Chapter 21
Allie
“Kidnapped?” Dax and I asked at the same time, huddled in front of Evie’s hazy image rising from the palaver.
My stomach dropped, power twisting and hissing deep inside.
“Unfortunately.” She sighed, rubbing the angry marks on her neck; they looked brutally similar to the ones I’d endured. “A total shock.”
“Kidnappings have a way of surprising you,” Dax muttered.
I elbowed his ribs. “Do you know who did it?”
She shook her head, fine brown hair swaying against her shoulders. “Same masked attackers that ambushed you. Can’t interrogate ash.”
My palms turned to fists on top of the table, the previous anger now sharpened.
Meaner.
Cleaner.
No heat, only the hunger to hurt back.
It was one thing to attack me. Targeting my family was begging for revenge.
She bit her lip, a long sigh blurring the palaver image. “That’s not even the worst part–”
Heavy knocks on my door froze us all.
I pressed a finger to my lips and hurried to open it, my thundering heart already telling me who was on the other side.
Ryker greeted me with a formidable frown that made my chest burn. “I know you don’t want to see me right now, but–”
His gaze jumped from me, to Dax and Evie’s palaver. His shoulders relaxed. “So you already know.”
I jutted my chin out. “Yes.”
I wanted to say more, but not in front of Dax and Evie. I didn’t want them to hear the hurt when I finally roared.
He lingered in the doorway for one breath more than needed, like he wanted me to stop him.
I didn’t–but I cursed myself for wanting to.
He left with a nod and yearning in his eyes, and I shut the door with both regret and satisfaction.
Dax raised a questioning brow at me, but I waved him off, sitting back down with a heavy sigh caving my chest.
The thunder in my chest lingered even as I felt the distance between Ryker and me growing.
“I don’t know how you stand him.” Evie wrinkled her nose. “He’s so cold.”
No, he was hot and incandescent and annoying. “Same way you stand the Dragon.”
Evie’s brown eyes lit up. “He saved me from those attackers.”
She still had that air of mountain innocence, but even I could admit Evie’s stay in the Capital had been good to her. She had a healthy rosiness to her cheeks, more meat on her bones, and a confident twinkle in her eyes that warmed my heart.
“It’s his duty.” Dax raised his brows. “It’s like congratulating someone for breathing.”
She furrowed back at him. “You protect your fiancee lately?”
“We haven’t officially met, I’m afraid.” He grinned, but it had a sharpness to it.
“Evie, what happened?” I asked firmly before this went on in circles longer.
Evie took one long inhale. “There’s this tradition before the wedding where the groom has to find the bride and I had to leave the Capital in a carriage–”
“That doesn’t sound antiquated at all,” Dax drawled.
My elbow jammed him again. Dax gave me a mean side-eye.
“–and we got ambushed.” Her eyes, normally soft and curious, turned to steel. “There was a being who looked exactly like me. Same face, same voice. But her eyes…they were completely black. A replica, they say.”
Dax stilled next to me.
“She froze my friends in the carriage and knocked me out.” A darkness slithered in her voice. “The attackers kept saying they wanted my blood.”
A dull roar erupted in my ears. “Orion said the same thing about me.”
A terrifying silence descended upon us.
We’d known we were hunted, but the attacks were getting more complex. More dangerous.
If someone had risked attacking Evie so close to the Capital and the fiercest army on the continent, they were desperate to get us.
“This can be good, in a horrifying way, though, right?” Dax asked. “At least they don’t want to kill us. Not right away, at least.”
Evie shook her head. “They had no qualms with trying to strangle me, as long as they didn’t spill any blood.”
My hand flew to my own neck before I could stop it, sealing the questions in my throat.
“What about the replica, is she alive?” Dax asked.
“She ingested a poison when Adara captured her. She’s currently rotting in my kitchen.” Her face contorted with disgust, all that naivete gone. The Capital had truly changed her. “I wanted to warn you to stay safe.”
“Us?” I finally found my voice again; of course it would come back when it came to safety. “You’re the one who just got attacked.”
“And you had to fight off attackers only days ago.”
“It’s different. They didn’t come for me.”
“They did before.”
They had. Led by my own Clan, no less.
I turned to Dax. “Clara and Dara?”
“No attacks. Not yet.” He clenched his jaw. “Clara’s secluded in that heinous temple and Dara knows how to stay hidden.” He gave Evie a pointed look. “In places where others can also hide. If they wish.”
“I’m not vanishing like a coward,” Evie said.
I knew Evie hadn’t meant it–she probably didn’t even know about the lies Silas had spread about me.
But the reminder that so many people thought I had run away to protect my own hide slashed through me once more. My eyes slid toward the crown’s hiding spot.
Out of sight, but permanently on my mind.
“I’m as safe as any of us can be.” Evie rolled her shoulders back. “The Capital is on lockdown. Nobody unaccounted for goes in or out. Which means…”
“We already know we can’t come to the wedding,” Dax said.
“I’m sorry,” she said with so much kindness, I wanted to jump through the palaver portal and hug her. “I would have really loved to see you here.”
Dax cleared his throat. “Actually–”
Voices, loud, hectic, and happy, resounded from the other end of the portal.
“I have to go, sorry. Wedding preparations.” Evie’s eyes lit up, even as she tried to seem aloof. “I’m getting married. Me.”
That was not the coldness of a political arranged marriage between enemy Clans. It was the joy of someone in love–which only made it riskier.
“Does it count as her second wedding if she didn’t even get to exchange vows before her former groom was killed by the current one?” Dax mused as soon as we closed the palaver.
“What matters is that someone wanted to stop the wedding,” I seethed.
“Maybe someone realized the same thing as us. That Evie as Blood Brotherhood queen means an Evie with a powerful army.”
“Maybe.” But that didn’t sit right. Something nagged at me. Something obvious that lay there beyond my understanding, waiting to be discovered. “What do you know about replicas?”
“Enough to be sure I never wanted to risk the whole process, though it could have seriously helped me to wear someone else’s face,” he said.
My brows rose. The process must have been truly heinous if not even Dax wanted to experiment with it. He’d strapped a pair of untested wings to his back, for gods’ sakes.
“Then who would risk it?” I asked.
“Desperate people. Gold twists the mind.”
I crossed my arms, tapping my fingers in a quick pattern. “You don’t knowingly carry poison on you and ingest it for gold.”
Most people were greedy, but the selfishness of survival was always more potent.
“Maybe she had a curse on her like Orion,” Dax said. “He hadn’t wanted to kill himself. Whatever had tainted his power controlled him.”
I rose, feet aching to pace.
“You agree to taint your power for gold. Or more power. Or revenge.” The gods had surely not received Orion with open arms after what he’d done, but I hoped they’d had mercy on his widow and children and helped them escape Silas’ wrath.
“But you don’t know it comes with the price of your life if you fail. ”
Dax leaned back in his seat, watching me. “I don’t know any curse that can do that.”
Neither did I. No such curse should have existed. It marred the very essence of Clan magic.
“The attackers…some of them didn’t seem controlled.” The last three had turned themselves into ash in a heinous, split-second ritual. “What if some of them know what they’re getting into?”
“That sounds fanatical.” He grimaced. “You’d need either a very good or a very heinous cause to convince people like that.”
I raised a brow. “The Cold Blooded War started because a eunuch priest claimed to have a vision of a snake god swallowing the continent.”
“People haven’t raised their weapons because of a vision in a long time. No gods demand bloodshed anymore.”
“Not all.” I remembered bleeding and howling at the moon with Solkar’s Reach warriors. “They used to sacrifice people for gods that didn’t even have a name.”
“No new gods, then.” Dax licked his teeth. “But who’d have such a faith? Even Xamor has strict rules for war.”
“This isn’t faith. It’s a perversion drenched in blood.”
I inhaled sharply.
Drenched in blood.
“You remember what Dara told us about that weird Clan the Blood Brotherhood conquered, who drowned their lands with sacrifices? Quirinths? Quoronths?”
“Quoriliths,” Dax said. “They’re long dead.”
I stopped pacing and turned to him. “Then why have their practices endured?”
“Just one. The throat slashing. And we all know at least one person who’s done that at least once in their life.”
“Uncle Maksim,” we both said at the same time, me with a sigh, and Dax with too much pride.
“I’m sure your Commander was forced to kill an enemy at one point, too,” he said. “It’s Clan life. To protect is to endure.”
My mind whirled back to Orion and the cold hatred with which Ryker had slashed his arm to save me.
He’d hidden his dagger that night as well.
A fresh wave of fury rolled through me.
“Dax?” I looked at him, unwavering. “I need you to keep an eye out for anything that seems amiss while you’re here. Sneaking around, whispers, strange glimmers on the rim.”
The more I thought about that glint, the more it bothered me.
“Setting me loose on the fortress?” He whistled. “What did your Commander do to annoy you this much?”
Something I wasn’t ready to face, but I had to nonetheless. “One or more people in this crater want to hurt it and us. Help me find out who.”
Who had stolen that dagger to kill my father. Who’d let the attackers inside Solkar’s Reach after I’d arrived.
He cracked his knuckles gleefully. “It will be my absolute pleasure.”
At least I could count on one person in this frozen land.
“Replica aside, you know what else bothers me?” His face turned sharp, gaze calculating. “Evie said her friends were frozen. Sound familiar?”
It did, unfortunately.
“The Commander was here yesterday,” I said.
He didn’t deserve me protecting his reputation right now, but fact was fact.
“As much as I dislike him, he doesn’t seem like the type to sneak up on someone, knock them out, and strangle them. Fight them until they wish they’d never been born, yes, but face to face.” Dax leaned back further in his chair, until it balanced on two legs. “But if he knows how to do it…”
I inhaled sharply. “He knows how other people can.”