Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(118)

As soon as his footsteps had faded away, Wren shoved the door open and rushed to Odile’s side.

Wren thought she was already gone, but the woman flinched at Wren’s wary touch on her shoulder. She took a wet, rattling breath and tried to speak around the knife in her chest.

Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Her eyes widened in panic and she scrabbled at her neck. Wren thought she was trying to lower the collar of her robes—to better breathe, maybe?—but then her trembling fingers latched on to a thin chain hanging around her throat. She tugged fitfully, and Wren helped, withdrawing the necklace until a key appeared dangling at the bottom.

A bone key—the same one she’d used to take Wren into the lowermost dungeons of the Breachfort.

She pushed it onto Wren, who stared down at it. What had Odile said before?

If anything should ever happen to me… now you know more than one way out of the fort. Just in case.

When Wren looked up again, Odile’s gaze was clouding over, distant and unfocused.

She was gone.

A cloak of grief settled over Wren… for the loss of a mentor—someone she’d liked and respected—and the one person who seemed willing to tell her the truth. Now she was dead, and whatever other secrets she had known had died with her. Why had Locke never loved Odile as she had loved him? Had he loved Ravenna, or was their twisted, tangled love affair toxic on all sides?

And if it was, what did that make Wren as the spawn of it?

Footsteps sounded from the staircase beyond—had her father returned?

She darted back to her hiding place just as the door to Odile’s chamber creaked open.

“It’s rather late for a—” came a voice that did not belong to Vance Graven. Peering through the gap, Wren spotted Galen standing there, mouth agape at the sight of Odile, murdered, in her chair.

Before he could do more than peer around in confusion, a second wave of footsteps echoed down to them. Now Wren heard her father’s voice, but he wasn’t alone.

“Haven’t the faintest notion why she called this clandestine meeting, Commander, but—”

The door swung wide, revealing Vance and Commander Duncan.

“What is the meaning of this?” Commander Duncan demanded. He took in the scene, and Wren saw it through his eyes—Galen alone with Odile, who had been recently murdered… the weapon, golden handle reflecting the lantern light, protruding from her chest. The look on Galen’s face told Wren that the knife was definitely his—as did his hasty check of his belt and jacket pockets, but she already knew what he’d find: an empty sheath.

Apparently Vance had gotten better at hiding his tracks. Wren had no idea when he’d stolen that golden knife or when he’d known he might have to remove Odile, but now he’d ensured that only his version of events was relayed to the fort and the Dominions as a whole. Galen was a liability, since Vance had obviously been the one to pay him to assist in the kidnapping, and now the only people in the fort who could prove Vance’s story wrong were Wren and Leo and, to a lesser degree, Julian.

They were all in grave danger.

“Guards!” Commander Duncan shouted into the hall, and while they rushed in to apprehend Galen—who was wide-eyed with shock—Vance hurried to Odile’s side. With his back to the others, he would appear frantic and concerned, checking for a pulse, but Wren could see his face. His wide, anxious eyes and lips downturned with disgust, proving that he didn’t necessarily have the stomach for these games, though he played them all the same.

Wren had seen enough.

Disappearing down the dark hallway, she climbed the stairs from the cellar in a daze.

It was too much. All of it. But while her mother’s identity—past and present—was shocking enough, it was her father’s various betrayals that hurt worst of all. If he even was her father.

She had built a life, an identity, out of wanting to please him. Of trying—and failing—to be good enough for him. Without that, Wren didn’t know who she was. Where she belonged. She’d told Julian she belonged here, but nothing had ever felt less true.

And considering what her father wanted to do next… Wren was firmly with Odile. That well contained a power she wanted nothing to do with. It should be destroyed, not used, no matter how much her father deluded himself that he wanted to use it for good. She had seen what it could do, even in the hands of someone with noble intentions like Locke. And she had seen it turned to something twisted and sinister with the iron revenants. The magic itself might not be evil, but the power was more than any one person should have.

Before she knew it, her feet had taken her back the way she had come, to the room that was a balcony hop across from her father’s chambers.

Inara was still there.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, smiling at her own stupid joke.

Wren put both hands on Inara’s chest and shoved, slamming her up against the wall. Inara looked stunned, and though she struggled, Wren’s hold was too strong.

“What the fuck, Graven?” she demanded.

“He put you up to it, didn’t he?” she asked, watching her cousin closely. “During the trial?”

She didn’t know why it mattered. He had done worse, hadn’t he? But it made a difference, somehow, to know whether her father had taken advantage of a situation that presented itself or deliberately set out to ruin the most important day of her life. That he had played into her desires, using her love for him against her.