Chapter 51

Chapter Fifty-One

Petra wanted to appreciate the spectacle of Silas working in his element, but she couldn’t focus on anything other than keeping her breathing level.

She didn’t want to be right. She wanted Silas to find more illicit personal information, not any evidence of a plot. She needed to be wrong.

But the knot of anxiety in her stomach wouldn’t budge. It was the same feeling she’d gotten the day her parents were killed. It was that gut instinct that told her to hide mere moments before the shooting started.

There were so many reasons she could be wrong, though. Really, what evidence did she have? Nothing but her gut and suspicious timing.

Petra gripped the arm rests of the chair Silas had pulled over to his desk for her. It was extremely late. Her body was exhausted from the long rut and the witchbond, but she was too wired to care, let alone sleep.

She tracked the data streaming across the wide, curved computer screen, but she couldn’t make any sense of it. He’d been quiet for a while as his long, clawed fingers flew over the buttons projected onto the desk.

The urge to ask Silas how things were going was a visceral one, but she bit her tongue.

They’d only been down in the lab for half an hour, she reminded herself. It hadn’t been the eternity that it felt like. But every minute seemed to stretch into hours, and every tap of his fingers jolted her nerves until her whole body was wound as tight as a spring.

While she waited, Petra scrubbed through every interaction she’d ever had with Antonin and everything she’d learned over her years as High Priestess. She tried to peel away her past interpretations, to really see what was going on beyond what she assumed at the time. Mostly she hoped to dissuade herself from her hunch, but it didn’t work.

She’d been focused on what Antonin did to Max for so long. It never occurred to her that Max might simply have been a tiny diversion in a much larger, more sinister plan. That she might’ve been an even smaller piece.

Her skin crawled. Why did she think everything began and ended with Max?

This wasn’t the streets of Los Angeles or the dingy halls of the children’s home. Antonin was no petty criminal and Max hadn’t inadvertently walked into a turf war. This was so, so much bigger than anything she’d known before. Why couldn’t she have seen it?

She was friends with the sovereign’s consort. Petra was the spiritual leader of one of the most powerful cities on the continent. She had conned her way into the highest tiers of an organization that controlled vast land, wealth, and influence.

It was an oversight to think that Max would’ve confronted Antonin for anything less than something earth-shattering. It was an even bigger one to think Antonin wouldn’t be up to something a lot grander than blackmail and extortion.

After all, he was already wealthy. He held untold amounts of influence. She’d taken his desire for her and an heir at face value, but a man like that had to have higher ambitions than simply standing in the shadows of the High Gloriae.

Why did he need an heir? Petra rubbed her temples, desperate to ease the dull pounding in her skull. What was the project he said he was in town for?

The more she thought about it, the more tense she became. Her nails dug into the armrests of her chair until the beds blanched white. What was he doing?

She wanted to believe that whatever it was, it had to be over now that he was dead. He couldn’t harm anyone now. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the empty-eyed soldiers of the Ardeo, about where his aid Nicolas had gone, that friend he mentioned when she refused Antonin’s advances?—

The low buzz of Silas’s watch vibrating on his wrist nearly made her jump out of her skin.

He cast her a concerned look and settled his hand on her thigh. Lips turning down into an even deeper scowl, he told her, “Rasmus is calling.”

“Answer it.” Petra practically crawled into his lap to reach for his left arm. “How do I answer it?”

She’d known Rasmus long enough to understand that if he called, it was for a good reason. If he called Silas, it had to be for a very good reason.

“I have to program your biometrics in,” he replied, pointing to the screen. “Remind me to do that after we’re done with this.”

She didn’t have time to savor the burst of warmth that came with that easy acceptance into every aspect of his life, let alone his easy confidence that soon this would all be over. Maybe later she would, but not now, when she felt like someone had hooked up a generator to her nerves and cranked it up to the highest setting.

Silas tapped the screen, answering the call. “What did you hear?” he grunted, eyes already back on his computer screen.

Rasmus had a deep, raspy voice. Even coming through the tiny speakers in the watch, it made an impact when he announced, “You can’t come back to the city.”

Silas’s fingers paused their rapid movement. “Why?”

Her heart jumped into her throat when Rasmus answered, “I just mediated a little get together between a certain spymaster and the McCorrans. You remember the bounty put out for Dr. Atria Le Roy and Ruby Goode?”

“What bounty?” Petra reached for Silas’s arm again. Speaking directly into the digital watch face, she pressed, “There was a bounty on Atria?”

They hadn’t met yet, but Petra knew Margot was good friends with one half of the duo famous for their breakthrough with the m-generator. The other half, Ruby Goode, was her cousin — who had been mysteriously absent from the m-generator’s presentation. Her absence had sparked a tsunami of rumors, but Petra had been too caught up in her plans to pay attention to any of them. She was pretty sure she’d remember talk of a bounty, though.

“Pet?” Rasmus sounded surprised, but his tone immediately shifted to gruff concern when he growled, “You all right? Shade wouldn’t let me see you. If you need help, say the word.”

“I’m fine. Just?—”

“I told you to stop calling her that. Do it one more time and I’m taking a finger,” Silas warned. “You know what? Actually I’m taking all of them.”

Petra lightly swatted her mate’s arm. “Who cares about that? Rasmus, I’m fine. Explain what’s going on. Why can’t we come back to San Francisco?”

“A couple months ago, someone put out an anonymous bounty for Ruby Goode and Atria Le Roy. Now we know it was probably to get their hands on the generator shit, which is worth more money than you or I could ever imagine, but at the time it seemed fishy. Some anonymous entity offering a comically huge amount of money for two random scientists? Please. If it wasn’t a trap, then it was bound to start a war between the shits dumb enough to all go after it at once. Anyone with sense ignored it, thinking it was either a scam or not worth the trouble, but obviously there are people without any fucking brains in their heads.”

Silas bit out, “Who?”

“A rogue group of gargoyles split off from the McCorran clan. Kaz took them out.”

Kaz? Petra summoned the name out from a deep place in her memory. An outrageously handsome orcish face came with it.

Looking at Silas expectantly, she asked, “Isn’t Kaz a captain of a Patrol unit?” She’d only met him briefly once, but she’d noted his rank because she thought it was pretty strange that the sovereign would give an orc such a powerful position in his military.

“That’s his official title, yeah,” Silas answered, like he knew the man well. “But his real job is intelligence. He’s in charge of security for the entire territory.”

Huh. It wasn’t the time to ask, but she was suddenly extremely curious about how an orc came to be the eyes and ears of the sovereign himself.

Shaking her head, she pressed on. “What does any of that have to do with us?”

“The McCorrans came to settle up with Kaz. They didn’t give their permission to accept the bounty and didn’t want any retribution for the attempted kidnapping on elvish land — or from him personally. To square things up, they gave Kaz information on whoever put their men onto the job.”

A heavy stone of dread dropped into the pit of her stomach. Oh, Glory, no.

Silas met her gaze when he slowly asked, “And who was that?”

“Don’t know,” Rasmus answered, “but their last known location before they started their hunt for the witch was St. Emaine’s.”

Petra closed her eyes. “When?”

“Sometime in early May, maybe late April. Dunno.”

“I’m wrapping up a project,” Antonin told her the night he turned up at the cathedral out of the blue. “Just thought I’d stop in and finally behold Glory’s rising star for myself while I had the chance.”

“Demon,” she whispered. “The first visit. When he made the proposal. He showed up out of nowhere and only stayed for a night. It fits.”

He squeezed her thigh. In a deep, threatening voice, he asked Rasmus, “What does that have to do with Petra?”

“She suddenly went on sabbatical and disappeared off the face of the Earth right before a major festival, Shade. It doesn’t take a genius to see what Kaz might get when he puts those two things together. If I didn’t know better, even I would be suspicious.”

There was a long, tense pause before Silas’s sharp smile unspooled across his face. It was the smile that promised pain, and even now it sent a shiver of unease down her spine. “Kaz is hunting for my mate. That’s a bad choice.”

“He thinks Petra is involved with his mate’s attempted kidnapping, Shade,” Rasmus explained, like he could see the violence brewing in Silas as clearly as Petra could.

An electric sensation zipped across their bond, one that raised all the fine hairs on her body. It was like the magic that filtered through him had taken on Silas’s unique flavor — and his rage.

“No,” she muttered, covering the hand on her thigh with her own. “You can’t kill him. Calm down.”

“Aren’t you and Kaz friends?” Rasmus asked. His skeptical tone belied how much stock he put in the idea. “Get in contact and tell him Petra had nothing to do with it. If you clear her name, she can come back to the city.”

Silas’s upper lip peeled back from his fangs. Before he could argue the point, Petra reminded him, “We have bigger fish to fry. It lines up with my timeline, which means that he must’ve wanted the m-generator. If we can prove that?—”

Rasmus cleared his throat. “Who wanted the m-generator? Was it Vanderpoel?”

“None of your damn business, nosy wolf,” Silas growled. Flicking the watch's screen, he ended the call.

Petra barely noticed. Her heartbeat was a frantic rhythm in her ears when she asked, “What could Antonin have done with that kind of technology?”

Silas’s lips pressed into a hard line. He was quiet for a moment. Those clawed hands found their way back to the projected keyboard, but this time they moved even faster than before, inputting code so quickly she could barely keep up.

A window popped onto the screen. It was normal-looking, as far as she could tell. Just a square with two input fields: one for a username and another for a passcode.

Her heart sank, but she didn’t have time to ask if there was a way around having a passcode. Silas pasted a long string of symbols into both fields and hit enter.

Sitting back in his chair, he stared hard at the sea of neatly organized files that filled his screen. “He could do just about anything, but my best guess is weapons.”

Petra swallowed hard. It did little to quell the bile that scaled the fleshy walls of her throat. “They’re building a prototype in the Tower.”

“That’s why I rolled into town, too.”

“But that won’t be ready for months,” she reasoned, trying hard to find some way to make it better, a little less terrifying. “Even if he still thought he could get it, why would he come back to San Francisco so urgently?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to wait.” Silas dragged his gaze away from the screen to pin her with a dark look. “Maybe he saw a different opportunity.”

“How do we find out what that was?”

“Whatever he had planned, it took coordination. You can’t do that without a paper trail.” He gestured toward the computer screen. “It’s in here, baby. We just have to look.”

She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her voice came out whispery with panic when she asked, “What do we do if it’s bad, Silas? Really bad.”

It’d been one thing to hand over evidence that Antonin was behind Max’s murder to a journalist, but if the truth was as big as it appeared to be, then things were a lot more complicated — and infinitely more dangerous.

Silas didn’t appear panicked. He was deadly calm when he answered, “That’s up to you.”

“Me?” she squeaked, appalled.

He nodded. “If what we find puts you in danger, then I’ll take care of it. If it doesn’t… Then it’s up to you.”

Petra’s stomach turned. “What if I make the wrong choice?”

Silas shrugged. “You won’t. Now tell me where to start looking.”

She turned her gaze to the screen. He’d told her how much data there was. She tried to imagine just how much information that had to be, the countless secrets and plans that lay innocently behind pixels and files labeled in mundane, boring ways.

Where did one even begin to find the truth when there was so much? The same place I did.

Taking a deep breath, she said, “Start with Max.”