Chapter 2
Rosabel La Rouge
Present Day
Poppy had always been a hopeless romantic since we were little, and she spent hours planning her fall in love. Not her wedding, no—she planned how she would fall in love, and claimed that when she met the one, he would do everything right because he’d be so in tune with her feelings that he’d know how to win her heart within an hour and a minute.
That’s what she said—an hour and a minute.
I never believed her until I did.
Regardless. The only thing that would guarantee her cooperation was that—the promise of a love story. Which was why I’d written that letter the way I had, even though it was a lie. I’d deal with the consequences later. She could get her revenge on me any way she pleased when this was over and she realized I’d lied.
Just as soon as this was over .
I flashed my ID at the scanner in front of the gates, and they swung open right away.
The IDD Headquarters was a massive building with plenty of space for everything—parking spots for my bike, meeting rooms, infirmary and operating halls, jail cells, private rooms and bathrooms, even a kitchen if I’d ever cared to cook. But most importantly, it had safety. Guards, cameras, wards. The building and the large fence and gates that surrounded it were the only safe place for me now.
Until he was behind bars again.
Chills broke down my back when I left my bike in the garage and headed toward the side entrance of the large, cross-shaped building. Guards nodded at me as I passed—I’d been working here for the past…well, one year, one month, and twenty-two days now. Long enough that most guards knew me by name. Nobody stopped me when I made my way inside, toward the staff area and the dressing rooms. Plenty of people in the building, even at this hour—bad guys didn’t really care about the time of day when they committed crimes. On the contrary—they preferred the dark, thinking it was their friend. It wasn’t. Iridian agents were available at the IDD at all hours, but the side of the women’s dressing room where my locker was, was blissfully empty right now.
I closed the metal door slowly, then rested my back against it, closed my eyes and released a long breath.
I was okay. This was the IDD Headquarters, possibly the safest place in world for me to be. The wards that protected every single inch of this place were Greenfire wards, fourth-degree spells, the best of the best.
Slowly, I let go of the fear that had gathered in my chest with every new breath I took. Done. It was done. Everything was going according to plan. I’d received the text, and I’d left Poppy the letter, and I’d made it into the IDD in one piece.
Now, it was only a matter of waiting for a couple of days—until I either died, or things went back to normal.
Normal— you know, the state in which I was miserable twenty-four hours a day, with no real possibility of ever escaping the life I was born into and the life I was destined to live. Where I took extra shifts and did extra work any time it was available just to avoid going home. Where my grandmother dictated everything about my life, where I went and what my hobbies were. I wasn’t allowed to have my own place or make my own choices— and I shouldn’t be because I’m too much of a coward to stand up to her and at least try to take control of my life.
Such a fucking coward…
But if I didn’t die, everything was going to go back to that normal very soon—who cares that a couple tears slipped my eyes as I put my things away in my locker, or that I wished from the bottom of my heart for the end of the world to begin just so my life didn’t have to go back to normal?
This, too, shall pass, I reminded myself. It wasn’t going to be like this forever because even Iridians don’t live that long. Madeline Rogan was going to die eventually—and, yes, I realize how pathetic it is to wait for someone’s death rather than take charge of your own life, but I was raised by her since I was six years old. I knew there was no escaping her claws no matter what I did or where I hid.
Iris help me, her death was my last hope.
When the door to the dressing room opened, I startled so bad I thought I might scream. My heart tripped all over itself because, as much as I thought I wouldn’t be so afraid once I made it to the Headquarters, I was .
I was scared shitless.
Even so, I turned and cast a look back at the door with an expression that screamed unbothered . I’d perfected it to such a level that now it came as easily as breathing to me, and it was the reason why I was in this mess in the first place. The ability to play a rock had screwed me over just as much as it had saved me from my grandmother.
“There she is,” Cassie said as she came into the room. Even though I was done hiding my backpack in my locker, I still kept it open and pretended to be busy with something. “I thought I saw you coming in. You don’t have third shift, do you?”
Pushing the locker door closed, I turned to her. “Nope. Just couldn’t sleep.”
“Pfft. Sleep is a luxury for me,” she said, waving me off. “One mistake—just one mistake and they have me stuck in this fucking graveyard for the second month now. One mistake!”
“That cost three agents their lives,” I said, not to be a bitch, but just to remind her that her complaining was pointless.
“That’s on them . I told them I couldn’t see well into that basement—I told them. Not my fault they went in anyway.”
And she was half-right.
There are five colors that the magic of Iridian mages manifests in: Blue, Green, Red, Black and White. And because visually that magic looks like colorful flames when a mage uses it, it is also called fire— Redfire and Greenfire, and so on.
Cassie was from the Bluefire coven, very powerful, and some of her kind had the gift of foresight. Part of Cassie’s job was to follow agents on the field through cameras and try to determine whether a place was too dangerous to enter or not. With all the kinds of magical creatures that we had to deal with on the daily, the foresight of Bluefires, even if not always accurate or powerful, was very valuable.
Cassie had warned the agents that she couldn’t see well enough into the future to be sure it wasn’t dangerous in the basement of a house they’d been tasked with searching, and they’d made the call to go in anyway.
They’d died from an illegal curse trap the owners had set up, and now Cassie would remain on The Shitlist for goddess knew how long.
“Anyhoo,” she said, throwing her long brown curls behind her shoulder before she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Since you’re here, I thought I’d use you. I’ve got a siren ready to be interrogated in Seven. What do you say, huh, Cupcake? Wanna help me out?” She batted her lashes at me innocently.
I flinched. “A siren ? Are you serious?” Those were rare—so rare I’d only ever seen one before—because they usually stuck to the sea.
“You know I do be being serious about stuff like this,” she said, making me want to smile. Cassie’s choice of words never failed to entertain me.
“You do be being,” I repeated, and she beamed.
“I do be. And I’ll owe you one, too. How about that? It’s just a little interrogation, that’s all. Nothing you haven’t done before.”
I shook my head and went to sit on the wooden bench near the front of the room. It was a big room— huge, with over four hundred lockers and five different entrances. If there was somebody else in here with us, we couldn’t tell.
“Something you’ve done before, a lot more times than me,” I reminded her. She came to sit with me, waving me off again, as if the fact that she’d been an agent for a decade longer than me was no big deal.
“That don’t mean shit when it comes to sirens and you know it. I’m Bluefire. I can’t lock her out as well as you,” she said. “And with that face, sweetie, it’s the opposite of possible to read you in any kind of way.”
Opposite of possible, she said, because impossible was too mainstream for Cassie.
“You are perfectly capable of interrogating a siren.”
“I amn’t,” she insisted. “I really, really don’t want to, La Rouge. C’mon, do me this and I’ll do you one better. Anything you want.”
I laughed a bit—how could I not? With my eyes closed, I rested my back against the lockers.
“Seriously, though. You be looking really pale, now that I think about it—and it’s not just these awful lights. Everything okay?”
I straightened up instantly and my instinct was to deny and redirect her attention elsewhere. Or lie and just get the hell out, go somewhere she couldn’t see me.
But this was the IDD and Madeline wasn’t here. And now that I thought about it, a siren interrogation sounded mighty fine at the moment.
Not only would it require all of my attention and not let me think about anything else, it would also make it very easy for me to get more information about that text.
Because what if the guard had lied? What if he’d messed with me or something?
What if somebody had stolen his phone to prank me?
Highly unlikely, true, but I had to confirm it—and who better to do that than Cassandra Martins, Bluefire clairvoyant with access to the information room files and computers, regardless of whether she was still on The Shitlist or not?
“Not really, actually,” I said, wetting my lips as I turned to her with my whole body.
“Well, what is it? Spit it out already,” she demanded, her blue eyes wide and her lips parted as she waited.
“I’ll do the interrogation for you, if you find something out for me. Something about the Tomb,” I said slowly, trying to drink in her expression to see what her initial thoughts were. It was so easy to do with people—you could read their thoughts on their faces and in their eyes like words on the pages of a book. They showed you everything you needed to know, especially in that first second after information is revealed to them.
There were only three people I’d met in my whole life that I couldn’t read with such ease, and one of them was my grandmother.
“The Tomb?” asked Cassie. “You mean, the Tomb Penitentiary?”
“Yep,” I said with a nod, and so far, she wasn’t so freaked out as to tell me to forget our little talk and leave the dressing room.
“Hmm,” Cassie muttered, looking down at her hands, her skin pale, a stark contrast to the indigo tattoos that covered her wrists and reached down to her knuckles in swirls. She traced the lines with her fingertips for a moment as she thought about it. “I don’t really have access to the Tomb, but I know someone who does.”
“And they owe you a favor?” I guessed—easy enough. Everybody owed her favors around here—Cassie was trustworthy, friendly, not afraid to do stupid shit in the name of helping out a friend .
“True, true,” she said, nodding her head. “But riddle me this—what does a golden Iridian sweetheart like yourself want with the Tomb? You know only the worst criminals in the world are locked up in there, right? The batshit crazy, dangerous kind.”
They’re not.
I bit my tongue. “I just need information about an inmate, that’s all. I don’t want anything from them.”
Cassie raised her thin brows. “What kind of an inmate?”
“Blackfire,” I muttered.
“I’m listening,” was her way of saying she wanted to know more.
And what the hell did I have to lose, anyway? We were already here, and I was sure she knew all about how I came to be in their midst. The youngest ever agent in the IDD, a clumsy rich girl who didn’t know shit about even firing a gun when I first went through the doors of the IDD training academy. Like I said, people owed her favors, and I was a hundred percent sure she’d used one or two to figure out what my deal was.
But even so, that didn’t make spitting out that name any easier.
In fact, it was just like sticking my hand in my gut and pulling out a handful of my own organs.
“Taland Tivoux,” I said, and if keeping my shit together and my face empty hadn’t become an instinct to me by now, I’d have probably broken down in front of Cassie. I’d have cried, bawled like a damn infant. I’d have probably hugged her, too.
The second of silence that followed said that my earlier suspicions were true—she did know exactly how I came to be an agent at the age of eighteen .
“Oh,” said Cassie after a good moment. “Oh, you mean… the Taland Tivoux?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“ Goddess-damn it ,” she whispered, so low I barely caught it. “What, um…what about Taland Tivoux?”
Please stop saying his name.
“I have information that he escaped from the Tomb tonight,” I forced myself to say, and she jumped to her feet as if I’d assaulted her.
“You better be fucking with me,” Cassie said but didn’t actually wait for a reply. “How in the world do you even know that? Are you keeping in touch with him—no, no, that don’t be it. Must be someone on the inside, is it? Or maybe someone on the out side?” She stopped in front of me, looking down at me like she was about to burst into tears now. “Tell me, woman! How’d you know?!”
So damn dramatic.
I stood up because the only person who looked down at me was my grandmother. Cassie had no choice but to step back. “Doesn’t matter. Find out if it’s true, and I’ll interrogate your siren.” I raised my hand for hers. “Do we have a deal?”
“By the Blue,” she whispered, looking down at my hand for a second before she shook it. “Yes, we have a deal. Fine, La Rouge. Fine. ”
I stepped back, pretending that I wasn’t anxious and excited and relieved at the same time. Always pretending. “Number Seven?”
With her hands on her hips, she lowered her head. “Yes, she’s all tied up and ready for you. Her file is by the door.” Then she continued to mutter under her breath words I didn’t understand .
“I’ll find you when I’m done,” I said, slipping out of the dressing room.
Cassie said nothing and the door fell closed behind me.
As I made my way toward the interrogation area, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to know what the end of this day was going to look like or not.