Chapter Thirty-Seven
Milo
“Itold him!” I shouted, slamming the door to my office behind me as I stormed into the room and began pacing behind my desk.
“I told Harrison to let me handle this and he went and pulled that shit. Now they have her again. She’ll be locked up in House Viper where we can’t reach her with no trial in sight. Godsdamn it!”
I pounded the top of my desk with a fist, rattling the pens and polished letter opener atop it. Pax frowned at me from where he stood in the center of the room.
“Find Wolf,” I snapped, looking up at him from where I leaned over the desk now. “I want an explanation for why his rebels interrupted this trial.”
Pax dipped his head once before turning and leaving the room altogether.
I resumed my pacing, running a hand through my hair as I marveled at how everything had fallen so fantastically apart.
Unable to help myself, I crossed the room and unlocked the drawer of my desk.
I stared down at the necklace resting against the wood below with a frown.
Whatever, or whoever, was trapped inside of this thing, giving it its magical glow and properties, was responsible for all that had happened to Olympia since she left the House of Harlowe.
Somehow, Cosmo knew about this necklace.
All of this had begun when he’d noticed Isla wearing it at the temple.
He’d been like a dog with a bone ever since, sending his own grandchildren out to spy on us, to attack us in the street and attempt to take it the one time it was beyond the confines of House Avus.
It was no coincidence Bade happened to come for Olympia on the one night the necklace had left our House since Isla had worn it to the temple. Cosmo wanted it, but why?
What could he possibly hope to accomplish with the jewel?
Did he simply covet the longevity the necklace seemed to grant its wearer?
Had he even put together why the women of Avus had lived such long lives for the past five centuries?
Or was this about the god inside? My fingers twitched against my sides, revulsion coursing through me at the very thought of touching the jewel again, of hearing that supposed deity within.
I could still remember the words it had spoken to me before, the request it had made.
Free me. Is that what Cosmo wanted? To free whatever was inside that gem?
I shuddered at the thought.
The door suddenly slammed open and I shoved the drawer shut and locked it just in time to look up and find Wolf storming into my study, red-faced and furious. My gaze snapped to Pax.
“That was quick,” I said.
“He was already on his way up,” Pax explained, closing the door behind them before striding forward to put himself strategically between Wolf and I, hand draped casually on the hilt of his sword.
“I thought we had an agreement, Wolf,” I snarled as the man attempted to sidestep Pax in his rage only to find my cousin’s hand on his chest, pushing him back once in warning.
“I didn’t order that!” Wolf screeched, pointing back in the direction he’d come from as he peered around Pax to meet my gaze.
“That boy came to me the moment he left you up here, the moment you informed him his girlfriend was set to go on trial and you intended to do nothing about it. He begged me to stop the whole thing, to rile up my people and send them crashing through the Tribunal, but I told him no. I told him we had an arrangement. So he went for the Bexleys. I’ve got a lot of sway down there with the lowers but not more than them, not nearly more than them.
The second they started talking about Cosmo’s fucked up justice and the mockery that is the Tribunal, they managed to convince half of my people themselves.
He didn’t say another word to me before marching the lot of them down to the Deck and doing what he did. ”
“I thought you had control over your people.”
“You find some control to hold over a lit match! These are lower ringers, rich boy. Pissed off people tired of the boot of oppression stomping down on their necks. They’re a powder keg ready to explode and your boy ignited them.
Once he got the Bexleys involved, there was nothing I could do.
The family of a Champion’s word goes a lot farther than mine. ”
“You’re saying there’s nothing you can do?”
“I’m saying I’m no longer the one you’ve got to negotiate with. It’s that boy and the Bexleys and, from what I hear, none of them have a tendency to listen much to what you have to say.”
Fists clenching at my sides, I resisted the urge to open another drawer just so I could slam it.
Wolf was right. It was a tentative thing, controlling a group of pissed off rebels, in the first place.
The Bexleys had always had a power over people they’d never before claimed but we’d always known the risks.
It was why I’d gone out of my way to meet with them in the first place.
If they were to declare themselves for the rebellion now or, worse, to another First Ring family, my House would suffer more than it already was.
People would die in a way that made Bade and Olympia’s scuffle on the Second Ring merely an appetizer.
“Convince them,” I barked a moment later. “I’ll talk to Harrison and the Bexleys. You go to your people and remind them what could happen if they act first and think later.”
Wolf didn’t like to be ordered around, least of all by me.
I could tell from the clenched jaw and curled lip it disgusted him to do as I said but it was a plan and the only one we had so he dipped his head once in acknowledgement before turning and storming from the room again.
I heard his footsteps on the stairs a moment later and waited until I could hear him no longer before shouting a curse and slamming my fist on my desk again.
“I can go to Viper,” Pax offered as I turned away from him, preferring to stare at the books on the shelves in front of me rather than face anyone else in my rage. “If they’ll still let me see her, I can keep an eye on things until–”
“I don’t know if our agreement still stands,” I muttered, shaking out my aching hand as I let out a sigh.
“Cosmo only agreed to my terms for the time up until the trial. Technically, that time has expired. I wouldn’t risk them taking you too and inventing some trumped up charges to keep you there.
No. No one enters Viper without my express permission.
In fact, I don’t want anyone out after dark in groups of less than three.
I won’t have another member of my family accused of murder after being attacked in the streets. ”
Pax nodded, committing my instructions to memory and waiting for me to issue a command pertaining directly to him.
I didn’t. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything to order him to do at all, other than perhaps get some sleep.
Harrison’s stunt at the trial had made it impossible for any sort of negotiation to take place with Viper.
Cosmo had already had the upper hand before.
Now, he was practically untouchable. He would claim Nascha and I arranged the interruption of the trial to protect a member of our House.
His claims would be backed by the common knowledge that we’d associated with Harrison Fletcher and the Bexley family in the past. People would believe him and, if I pushed him too far, he could call for another trial, this time having already laid the groundwork that we were corrupt.
I muttered another curse and ran a hand over my face as I tipped my face upward to the ceiling and the shining silver chandelier dangling there.
I was stuck. I needed something Cosmo wanted, something to reopen negotiations for my cousin’s safe return.
My eyes dipped to the locked drawer beside my left thigh.
I could ask him what he wanted with it. Maybe he only wanted the longevity of life.
I wouldn’t mind him having that. It was worth getting Olympia back.
Then again, maybe he wanted something else, something more, something even I didn’t know the jewel was capable of.
I wouldn’t know if he lied and Cosmo lied as much as he breathed.
All of this was assuming, of course, he didn’t just kill me and take the thing himself.
He had, after all, been willing to kill for it before.
So the necklace wasn’t an option. But then…
“Milo,” someone spoke.
I snapped out of my thoughts to find Pax still standing in the center of the room, waiting to be commanded as always.
He wasn’t the one who’d spoken. Isla stood in the threshold, a torn black leather journal clutched to her chest. Her chocolate eyes swiveled from me to Pax and I understood what she wanted immediately.
“Pax, if you could excuse my wife and I,” I said.
Pax nodded before leaving the room, closing the door behind him once Isla had scooted inside. Once we were alone, she stepped closer, coming to a stop on the other side of my desk.
“You read Eximius’ journals and you read Adelaide’s,” she spoke and it took me a moment to realize we were talking about the journals again.
Those godsdamned journals I’d wasted so much of my time sifting through rather than identifying the warning signs of the rebellion growing just under my nose. “Did you read Atticus’?”
I blinked in surprise, trying to place the name. Atticus…
“Eximius’ son?” I asked.
“His Heir,” Isla replied with a nod.
“Atticus took over the official family report once Simi went mad. Between that and correspondences of his recovered from that time, there was never any indication he kept a private journal as well.”
Isla dropped the leatherbound book on my desk with a thud. I stared down at the ripped and curling cover.
“I had an acolyte help me pull this from the archives,” Isla informed me. “It’s old and a little worse for wear. Atticus wasn’t as careful with his possessions as his father or sister, apparently, but there’s a passage you need to read. I’ve marked the page.”
She turned away from me, strolling off to one of the bookshelves on the sides of the room and examining the spines as I reached down and gathered the book in my hands.
Curiously, I pulled back the cover and flipped to the dogeared page she’d indicated.
The pages I flipped past were full of exceptionally short entries for spread apart dates that held hardly any information at all, as if Atticus had truly been too busy for keeping much of a personal record as I’d expected.
But then I reached the page Isla had marked and saw it was full of his sloppy handwriting, front and back and onto the next page beyond.
I glanced up to find my wife pulling a book from the shelf and reading the cover. Then I turned back to the journal and began to read.
Father passed last evening.
I won’t say it was a peaceful death. There was nothing in the last decade of my father’s life that could pass for peaceful. We aren’t quite sure what caused it. The priests are convinced his disease of the mind simply took too much of a toll on his body.
I went to clear out his study since it’s to be mine now.
Not that I’ll have it for long if the rebels practically at our gates have anything to say about it.
I found a letter on his desk, already bound within an envelope addressed to the House of Harlowe.
It was in a neat script, the sort of handwriting he hasn’t had since he went mad years ago.
I almost opened it right then and there but knew that wasn’t what he would have wanted.
He hadn’t addressed a letter to me or my mother or sister.
It was to the House of Harlowe and to the House of Harlowe it would go.
But I found something else as well. Another letter, buried beneath the false bottom of the middle drawer of his desk, a place only he and I knew of.
It was addressed to me and it…the handwriting was the same, clear and concise like it had been before, but the contents…
My eyes bulged from my head as my gaze snapped up to my wife.
“Isla, this…”
“I know,” she replied, frowning in my direction as she set the book back on the shelf.
I dropped my gaze to continue reading Atticus’ recounting of his father’s note and, therefore, the story of how a man had lost his mind because he’d met a god.