered to come here is to see if she’s alive. Is she doing all right?”

“Fine.”

“Really? Because last time I saw her, she had a hole in her side.”

Silas’s shadows rippled, itching to act on the surge of aggression that coursed through him, but he got a handle on them just in time. He had no particular fondness for Rasmus, and Silas hated that he’d seen Petra when she was at her most vulnerable, but killing him served no real purpose.

Maybe that wouldn’t have stopped him before, but it did now. Because now he had a mate to think about. Petra asked him not to hurt Rasmus and so he wouldn’t.

Even if he really wanted to.

“She’s healed,” he bit out, forcing his shadows to settle at his feet, where they began to writhe in the darkness below Rasmus’s vehicle. The urge to slash his tires was a visceral one.

She’s healed, he silently repeated, reassuring himself. She’s healed and she’s mine and no one can take her from me.

And when they got back to his den, he’d finally, finally seal that claim.

Rasmus shook his head, his expression troubled. “Look, I certainly can’t say shit about mismatched pairings, but you and Pet? Are you sure? I want to talk to her, just to see for myself that you haven’t fucked with her head or something. She deserves better than you, Shade.”

Silas couldn’t deny it. He still felt her fingers gently combing through his hair, still heard the sweet nothings she whispered in his ear. He couldn’t stop thinking of her quiet certainty that he cared.

Petra Zaskodna was a woman of masks, but those masks hid an exquisitely fragile heart. She cared about her people. She was loyal to a fault. She believed in justice, however it might be delivered.

She was good — and that was why she needed someone very, very bad.

No one else could give her what she needed to thrive. He might be a bad mate who couldn’t love her in the way he should, but he’d tear the world down to the studs for her.

And he’d never leave her.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he replied, aggression steadily rising like steam within a kettle. “She’s my mate. She’s happy and she’s healthy and she’s safe. That’s all you or anyone else needs to know.”

Rasmus’s lips pressed thin. “I want to see her.”

“Sounds like you want to die, too.”

“She’s my friend, Shade, and I’m the one who made the colossal mistake of connecting you two. I need to see that she’s okay after you got her shot.”

“The fact that you’re her friend is the only reason you’re here,” he snarled. His blood felt too hot, his skin too tight. The glare of the sun was searing on the crown of his head and in his eyes.

Fuck this and fuck the sun. We should be in my den.

On the brink of losing control, Silas sought out the bit of himself tied around Petra’s neck. The phantom touch of her — the beat of her pulse, the salt of her skin, the hot bite of her magic — soothed the sharpest edge of his rage. For a moment, anyway.

“She’s the one who wanted to give you that. She’s the one who demanded we meet. You think I’d do this? You think I’d do you a favor?”

A keen-eyed animal peered out of Rasmus’s mismatched eyes. “What favor are you doing for me, exactly?”

What little patience Silas possessed was rapidly evaporating. “You know what I could be doing right now instead of this? My mate. Just look in the fuckin’ bag so we can go.”

In a headspace not clouded by hormones, Silas would’ve appreciated the caution with which Rasmus peeled the tape off the package and pulled the edges of the bag apart. After all, there were many ways one could kill a man. Hiding some nasty sigilwork or even some good old fashioned poison in a package wasn’t the worst thing Silas had ever done, and they both knew it.

Rasmus was no saint. He’d had an illustrious career as a jack of all trades criminal before he settled down with the San Francisco were pack and took up the job as their enforcer and most recently as the owner of The Broken Tooth. There wasn’t much work for weres in the grim days after the war, so it wasn’t an uncommon story. The ones who learned to control their beasts tended to band together to share resources. Many of those packs inevitably turned to crime when every other door was shut in their faces. Some were better at it than others, and a select few, like the man standing before Silas, were very, very good.

Like him, Rasmus had killed men in underhanded ways. Many of them.

His skepticism was warranted, as was his clear reluctance to peer into the bag. Silas wouldn’t have done it. But he could feel his rut rising in him, putting pressure on all the soft, logical parts that might have found some humor in the situation, if not an overabundance of patience.

He wanted to leave.

It didn’t make a damn lick of difference to him what happened with Rasmus and the journal. He didn’t care about the man, nor weres in general.

And yet, somehow through the cloud of hormones and impatience, a bit of… something managed to get through when Silas watched the man’s face go sickly gray.

Rasmus stared into the bag for several seconds before he reached inside to retrieve the old, smoke-scented doctor’s journal. His eyes went wide and glassy, his lips colorless. All the life in him appeared to simply shut down.

“Where did you find this?”

“On a dead man.”

Rasmus didn’t open it. He didn’t appear to need to. His fingers gripped the aged leather cover so hard the pads went white. “Who.”

It wasn’t a question. It was barely even a word. The single syllable was garbled, choked out like a reflex.

Silas didn’t want to give him anything, especially any information tied to Petra. Everything about her was on lockdown — particularly her involvement in the death of the Protector of the Gloriae.

But Silas fought to claw back some of his usual cool rationality. He needed to see this moment as he would have a month ago, when everything was different. What can I get from this?

He’d never considered allies before. After all, he’d only ever needed Tal. Everyone else who might have been useful to him could either be bought or blackmailed into giving him what he wanted. Silas had viewed the gift of the journal as a sort of bribery for a future favor, but when he watched Rasmus’s features tremble, threatening the infamous and horrifying transformation into his were form, he realized that there might be something else gained.

“His name was Antonin Vanderpoel,” he begrudgingly revealed. “He was Protector of the Gloriae and the leader of the Ardeo.”

“The Ardeo?” Rasmus took half a step back, his expression contorting with disbelief. “The Temple hasn’t had a military since?—”

“Apparently they survived. Or someone has gone to great lengths to remake it.”

“Fuck.” Rasmus braced his free hand on the roof of his car. His other hand hung stiffly by his side, the journal pressed against his thigh like he wanted to keep it out of sight. If Silas thought he was pale before, it was nothing compared to the sickly pallor that passed over him then.

Almost speaking to himself, the were muttered, “Soldiers. He was trying to make soldiers. Just never found out why.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Wyeth.” Rasmus’s forehead beaded with sweat. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Josephine said it was— She warned me. She was always trying to warn me. I thought it was the Queen. We all thought it was the Queen.”

Silas could barely follow the thread of what Rasmus was trying to tell him, but there was only one queen in the UTA. The orcish queen of the Orclind was a formidable, ruthless woman, and he had no doubt that she could have been responsible, but… “That was never proven, and Queen Sigrid denies it. ”

“That’s where most of us were shipped. Not all, but most,” Rasmus replied, brows bunching as if in pain. Silas got the impression that he’d momentarily forgotten who he was talking to. “The Orclind was being hammered on both sides and they’d started running out of soldiers. None of it made any sense, but it was the only theory that had legs. It never occurred to me that they might have been testing soldiers for another player altogether and— and hiding it behind selling us as mercenaries.”

The hair on the back of Silas’s neck prickled. Voice dropping, he muttered, “I think the Temple has had grand ambitions for a very long time.”

“How do you know?” Rasmus opened his eyes and pinned Silas with a glassy look. “How do you know he didn’t just— just stumble on the journal? Or buy it?”

They were valid questions. If Vanderpoel was in the blackmail business, as he very much was, then it made sense that much of his information would be bought secondhand. It wasn’t outrageous to think he might have had no direct involvement in the scheme to weaponize weres.

“Dr. Wyeth wasn’t discreet.” Silas gestured to the journal in Rasmus’s white-knuckled grip. “There’s more than just medical notes in there. There’s records of payments, summaries of meetings, complaints about his benefactors. He basically plastered the Temple’s name all over it.”

Which explained why Antonin kept it. Whether he had a direct connection with Dr. Wyeth or not, it made sense to keep an ace in his pocket. Hiding it saved the Temple from international outrage and prosecution, but if he’d ever needed to leverage something against the organization as a whole… Yeah, evidence of a war crime would do it.

Rasmus swiped his hand over his clammy face. “The Temple was building an army. Why?” He paused, eyes darting like he might find the answers out in the grass somewhere.

Silas’s mind churned through everything he knew, everything he’d seen and heard in the last few years.

There was nothing concrete, no one thing he could pin his suspicions on, but his gut warned him that he’d been closer to the Ardeo’s web than he realized long before he ever set his sights on Petra.

“No organization that has the means and the wherewithal to make soldiers stops on its own,” Silas replied. “It just changes tactics. I haven’t figured out what they’re after, but I will.”

Rasmus’s gaze sharpened as the shock began to wear off. “Is this what Pet needed your help with?”

“No.” He scowled. “Not directly. She had no idea what she was stepping into. And stop fuckin’ calling her that.”

A shadow of a smile came and went across the were’s scarred mouth. “How’d she get shot? I figured it was your fuck-up, but…”

It was my fuck-up. But Silas still answered, “Vanderpoel.”

“When she asked me to set up the meeting between you two, I asked her why. Figured I could probably talk her out of it if I knew. But she said she needed information on someone, and he was dangerous enough that she didn’t want me or the pack involved. Must’ve been him, huh?” Rasmus straightened up a bit, his shoulders no longer bunched up around his ears. “The sabbatical excuse is good for a few months, Shade, but if this is as bad as it looks?—”

“I know.”

He wasn’t naive enough to think the Ardeo died with Vanderpoel, nor that he could hide Petra away forever. Willingly, anyway. The shock of killing Vanderpoel would wear off eventually and she’d want to return to the world, maybe even to her position as High Priestess. The clock was ticking before they were either found or she got it into her head to do something reckless.

Silas had no intention of failing her again, so that meant he had to figure this out before either of those things happened.

He’d put the entire Temple on notice, and he wouldn’t sleep until he’d rooted out every threat to his mate. If that meant he had to burn the entire institution down, then so be it.

Pushing himself slightly away from the car, Rasmus asked, “What do you want in exchange for this?”

“My mate wanted it to be a gift.”

“Great, but that’s not how this works.”

Silas fought the urge to turn his head to check on Petra. He’d been gone from her side for too long. His skin was beginning to feel too tight again, his clothes scratchy and stifling.

“You’re right,” he bit out. “I want you to be my eyes and ears in San Francisco. At least until we get back. I want to know if someone so much as whispers her name. And be on standby if I need something in the next few weeks.”

“What are you planning?”

Silas was already turning away, his long strides carrying him swiftly back to Petra, when he replied, “What would you do if a shady secret organization tried to kill your mate?”

Rasmus answered matter-of-factly, “Destroy ’em.”

Silas lifted a hand over his shoulder and flicked his pointer finger. Got it in one, asshole.

Rasmus barked his name, but Silas didn’t stop walking. He could make out the shape of Petra nearly pressing her nose against the windshield. Now that he’d sighted her, only an m-lev train could have knocked him off course.

His heart thumped in his ears as a rush of anticipation moved in a prickling wave over every inch of his flesh. It’s time, the animal in him howled. It’s finally time.

“Shade! What am I supposed to do with the journal?”

“Whatever the fuck you want,” he growled, yanking open the driver’s side door with a little too much force.

The scent of his mate and his own musky release wafted over him, more intoxicating than any drug. Rationality wavered.

Gogogogethomegrabherlickhercuntuntilshebegsgo—

Silas bit his cheek hard, fighting back against the animal that threatened to make it impossible for him to drive. Any interest he might have had in Rasmus was blown away like smoke in the wind.

Climbing into the car, Silas didn’t spare a thought for the way the man continued to stand there in the parking lot, staring at the journal in his hand like he couldn’t decide if he should throw it into the drainage ditch or not. He didn’t care what Rasmus chose to do with the journal.

Only one thing mattered, and she needed to be in his den.

Now.