Chapter 11

Chapter 11

L ord Cinnamon was a crier.

"Please," he sobbed, his face red and splotched with color as he looked up at her. "Please, you don't have to do this."

Fey's bored sigh warmed the fabric of her mask.

Just as she had expected, when Lord Alexander Cyanean's name had appeared in a black envelope in their quarters again, it had been written in red.

The Crown wouldn't tolerate treason. Couldn't tolerate it. And anyone who dared to imply that the Queen was lying about her heir's abilities was destined for death.

"I know I don't have to do it," Fey told him. "But it's what I'm good at."

Her blade didn't make a sound as it cut through his neck, spraying the wall of his poorly furnished home in blood. Fey stood over him, watching him fall to the ground, clutching at the hole in his throat.

Inside, she felt numb.

It had been easy enough to find him after Dameon had delivered the assignation. Easy enough to follow him home from The Eternal Crown and slip unnoticed into his townhouse. Too easy when what Fey needed was a distraction from the storm inside her head .

Four days. It had been four full days since she'd given Joy back her thumb drive, and four long, torturous days of them scouring through the data Fey had managed to steal.

After she'd left the club and let Joy know she was okay, Fey had returned to her room at the palace. She'd managed to have a long, much-needed shower, and spent a good hour alone with her vibrator before her sisters had finally returned from their celebrations.

At first, Joy had been thrilled with the wealth of data her drive had managed to collect. She was right—the owner had a camera in every corner of that damn club, and there wasn't a single place unmonitored aside from his office. If Alice had been there, they'd be able to find what she had been doing, and who she might have met with.

But the video feeds weren't organized in any way that made sense, and it wasn't long before Joy's enthusiasm waned. They had terabytes of video feed, none of it in chronological order, and none of it labeled in any way to help them figure out which videos corresponded to what dates and times. The file names were nonsense, just strings of nonlinear numbers, none of them seemingly related to anything Joy could understand.

"It's almost like an encryption," Joy had explained after her first day with the drive. She'd spent the entire day hunched over her computer and only stopped when her eyes hurt too much to continue. "These numbers mean something to someone, but without some sort of code to figure it out, I'm just going through these videos blind. It might take me weeks to find anything like this, and even then…" She trailed off, sounding hopeless.

Weeks. They didn't have weeks. They'd already wasted enough time, and every extra day they spent on this made Fey feel as though Alice's murderer was slipping further and further out of their grasp. This was the only lead they had, and if they didn't figure out something fast, it might be too late.

Alexander Cyanean gave one final gurgle, one last death rattle deep in his damaged throat, and died at Fey's feet.

Satisfied, Fey tried to look on the bright side, tried to look past the dead man bleeding on her boots, tried to look past the roadblocks to solving Alice's murder .

Tomorrow was another day, after all.

Tomorrow was Willow's official induction to the blades.

Tomorrow they would officially have a new sister.