Chapter 1
Chapter One
Emmeline
There was blood on her boots.
Again.
Fates save her, if Emmeline DeLeoste got caught sneaking into the Lyra Temple Academy’s kitchens one more time to steal the only soap that could properly scrub crimson splotches off the leather, someone was going to start asking questions.
She should just go to Mist and Rose, the apothecary closest to the Academy, and purchase some for herself, but last time she did that, the slight shopkeeper with eyes like an owl commented how recently she’d seen Emmeline at her door for the same item. That sort of observation was too risky.
The Isle of Lyra was littered with similar shops, but she lived most of her life in two places: at the esteemed Temple Academy perched atop the highest hills of the island, or in the shadows as she was now. It didn’t leave much time for things as frivolous as shopping.
But she’d thrown out two pairs of boots last month, and she’d call on the Fates before she let another go, especially this pair with their delicate, lightweight silver buckles and the hidden sheathe sewn into the leather on the outside of her ankle.
And especially not for someone as despicable as the man before her now, withering beneath her triple-bladed dagger.
The three points of the star-shaped weapon shone in the light of the chipped mystlight lantern hanging overhead.
The fogged, dusty plum glass illuminated his features, the fear rippling through his eyes igniting a blood-drenched hunger in Emmeline’s own spirit that outweighed concern for her boots.
The kitchen soap it was.
“Who was it?” Emmeline repeated, words a soft, seductive hiss in the night.
The same tone that had lured him out behind the incense den, the Rogue Spirit, in the first place.
A bashful look across the crowded room, a sway of her hips in her fitted black leathers, and he was snared.
Practically panting when she bit her lip and said she wanted to get some air.
Only now, her tempting voice had a sharper edge to it.
“I. Don’t. Know,” the man gritted out. His knee buckled as he shifted his weight, the ankle Emmeline had stomped on to incapacitate him weakened.
The veins in his neck strained as she nudged her toe against the likely-broken bones, and he spat, “When I saw your knives, I didn’t expect to be assaulted by them. ”
“Mm, I can imagine what you expected when I tied your hands up.” She dragged a gloved finger across the thick rope restraining his wrists above his head, a dagger pinning them to the bare webbing of the wooden trellis.
Satisfaction purred through her at the perfect restraint.
“You can’t appreciate a taste of the very crimes you committed? ”
She tutted, tilting her head so her long chestnut braid slid over her shoulder, and positioned one point of her dagger at the corner of his mouth. Color leached from the man’s face, and Emmeline’s chest flushed with smug warmth.
“I know nothing of that shit.”
“What a pitiful little man you are,” she cooed, pressing in.
“Nosy whore,” he sputtered, careful not to lean into the nick. Try as he might, the slur didn’t offend her. It was a low mind that had to result to such baseless insults.
Emmeline only dug the tip of her blade in deeper, rotating her wrist to drag outward from his mouth.
With it, her heart sang.
Revenge.
Retribution.
Answers.
“Are you certain you don’t know anything?” she intoned as a shallow line split his cheek. Leisurely, blood bubbled along the slice, as if his own body was teasing out this penance as much as she was.
“Yes,” he hissed as the wound stretched.
“That’s not what I heard.” She twisted her hand so one of the other two blades pushed into his cheek beneath his eye.
The man whimpered. “You’ve been on this isle for three weeks now, and six of those nights you’ve returned to this incense den, in the private room on the second floor.
Did you know there’s a balcony you can access from the roof across the street? ”
He didn’t comment, but his breathing shallowed.
And Emmeline grinned.
“I’m certain even the Rogue Spirit’s owners don’t care about it, dusty as it is.
” She shrugged, not removing her dagger.
“It’s a bit of a jump, but once you’re there, you can hear everything.
Including tales from men who boast of their time spent trading on the continent.
The routes they took, the numbers of bodies transported, and how they don’t think the practice is truly abolished. ”
Desperation drove her blade in deeper. Every drop of shining crimson, every warm speck that dripped across his chin, was one step closer to the secrets she’d been working to unravel for twenty-two years.
One step closer to finding her.
Blood hung off his pointed chin, falling to the toe of her boot with a silent splash that sent alarm ricocheting through her. Blood meant questions, and questions threatened her entire operation.
Emmeline’s heart clenched at the reminder. She may be a predator, but there were things with sharper teeth that would snap her neck if they knew she was hunting—if she was careless.
Not that she ever was. But caution required constant attention. While crime often went unpunished on Lyra, a gouged-out eye would be obvious.
Reluctantly, she stopped herself from digging her blade into his socket. The man’s breathing calmed as the pressure relieved.
Emmeline couldn’t allow that.
She moved the dagger to the side of his head, leaning in to whisper along the hilt.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me correctly.” With a sharp twist, she nicked the flesh inside his ear where the cut would barely be noticeable, but the blood gushed.
The man squirmed, his face purpling from the pain. “Tell me what you know of the traders.”
“I know nothing,” he ground out as blood coated his ear, his neck. Sticky, hot, and tanging the air, despite the mask over her nose and mouth.
“You’re a useless piece of filth, then.” Her vision tunneled in, surroundings obscured by rage. “You brag all week about your past—stealing children from their families, using their developing magic, and how you left the business—but you can’t even report any names or locations?”
“It all shut down years ago.”
“That’s not what you said to your friends.” And she’d been on the balcony to hear it all. Fury flushed through her at the memory of his gloating, and she shoved her arm harder into his chest, the trellis quivering.
He hadn’t given any names or concrete details—which implied perhaps he did know less than he let on—but he’d used the knowledge to earn approval from the men he’d met with. That it worked confirmed one thing: There was still interest in the practice.
“Lying.” Sweat rolled down his temple, knees buckling as he tried to support himself.
That could be true. The former Chancellor of the Starsearcher Warrior Clan had unofficially outlawed the kidnapping for extraction and manipulation of magic years prior, but he had also overlooked where it was still occurring, lining his pockets with the coins the temples earned from the exploited magic.
With the Chancellor’s death a couple years ago, the faux guardrails he’d instituted had fallen away. Discussions of it starting back up were rumbling, even on Lyra.
Up-and-coming leaders in the capital were supposedly working to dismantle it for good this time, but that revolution required time to discover the rot at its roots.
And men like the one before her were steeped in the tainted soil and tended by those who headed the operations.
They fled to places like the Constellation Isles along the coast of Gallantia, a forgotten set of islands ignored by most Starsearchers on the continent.
And the Isle of Lyra, where Emmeline had made her home, had been crawling with former traders in recent years as crime exploded across the jungle-laced drop of land in the sea.
No children were being kidnapped by the temples here—she would know with her position at the Academy—but drugs and vices were as common as fruit nowadays.
“I don’t care much for liars.” Emmeline tutted as she dug through the pouch slung around her shoulders.
“What’s that saying many people claim is about Valyrie?
” She pretended to think, considering the Angel who founded the Starsearcher Warrior Clan, gifting them the magic to communicate with the Fates.
“Behind a mask of beautiful innocence, all-knowing power births ruthlessness?” Emmeline removed a pinch of silky-soft blue petals from her pouch, holding them before the trembling man’s eyes and ensuring he saw exactly what they were.
“I think they’re right. The most delicate poisons are often the most venomous, are they not? ”
The scent of piss permeated the air.
“Now, you and I both know the trading has not truly ended.” She paused, but the man’s lips pressed together. “Tell me something”—she lifted his chin with her dagger—“or I will tell you all the ways I know to kill a man, beginning with my most creative.”
He swallowed, the bob of his throat pressing his skin into the tip of the blade. “I only ever spoke to the second-in-command, never the leader. And I never even saw his face.”
Second-in-command. That was higher up than she’d ever encountered. Elation jolted through her, but she stifled any show of it.
“Do you have a name?”
“No.”
She forced the dagger closer. “Something.”
The man panted, sweat cutting tracks through the blood splattering his cheek. “He was always very directly involved. Ran the cargo boats down the rivers between major cities on the mainland himself, checked every shipment.”
Cargo boats and shipments. Bile burned her throat at the inhumane methods and terms for children ripped from their homes and enslaved to the dirty temples to manipulate their magic.
“That’s all I know. No idea where he went when it was dismantled. He left the rest of us in the lurch.”
Based on the disgruntled offense in his voice, he was telling the truth.
A breeze wrapped through the alley, the crisp, early fall night soothing Emmeline’s anger. The mystlight lantern hanging overhead swung, gilding the terror streaking through her victim’s eyes.
“You’re despicable, but you’re also a coward. And I’m done with you.”
Emmeline didn’t give him time to panic before she wrenched his jaw open and stuffed the petals in his mouth, his teeth gnashing at her gloved fingers as she covered his nose.
His red-rimmed eyes, bloodshot from the incense den, widened as the flowers melted across his tongue.
But it was too late.
The toxins of the midnight bulbs were already seeping into his bloodstream, potent and bathed in her own retribution. For a moment, doubt doused Emmeline’s fury, tightening her ribs.
This wasn’t the first life she’d taken, and she wouldn’t regret her actions, but it never became easier to live with. Each kill widened the grieving ache in her own chest. Each added a claw around the hole ripping through her spirit.
But as awareness drained from the man’s eyes, as his breathing slowed and his pulse faded to a level hum of silence, she remembered the emptiness left behind from her own losses thanks to men like this. The many hearts that no longer beat.
The jaws of doubt snapped closed within her.
With a grunt, Emmeline shoved the man to the corner of the alley, sprinkling the remains of herbs and ground petals around his lifeless form.
Her thoughts were jumbled from the relief of getting an ounce of information, but she forced herself to focus and carefully placed extra slivers of yarrow root steeped in dandelion oil beside his hand.
No one would look too closely at a bruised-up man behind one of the dens, anyway.
That was a saving grace of the drug problem on the Isle of Lyra.
Once she untied his wrists, Emmeline’s gaze flashed to her boots.
“Ugh,” she scoffed at the extra mess that last injury had left behind, and she fled out the rear of the alley, avoiding the island’s main thoroughfare.
Even in the narrow back walkways, she had to dodge drunken tavern-goers and warriors high from the Rogue Spirit, nearly colliding with a man as he charged toward the back door of a nearby tattoo parlor.
Emmeline ignored his complaints, grumbling to herself, “I’m going to need another pair of boots.”