Chapter 62
Allie
“You know what’s bothering me?” I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, staring at the parchments as if I wanted to burn them.
“The list is long, I imagine,” Dax drawled, twisting his wrist.
“Sounds like you want to be added to it,” I said, half joking.
But no grin graced his face. He just sighed and kept writing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The better question would have been what’s right.
Nothing.
The fortress was so silent, each of my steps echoed through the floors. Geryll was gone, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of Nadya or Mrs. Thornbrew in days, and Ryker was at war.
Mercifully, alive.
My stomach fluttered as I felt the pulse of him at the back of my mind. His energy was so rushed, I had to force myself to sit down and read instead of running around the city to expel it.
Even so, it was an unexpected comfort.
If I could feel him, he was breathing.
And…marching? No.
Pushing…pushing through something. Something which made him glad, but worried.
I exhaled a long breath.
It was debilitatingly easy to allow myself to reach him. I’d expected hesitation. Fear. Anger.
None of those emotions had come.
Feeling even that sliver of him was the most normal thing in the world. The same way my lungs breathed air to survive, my thoughts sought his presence for comfort.
It made me toss and turn at night, and not just because the dreams were becoming more vivid and I wondered if he could see them. Then wondered some more if he’d even like them.
A selfish thought in the grand, grim schemes we were facing, but one which slithered in my mind nonetheless.
Now I had something more to lose.
Something which felt natural and removed from the wickedness of this world.
I’d already accepted our marriage–and far from prying eyes and the sharpest parts of me, I’d relished in it–but calling us fated mates felt wrong.
Not because our souls were apparently meant to meld together–what did the fairytales say? The perfect union.
But because the concept erased all the effort we had to shoulder. Yes, our souls beat the same, down to the principles which sometimes tripped us, but onto which we both clung with the same stubbornness.
But the journey was ours to claim, not the gods’.
It was fate that our souls had met. We had to bridge our lives together.
And a part of me, the biggest and boldest, craved just that.
I wanted him to come back home with a longing that seared my veins the second I rose. The rest, we would have to figure out, like we had so far.
Together.
“I’m tired,” Dax said, cranking his neck. “We’ve filled an entire forest’s worth of pages. We still have no answer and I only have one vial of truth serum left.”
He was right. He’d drained himself to his limits, dark circles clinging to his eyes.
“I know. But something has to be in here.” I grimaced at the pages.
“I wonder if it will even matter in the end,” he muttered.
Alarm bells rang in my ears. “Why?”
“So many deaths, many more to come, none of them for the ones who actually deserve it.” He sighed once more. “I’m just tired. You’re bothered. We make a fantastic team.”
The silence that descended between us reeked of defeat.
I fisted my hands on the table. I couldn’t let us give up. Not with my father’s last request.
Swallowing my own exhaustion, I flipped through the endless pages.
“Bia Marino was at the Academy two years ago,” I said.
“And doing wonderfully, from what I heard.”
“If she was still a student,” I went on, undeterred. “She couldn’t have asked for mission gold.”
“That’s right.” Dax’s brows rose. “She shouldn’t have in the first place, anyway.”
“Yes, but–” There it was. Another large sum, right between the summer harvest charges. “Did she just come back from the Academy to empty the vaults? If she avoided Aquila like the plague, when would she have had the time to ask for the gold, get it authorized, and then…what? Make it vanish?”
He tilted his head to the side. “If she only came back for that and she already had someone she was sending the gold to, then yes.”
I looked at the parchments with a growing horror. “So how can we figure out who she sent it to?”
It seemed like a monstrous feat.
If Bia was alive, then she was very well hidden.
If she was dead, that made the task of finding answers infinitely more difficult.
“You know what doesn’t make sense in all of this?” He let his quill rest for the first time today. “Why would she have been working with Silas?”
“She could have found out how inept he was from Clara,” I said, but that defense sounded meek to my own ears.
“Even with all these numbers, one person can’t empty a Clan vault.”
“No.” I bit my lower lip. “It would have sounded some alarm.”
“Unless she found another way to steal more,” Dax said. “If she did it.”
“And how could my father have realized this?” I grimaced at the lines. “It wasn’t like he spent all his waking days in the vault.”
“Unless someone told him.”
“Who?”
The question hung between us, as if begging for answers.
But we had none.
Not yet, at least.
My gaze lingered on his name on the page. Alaric “Alar” Vegheara, good leader, good husband, good father. I wondered if he would have become great if he’d been allowed more time.
Who’d embodied some of the best Protectorate ideals, down to saving as much gold as he could. Who bought one good pair of shoes every decade and argued when he had to change–
My eyes narrowed on the parchment, which detailed summer expenses. There it was, a pair of leather shoes for Alar Vegheara, bought from the oldest shoemaking family in Aquila, who always bent the sole at the perfect angle for each foot.
A pair.
My stomach dropped as a roar blared in my ears. The bedroom and Dax turned hazy in the sudden whirlwind of my thoughts.
I jumped to my feet, breathing heavily, and started to toss papers and journals aside.
I’d seen it.
I knew I had.
“What?” Dax asked. “What did you find?”
I couldn’t answer, my hands shaking. I moved through the parchments so fast, one of them dared cut my finger. It didn’t matter. These numbers were already bloody.
“Tell me.” Dax rose as well. “I can help you find it.”
He’d already had.
My frantic gaze snagged on my father’s name once more. I snatched the parchment, eyes flying over it.
There it was.
Another pair of shoes.
“You said–” I licked my lips, heart thundering. “You said these expenses are from the past five years.”
“Yes?” he asked, still confused.
“And in order.”
“Same order I read them in.”
I slapped the two pieces of parchment onto the table. Shoes, on both. The same ones.
“What exactly am I looking at?” Dax raised his brows. “Other than Uncle Alaric having great taste in footwear.”
“A lie.”
No other expenses matched.
Nobody else would have noticed this, except my father–and his daughter.
My fingers trembled as I glided over both numbers, as if I could hold onto those memories for a while longer.
“My father didn’t buy one of these,” I whispered, trembling. Maybe neither. “He always changed his favorite pair of shoes once a decade. Same model, made by the same hands.”
Dax hesitated. “If one of them got damaged.”
“No,” I said, voice not leaving room for argument. “I knew my father. This is false.”
Not a paltry sum, but not one which could have led to riches. But a handful here, a coin purse there, a house loan there added up–enough that nobody would notice.
“This.” I tapped onto his name, besmirched in such a small way. But someone had used such a small joy of his to craft a plot to kill him.
My blood boiled.
A sinister heat pulsed in my chest. I only became aware my power began twisting around my wrists when Dax pulled the papers away.
“Careful,” he admonished. “Don’t want to have to rewrite any of these.”
“You won’t.” I rested my hands on the table, face contorting. “That’s how they stole money. Through expenses in someone else’s name. That’s how he’d figured it out.”
And then sent me on a wild chase for a pebble in a rocky river bed. Why not tell me outright? Why not launch an investigation while he’d still been alive? A real one, instead of asking me to figure it out.
My father, bless his soul, had been peculiar. But he was a smart man. He’d had his reasons–but would never be able to reveal them. Not anymore.
Whoever had done this knew my father’s predilections, but not his spirit. Not enough.
The list was long.
The task now edging on impossible.
“So someone was forging expenses in our names. We’ll never be able to tell which is which. Some of these people are on the run. Others dead,” Dax said, voice filled with dread.
“We’ll focus on the ones we know are out of the ordinary.”
“Like Bia and her house?” He tilted his head at the pages. “She might have known those large sums would attract attention and tried to syphon as much as she could.”
“Or someone framed her.” I righted myself, tall above my Clan’s crimes hidden between the lines. “Someone who must have hated her.”