Chapter 21

“You’re goingto need this, too.” Kaine handed Malcolm a pistol and belt, holding several magazines. He hoped they were spares and not needed.

Malcolm put them on without a word.

Kaine didn’t need to like him to know that Malcolm was not the traitor, or to trust him not to shoot him in the back. Right now, they wanted the same thing, which was Gerrit, and the kingdom and by extension all paranormals, safe.

Because Kaine had kept the information segmented, it had been too easy to whittle down who was telling the Shadow Board everything. He’d suspected, but if he’d flinched too soon, they wouldn’t have gained any ground.

The retaliation in London had been anticipated, but it was a distraction. Or at least it was supposed to be. Dalmon wasn’t there, and neither was Lucian. They were both in France.

If the Board was a bit more thorough, they would’ve known his driver had taken an empty car to the office while Dalmon had taken the tunnel—they would’ve expected him to use the jet.

Everest hadn’t been told that part of the plan.

He hadn’t been told about Candlelight either. That was specific, and only three people knew about it. Yves, Gerrit and him.

Arresting Everest was going to break Gerrit’s heart.

Dalmon was going to be furious because Everest was their in with the Board. But Everest had used it for his own purposes. His single-mindedness might have damned everyone. He was too smart and too reckless for his own good.

Kaine got out of the car, the bullet-proof vest beneath his coat a weight he didn’t like, though it didn’t seem to bother Malcolm.

From a second car, two others got out. The same ones he’d had with him in the bar. He wouldn’t have said he was confident with their loyalty, but it was all he had unless he wanted to involve the human police, which he did not. Besides, these people had been vetted by the Coven and had been clean a few weeks ago.

His heart thumped as he walked toward the building. The stinging wound that his suspicions left was something he needed to ignore. His worry for Quentin was something else he needed to push aside. Everest and the Board would want to use him as leverage, to force Kaine to open up the system.

He expected that.

He hoped Everest would realize the depth of the shit he was swimming in. All he’d needed to do was wait and trust instead of rushing ahead, thinking he was smarter than everyone else.

That he usually was smarter didn’t help.

Kaine flashed his badge at the guard on the desk. “No one leaves. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They will assist you.” He nodded at the two extras that he’d brought with him, then he and Malcolm walked up the stairs to the second floor to where the woman with the kidnapped brother worked. He quietly walked up to where the woman was grabbing her handbag as if to go out.

She looked up, and her face paled.

“Can you come with me, please?” Kaine murmured, but people were looking up, wondering what was going on.

“It’s too late,” she whispered.

Kaine said nothing.

“I had to. You don’t understand.”

Kaine shook his head. “I do. You should’ve come to me or your manager. Instead, you put nations at risk.”

Not yet, but she didn’t know that.

She began to cry. “I just wanted my brother back.”

“I can assure you he was dead the moment you released the virus,” Malcolm said, his words hard and bitter as he put handcuffs around her wrists.

“No, they said they’d set him free if I did…” Her words were choked off by her sobbing. “I had to.”

Kaine glanced at Malcolm. He’s been saying those same words not so long ago. The one thing the Shadow Board did well was pick who to use. Who was wary of asking for help and afraid of law enforcement? Those who were already isolated with no one to turn to.

What were they seeing when they looked at Everest?

Where had the three of them gone wrong with him? What should they have done differently? Was there anything they could’ve done?

The lights in the building flickered.

“Everybody, make your way downstairs. There’s been a security breach,” Kaine said. Power held for another thirty seconds, and then the building went quiet and dark. He counted to five, and by the time he was done, the backup generator had turned on.

In another thirty seconds, the Shadow Board would be aware that the only country impacted was Mont de Leucoy.

There was nothing he could do about that, and it wasn’t as though there was an army on their doorstep ready to invade. These days, it would be a few fighter jets dropping some strategically placed bombs. He wasn’t sure magic could defend against a few megatons of detonation.

The Shadow Board didn’t have control of anyone’s military, not yet anyway.

Not today. They’d played their hand.

And it failed.

He should be happy, but there was a knot in his gut because he knew this wasn’t over.