Prologue #2
I dug my fingers into Varian’s shoulders as Ryland’s foul curse drifted down from upstairs. Another wave of power raced through the house, a fresh burst of foul magic burning my nose. The heist.
Something had gone wrong with tonight’s job. Upstairs, Ryland spoke in that tight, low voice that was so much more terrifying than any shout.
“We’ve been set up. There was no gold in the safe, not a single coin.
” Varian talked fast as he herded me toward the door.
“The old bastard had only one thing in there. The King’s Book of Secrets.
Fucking Jules touched the thing and the second she did, a spell triggered.
The tracking magic has already marked everyone in that room, me included. Ryland, now, too.”
He smoothed his hand up my arm, face full of emotion. “It’s too late for us, Lyrae. None of us will ever escape this city, even if we did, the king’s soldiers would track us, no matter how far we ran.”
“And Jules?” I asked, my mind racing.
There had to be a way to salvage this.
There was no way everything ended right here, right now.
Varian pinched his lips together. “Dead. But you can still get ahead of this.” He shoved me down the hall, roughly herding me toward the rear of Lord Maldrake’s house.
“Out the back door, at the end of the alley, make a left. Grab Ariel from the safehouse and don’t stop running until you’re free of the city.
Avoid the king’s patrols and keep your heads down until you reach the forest. Then stay hidden, don’t talk to anyone. ”
“But…you have to come with us, Var. We can hide. We’re fast. If we keep moving, we can stay ahead of the soldiers.”
His hands tightened around my arms, like he meant to hold onto me forever, then he shook his head.
“The tracking spell stays active until the king himself removes it, or we’re executed.
The rest of us are good and fucked, Ly, but you…
being in that room with Ryland…” His face twisted in something that resembled jealousy.
“Protected you from the initial surge. If you stay much longer, you’ll be contaminated, too.
” He pushed me away, hands fisted at his sides.
“Go. Now. Before you can’t.”
My body was trembling; something wet rolled down my cheek before Varian pulled me against him, hand gently cradling the back of my head to hold me tighter than he ever had before. I wasn’t crying.
I never cried.
“I know this is bad,” he murmured. “But don’t make our fate yours, Lyrae. You deserve to have a life. A future. I want you to have everything you’ve ever wanted.”
But the life I deserved was here, with the two males I was eternally strung between, now marked for execution. And the Shadow King was not a merciful ruler.
“I don’t…understand.” I blinked up at him. Surely this was a joke, one of Ryland’s twisted attempts at humor, something we’d laugh about later, when we went home and…
“Lyrae, get your shit together. You need to focus.” Var opened the door, cold night air sweeping in, reeking of the city.
“At worst, tonight was a trap meant to scoop up our crew. At best…we are all in the wrong place at the absolute wrong time. Go.” He pushed me through the door, but I caught the doorjamb with both hands.
“Fucking Lord Maldrake.” I glared one last time around the opulent house I’d been so envious of a moment ago.
“I knew he was a corrupt arsehole, but didn’t think he was a fool.
” Actually, I did think he was a fool, which was why we were stealing from him, while the lord made his nightly visit to the local whorehouse.
In retrospect, we should have known this was too good to be true.
Ry had been hired by some secretive, rich Fae asshole who claimed he wanted revenge on Maldrake, giving us everything we needed to crack the safe and clean the fucker out. Plus, he was paying us cold, hard cash for our troubles—and we’d jumped at the chance.
Because this rich asshole and his piles of gold were definitely two things that should be parted.
But the Shadow King had one weakness.
His Book of Secrets, rumored to hold all his transgressions, all his lies, even the key to his power. Which was now—technically—in our possession.
I didn’t know the name of the asshole who’d hired us, never thought to ask Ryland, not that it mattered now.
Because once the king caught us red handed with his book…Varian winced as something heavy crashed above our heads.
“The king’s guards take ten minutes to get here from the Keep.”
“How…how much time do we have left?” I calculated how long it would take to get my sister out of the city, then return. We had to fight, we had to do something. “What if we hid the book and wiped our scents? I could ambush the guards on the street…”
“Won’t work, and you know it. Six minutes, now.
” Varian hesitated, pushing my long black hair behind my ear.
“I’m not telling you what to do; fuck knows that’s a waste of air, but don’t stay for Ryland.
He’s not worth your life and neither am I.
If you won’t do this for me, then do it for Ariel.
Save your sister. You two leave this shithole city and never come back. Do you understand?”
I didn’t leave Blackcastle that night.
I spent the next week in the king’s dungeons beneath the Keep, having my ribs broken by two over eager guards with anger management issues and fists like hammers.
And the Shadow King didn’t execute me and the rest of our crew in front of the Keep as expected. He sent us to the front lines as cannon fodder in his endless, thousand-year war against his brother to the west, where, over the next decade, I watched my friends die, one by one.
As for Ryland and Varian, they didn’t end up in the dungeons, or even in the muddy trenches with the rest of us.
Before informing me what my shitty fate would be, the Shadow King himself made a personal trip down to the dungeons to inform me they brokered themselves a deal and walked free, betraying their oath to the rest of us.
And except for Varian collecting a generous bounty from the Fae King for my sister’s capture fifty years ago, I never heard of either of them again.