Chapter 32
Syneca
The flowers that bloom in graveyards remember everyone who forgets to visit. Plant none in your own garden unless you wish to be haunted by guilt.
My commitment to whatever the plan was echoed for exactly half a heartbeat before Jorn was moving, shouting orders to the young runner, who bolted back out the door.
“We’ve got maybe eight minutes,” Jorn said, already striding toward the back of the warehouse. “Move!”
We ran. Through stacks of crates and coiled rope, past barrels that reeked of fish and brine, and toward a door I hadn’t noticed before, half-hidden behind a false wall of canvas tarps.
“He’s a bird, right?” Jorn threw the question over his shoulder at Wickett as he tore down the tapestry, gesturing vaguely at Silas, who’d shrunk back to a more manageable size and was racing along beside me.
“Definitely a cat,” Wickett replied without missing a beat.
“No.” Jorn glanced back, his expression skeptical. “Feline, remember? That’s not a fucking cat.”
“Maybe you guys should worry less about my griffin and more about this plan?” I snapped. “What exactly are we doing?”
“Emergency protocol,” Jorn said, still moving toward the back of the building. In one smooth motion, he loosened a floorboard with a simple stomp, reached inside, came back with whatever he’d needed and promptly replaced the board. “If we’re compromised, we blow up my ship.”
My stomach dropped. “You’re going to—”
“The bodies of all involved will seem to have burned beyond recognition,” Wickett continued, his voice clipped and professional. “Case closed. Hunters get a win. Everyone’s satisfied.”
We reached the back door, a massive sliding thing that opened onto the docks, and paused.
“Just hate to say goodbye to my ship. Had her for fifteen years. Good vessel. Easy on the water and has been my only way out of the city since the Magistrate’s lockdown.
” There was real grief in the shifter’s voice.
Not for the mission, not for the risk, but for the loss of something that had served him well.
Something he was walking away from because one day he’d decided to save innocent people.
“On your toes, little witch,” Wickett said, his hand finding my arm and pulling me several feet from the door. “You can’t be part of this next bit.”
Jorn and Wickett faced each other. For a moment, they were just two men who’d risked everything together, who’d saved lives in the shadows while the city burned around them.
Jorn extended his hand. Wickett took it.
The handshake was firm, brief, heavy with everything they didn’t have time to say aloud.
“It’s been an honor working with you, Veyne,” Jorn said quietly.
Wickett dipped his chin. “The honor was mine. I’ll send word when I know it’s clear, when it’s safe to regroup.”
When. Not if.
But I heard what he didn’t say. Unless we found and killed Vitoria or somehow broke this blood oath, Wickett would be dead. Just like me.
Jorn moved all the way to the edge of the large door, bracing himself as we stayed back, waiting for the trap to spring.
The front warehouse doors slammed open behind us.
Hunters poured in like a flood, six, eight, still more coming, all in black and silver that marked them as Tiberius’s personal soldiers. Enhanced. Deadly. Moving.
They fanned out immediately, cutting off escape routes. Three broke left. Two moved to flank. The rest advanced in formation, weapons drawn, a tiny hint of their magic crackling in the air.
My heart hammered against my ribs so hard I thought it might break bone. I forced myself to breathe, to remember that I was standing next to their commander, that I was supposed to be here, that this was all a performance.
It didn’t help. My hands shook. My magic stirred, reaching for the water in Widow’s Bay, looking for any weapon, any defense against the threat bearing down on us.
They spotted us immediately, one of them pointing with his blade. “The shifter! Commander, he’s—”
“Do you think I’m blind?” Wickett’s voice cut through the chaos. “I’ve got this under control! That fucking smuggler is responsible for everything!”
He started running toward Jorn, and I moved with him because standing still might look suspicious. Maybe? I wasn’t sure what my damn role was. Stick with Wickett, that was all I could do. Mostly because they couldn’t kill me. The Hunter’s Promise had guaranteed it.
Jorn moved like the feline in his soul, already out the door.
“Catch him!” Wickett roared, his voice carrying across the docks with absolute authority. “Don’t let him reach the water!”
The hunters surged forward as a unit, a living weapon unleashed. Jorn was already shifting, his human form blurring and reshaping into the massive tiger, orange and black, built for speed and violence.
Furies, he was fast. Faster than anything that size had a right to be, paws barely touching the ground as he tore across the dock toward the ship anchored twenty feet out, roaring to the heavens all the while. The hunters tried, but even they couldn’t match a shifter running for his life.
Jorn reached the bay’s edge without slowing. The ship he was clearly aiming for bobbed in the harbor, twenty feet of open water between the dock and ship’s deck.
My breath caught. He was going to miss. He had to miss. No one could make that jump, not a shifter, not even—
Jorn leaped.
For one impossible, suspended moment, he was airborne. Silhouetted against the sun with power and grace and desperate hope, his whole life riding on whether his muscles were strong enough, whether his aim was true enough, whether luck would hold for just one more heartbeat.
A hunter tried to follow. Launched himself after the tiger with enhanced strength and absolute confidence.
He fell short. Hit the water with a scream that cut off abruptly when the black surface swallowed him whole.
Meanwhile, Jorn landed on the deck with a thud I felt in my soul.
Then he turned back, and I swear—swear—he looked directly at me and winked.
Then he dropped to the deck, out of sight for less than a couple seconds before the whole world exploded.
It’d been too fast.
The ship disintegrated in a ball of flame so bright it seared itself into my vision. Heat slammed into us like a fist, and the shockwave threw me off my feet, sending me flying backward into Wickett.
His arms came up automatically, steadying me without looking, but his entire focus locked on the burning wreckage. Searching. Looking for any sign that his friend had survived.
I searched too, squinting through the flames and smoke, desperate for movement. Orange fur. A shift back to human. Anything that would mean Jorn had somehow made it, had somehow escaped the explosion he’d triggered himself.
Nothing.
Just fire and smoke and debris raining down into water that hissed and steamed from the heat. Just the sick probability settling in my stomach that Jorn had actually died.
For us. For thirty-six people whose names we didn’t know and countless others.
Wickett’s hands tightened on my shoulders for the span of a breath, so brief I might have imagined it before he released me and spun to face his hunters.
I saw it happen. Saw the exact moment the shift occurred.
The warmth drained from his eyes. His jaw set into something carved from stone. With his shoulders squared, his stance widened, and the Ripper slid into place like a mask made of ice and death and absolute authority.
“Incompetent!” The word cracked across the dock like a whip. He gestured at the burning wreckage, at the hunters pulling their comrade out of the water. “I had him cornered, and you let him escape by killing himself! Do you understand what you cost us? He could have revealed everything!”
One of the hunters stammered, water dripping from him after hauling his comrade to safety. “Sir, we came as fast as—”
“Not. Fast. Enough. It took me one day of investigation to find this operation. One day.” Wickett moved closer, and the hunters actually stepped back.
“How long have you been searching? Weeks? Months? And you found nothing until I handed it to you. No one is to get in or out of this city. We quadrupled the guard around the entire wall. You couldn’t get into the Bloodwood right now if your life depended on it, yet the witches still have a way out. Right under your fucking noses.”
The hunters exchanged glances. No one answered. No one was foolish enough to answer.
“Get out of my sight. All of you. The entire operation was on that ship. So go fucking choose which head will go on my stake.” He turned his back on them, the ultimate dismissal, the clearest statement of disgust. “And pray my father doesn’t ask me why his elite are less effective than one man working alone. ”
They scattered. Dragging their waterlogged companion with them, moving as though they couldn’t get away quickly enough.
When they were gone, Wickett turned to me.
The Ripper was still firmly in place. Cold. Controlled. Everything his father had trained him to be.
“Go back to Chancellery House, witch.” He was loud enough to be heard by anyone within earshot. “Before I’m tempted to remind them what a witch’s blood looks like, since apparently they haven’t seen any in a while.”
I swallowed a tiny gasp.
I knew it was a performance; knew he was protecting me—protecting both of us by selling the illusion that we were nothing to each other. Commander and conscript. Hunter and witch. Nothing more.
But Furies, he sold it well.
So well that for one horrible moment, I almost believed him.
Almost forgot the way he’d nearly kissed me in the hallway this morning, the vulnerability in his eyes when he admitted what he was really doing here.
I almost forgot that, somewhere in the flames and smoke, his friend might be dying while we stood here pretending not to care.
I turned and walked away.
Silas fell into step beside me, and I felt rather than saw Wickett watch me go.